Windows 7 Beta

[BobbyK]

I've had Windows 7 on my laptop for about a day. So far, my only complaints are occaisional flickering of the notification area, and the fact that it hibernates without warning you.

The last one may be because I haven't bothered looking at the power management settings.

[rightisright]

Keep us non-tech geeks apprised. I'm installing XP on my new box in a few days.

If I can totally skip Vista, I'll be happy.

[308Mike]

I've been hearing that some people are "upgrading" their Vista installations to the BETA Windows 7, with some being so happy that they say they're NEVER going back to Vista. And this is just in BETA testing - not even close to production.

Who knows, maybe they FINALLY decided to listen to their customers???

[Cobar]

I have been running 7 beta since I think friday (the day they got pounded on the release).

The only problems I have run in to are of my own doing. I skipped vista, other than a little exposure to it on the boy's PC, so I had some fun looking for where they hid things.

The only technical problem I had was during installation. It did not want to format for me, so I had to use Gparted to set up my partitions prior to install. Aside from that it just works.

This is all on an old 3700+ Athlon single core with 1.5 gigs of RAM. It even runs decent enough with XP running in a virtual machine taking 512 megs of RAM.

I like it so far.

EDIT: It just gave me the update to fix whatever was corrupting MP3 files.

[BobbyK]

Day 1, so far so good.

No major issues, Outlook working well. I'm really digging the new taskbar.

[SoupOrMan]

Has anything new been added or updated to the Windows beta like a "Classic" look similar to Win98?

[SoupOrMan]

It's on 7 as well? I use it for XP and one of the things that has kept me from Vista has been the "You don't need that Win98 interface anymore" advertising and writing I've seen for it. I thought the transition from 3.1 to Win95/98 was easy enough. Keeping that is a good sign for me as that's the preferred look I like.

[Cobar]

Yup, there is a "windows classic" theme that makes it look like windows 2000.

Things are still a little different, such as the start menu and task bar. Personally I sort of like them, but I don't normally have that much stuff running at the same time, so I do not run in to the problems Chris does.

I came straight from XP, skipping Vista, and windows 7 is pretty good so far.

[esa5444]

I got a chance to see it last night, on a Mac no less. Looked ok, though entirely too friendly. I liked the old version that had the sharp edges, none of the color gradient stuff, etc. I am told you can get rid of that and go back to something that approaches Windows NT 4.0 user-friendliness, though hopefully without the Blue Screen of Death.

Windows 2000 was by far my favorite Windows system, so if they can have something that returns to that, I will be thrilled. I bought my desktop 2 and laptop 4 years ago, and both were factory refurbs, so I may need a new machine soon, but I have dreaded using Vista, to the point where I looked at a Mac. Then I saw how expensive they are, and I think if I was going to buy a new machine now, it would be a Thinkpad with Linux. Used to be that Thinkpads were expensive, but those Apples are ridiculously overpriced, and as a long time Thinkpad user, I don't care a whit for Apple's aesthetic sense.

[Dub_James]

Used to be that Thinkpads were expensive, but those Apples are ridiculously overpriced, and as a long time Thinkpad user, I don't care a whit for Apple's aesthetic sense.

That's what I despised about Apple in the 80's, and things haven't changed. They may be good machines, but do they do something that PCs can't? Don't think so. Therefore the extra cost is for nothing more than an Apple badge. No thanks.