Hold on a moment while I pour another beer.
I decided to be persistent tonight. Rather than copy my 80 some gigs of music and additional 60+ gigs of code, documents, pictures, etc I opted to try out a full OS upgrade. I haven’t done it in ages, and I wanted to see how it would turn out.
I think it’s my anal-retentive side that’s saying I’ll be doing a full re-install tomorrow when I get my beta key. This just doesn’t feel right.
That bit aside, I’m really enjoying this. I tend to be a Windows sympathizer rather than a Windows fan, but this totally kicks ass. My first impression was simply “It’s quick.” There’s just something more there which probably stems from taking the Vista formula and washing/rinsing/repeating for the last 3 years to optimize the hell out of the core system. I know Microsoft has been doing heavy research into lightweight kernels, but last I checked none of those were making it into Windows 7. It seems something made it in, because this is damn fast.
Aside from the gentle flow that everything seems to have, most of the new features (multi-touch not included) appear to add to the simplicity of the interface. Gadgets are no longer shackled to a sidebar, and the screen resolution is accessible by a simple right click on the desktop. You can customize every single system tray icon to tell it which ones you want to hear from, and which ones you don’t. It’s not form over function, but it’s not vice versa either. The designers have struck a balance and it works.
It’s not all fun, it’s still a beta after all. I had to work a little command-line black magic to get Chrome to run on the 64-bit version, and it appears as though Songbird wants to hijack my network connection. I’ll have to work on some development this weekend to see how it handles under some level of stress, but I’m not holding my breath on any epic failures.
Edit: The Chrome tweak required that I add ‘ –in-process-plugins’ to the end of the target in Chrome’s shortcut. There’s two dashes in that first dash, not one. Type the argument in, don’t copy and paste it. Otherwise it won’t work.
Posted by scottferg 
