So I’ve got my HP NX7300 laptop dual booting Vista SP2 and Windows 7 Beta, and I have to announce I am very impressed with Windows7.
Performance
I’ve installed Office 2007 SP1, Firefox 3.0.5, Live Mesh, Live Messenger and Live Writer 2009, NewsGator FeedDemon, plus the usual Acrobat Reader, Flash Player, etc.
Boot time is better than Vista with a similar software install base, as is login time.
Sleep and recover from sleep is hugely improved compared to Vista SP2 – the recovery time especially.
The networking and file handling side of things has evidently been sorted out as well, because network file copies, as well as copies from removable media are significantly quicker too.
To put this in perspective, the laptop is a 1.7GHz Celeron M, with 2GB of RAM, and I’m running W7 in a 20GB partition, so its not exactly a supercomputer!
Other Stuff
I’m running as a normal user, and I’ve not felt the need to turn off UAC yet – something which got turned off almost straightaway on the Vista install, never to be see again.
I have found that the National Rail Widget doesn’t work – it just displays a white box, with no options button.
Fortunately Stuart Preston has found and fixed the problem and made an updated version of the gadget available on his blog.
Overall, I think W7 is going to be a massive improvement on Vista in performance terms, particularly on marginal hardware.
I am considering talking my wife into letting me install it on her HP TC4200 tablet……
Posted by ee61re 