Windows 7 Public Beta: The Straight Dope
Let me ask you this…Would you rather be happy or right? OK then, let me tell you some things about Windows 7 Beta which may surprise you.
If any of you are thinking that you might try it after our Windows 7 Beta first impressions and you actually believe Paul Thurrott when he tells you that it can be successfully run as a main system, you’re in for a nasty shock. Brace yourselves, and hold your breath…
- It won’t install Office Home and Student 2007 (as Pennywise the clown said, “you’ll die if you try”) but of course, it won’t crash Windows.
- It won’t install “Real Alternative” (essential for those who won’t put up with Real Player)
- It won’t install any meaningful component of Windows Live Essentials.
- It’s ridiculously picky about what it will play over the Media Sharing Service (Compared to Vista) and it will faithfully transpose every “broken file” icon on to your Xbox.
So it’s crap, right? Err…No, it isn’t. And now I’m going to tell you exactly why!
This just doesn’t behave like a beta. I remember Longhorn Beta2 and if you do too, you’ll remember that it was truly horrible. The Office problem is a concern (I mean, really, was it even tested!?), but it seems to work when already installed and upgraded from Vista.
I’ve tested the crap out of Windows 7 in the past 72 hours in Virtual Machine, Hyper-V and straight primary-boot, and found that it’s as power hungry as Vista and is only remotely useable in the last two of these scenarios.
For most people, unless they like MS Office, (for the moment at least), this is not going to affect them at all. “Homegroup” networking is almost reason enough to switch to Win 7 right now. It’s essentially “Home Server” without the Server and it’s bloody awesome!
Network Attached Storage SAMBA issues, printer spooler-hang, latent network refresh, the famous sys-tray errors…Yeah, they’re all gone. When you upgrade you’re graphics driver and don’t need to re-boot, you know there’s something new going on here.
This is the second server-based client kernel which Microsoft has offered to Joe Public, and it’s by far the best. Clearly, it’s still in need of some fit and finish and while it’s not (nor was it ever intended to be) for Joe Public, it’s technologically above and beyond Vista, OSX and pretty-much anything else.
I will go in to further detail about the new features and real-world impact of Windows 7 in a future article, but does the new Windows 7 Beta really bring the rich media experience we were all waiting for? No, sadly it does not. I’ll discuss why in my next article, “Digital Nomad – Part Two”. No nerd should miss it!
Review by The Average Windows Nerd.
Related Pages:
- Windows 7 Beta Released
- Windows 7 Beta – First Impressions
- Windows 7 RC Essentials: Getting Started Guide – Part 2
- Windows 7 RC Essentials: Getting Started Guide – Part 3
- Microsoft Releases Windows 7 Downgrade Plans
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Comments: 2
6:40 pm 16th January, 2009
Despite the problems it is showing in Beta (Which is to be expected) I am getting pretty excited about Windows 7. It sounds like M$ heard the voices of the people, and are trying to make things better.
Comments: 174
1:37 am 18th January, 2009
I’ve not found any problems yet myself, so it looks like Microsoft are doing a good job of resolving issues and providing a beta which is very much like a Google Beta – something you can use on a daily basis reliably.
I’m currently dual-booting Vista and Windows 7 beta – will be interesting to see if I end up using Window 7 beta as my main operating system before Windows 7 is released onto the market!
Comments: 2
7:49 pm 18th January, 2009
Incredible that Microsoft have only just worked out the “no need to reboot when installing drivers” issue. I run Linux and if I install something, 9 times out of 10 I don’t need to reboot.
This said, I am interested in running Windows 7 in a VM environment and poking around in it. After all, I have XP in a VM…
Comments: 174
1:27 pm 21st January, 2009
I really hope that this part of Windows 7 comes true – the fact that you need to keep re-booting your machine, even in Windows Vista when installing new devices really does mark the operating system down when compared with others, hopefully that will be a thing of the past soon!
Comments: 1
10:54 pm 7th February, 2009
Having run Windows 7 as my main operating system for about a month now I am finally giving up and going back to XP.
Windows 7 has some weird SLI-based issues, I actually get worse FPS in games with SLI enabled than just leaving the cards in and disabling.
The “sheikness” of the OS just isn’t enough to convince me to keep it. Maybe in 6 months, if Windows 7 is be more heavily supported I’ll come back, but until then I can’t convince myself to smile happily every time a program I want to use is incompatible. Maybe if they just gave handouts to everyone who was beta testing when it lands in stores then I would keep trucking along, but the fact that it turns into a pumpkin around August just seals the deal.