Buzz Out Loud Lounge: Windows 7 First Impressions

Windows 7 First Impressions

A geek friend of mine got his hands on the 6801 Windows 7 build that's "floating" around the net these days. I watched the install on his machine, and I'd have to say it's pretty impressive even with this early build. Virtually everything he has on his machine works. Now, sometimes that required Vista drivers, and sometimes even XP drivers. He has an Nvidia Nforce2 board that's not even supported for Vista, much less Windows 7.

Basically, I'd say it's pretty darn robust even with this milestone build. It looks sweet, and UAC is so unobtrusive. I'd equate it to how Mac OSX handles UAC. You're asked once, basically, and that's it, from what I could see.

Software/hardware that worked of interest: AVG 8 Free, Avermedia's Media Center app with Aver A180 ATSC tuner (although while watching some HDTV on it, it did bluescreen an Nvidia driver after a bit), Geforce 6800 video with latest Nvidia Vista 32-bit drivers, Artec USB scanner software (took some hoop jumping for that!), Creative Audigy 2 ZS, etc. I don't think I'm leaving out much. Oh yeah, he had a Canon Printer that didn't even have Vista drivers, so he tried the XP download and voila, it worked!

One thing we noticed was that Windows 7 (and he said Vista, too) doesn't like installing on Nforce2 boards that have three DDR sticks of ram in them. Nforce2 is kind of weird in that it stays in "dual channel" mode even when 3 sticks (3 gigs, total) of RAM are in the box. Anyway, XP Pro doesn't have any issue with it, but he had to pull a stick out of the non-dual channel slot for Windows 7 and it installed fine. Otherwise, it would bluescreen during the install process everytime with all three sticks in. YMMV, of course.

Anyway, aside from the one bluescreen while using the TV tuner media app, it was rock solid. I'd have to say that I would have no doubt that Microsoft could get this thing out the door by next summer given the build quality that's already there.

I didn't have time to stick around to find out if he successfully did the Taskbar trick that enables the funky new 7 taskbar, but I did tell him where to find it on lifehacker. I'll report back on that when I see his machine in a couple of days or so.

But I do have to say, so far, so good. This is much, much smoother than typical alpha/beta software, in my view. Time will tell if it stays that way, of course, given the old Longhorn history. But good on ya, Microsoft. Keep the pork out between now and next summer, and you've got yourself a winner.