FROM THE IGLOO

Well Windows 7 has finally hit the MSDN site so we have been able to put our hands on the RTM in the office and it’s running better on the hardware here than the RC’s did. I was one of those people who has stuck through running Windows Vista for the past few years and seeing the people in the office who where less than impressed with Windows Vista fawn over the changes in Windows 7 is amusing I will admit. Having the chance to toss this on a couple of workstations here and work through it for the last week here’s some of what I have noticed.

Performance

Windows 7 feels faster than Windows Vista did on the same hardware. Now, my work laptop is not a slower machine but it’s not the fastest computer in the building anymore. Windows Vista ran fairly well, even with multiple VM’s open and running, however the UI for Windows 7 seems more responsive to my input and overall the OS just seems to be smoother running with fewer stutters than Windows Vista had. Even the install process was smoother, with no drivers required to get all the hardware on the laptop up and running.

The Desktop computer I’m working on is a much faster beast and the applications are responding in kind.

User Interface

Really it’s not that much different from Windows Vista, some things have moved around a little bit, some things are renamed but it’s all where I expect most things to be. When I did transition from Windows XP to Windows Vista it was a jarring experience, most of the bits of the OS that I needed to be into and the preferences that I liked to customize where hard to find at first. All and all it took about three or four tries before I was comfortable with Vista and this time around anything that has really changed feels like it should have been done that way in the first place.

Applications

So far everything that I use day to day as a line of business application seems to work fine, granted there are a few hiccups that I’ve seen but nothing that I would consider critical at this time. There’s even some applications that I can finally get rid of as the OS seems to have the functionality built in for the first time in years.

As for our products our QA team will be looking into them over the next couple of weeks, but feedback that we are getting seems to say that the more recent versions of DF are working (with some warnings at install time) as long as you don’t use a ThawSpace, and the copy of Insight that I’ve installed on my box seems to be running well. Keep in mind that this is not a official test – I’m just throwing these at the wall to see what sticks, official word has to come from our QA team and their testing is far more involved than what I’m doing.  If you have problems please let us know – even though we can’t support it we do want to know what you are seeing so that we can take a look at it too.