The last week has been a bit slow for me as a gamer. Usually I'll only play new games for about a week or two before a new game comes out that grabs my attention, but Borderlands has been a highly resilient experience and I haven't really found anything in the last week that has pulled me away from it (Next week: Dragon Age: Origins). I've been replaying the game, which I purchased on Steam after my Xbox died, and having a good time of it with a few of my friends.Anyways, in the spirit of keeping my blog updated (see the sticky note in the top right corner of my desktop?), I've decided to type up a few of my thoughts on Windows 7, as it may pertain to a few of you.
I purchased my copy of Windows 7 before it released and installed it on release day. Although I have Vista installed on my laptop, I'd never taken the leap with my custom-built desktop, which was still sporting the ever-stylish Windows XP.
The upgrade process was very simple. Although I'm pretty sure I clicked through for a clean install of Windows 7 like the upgrade advisor said I should, the installation process ended up upgrading to Windows 7, leaving all of my drivers intact, and moving all of my old installation files to a Windows.old folder. The process took about an hour
While I haven't truly put Windows 7 through its paces yet, my first impressions are pretty positive. Windows 7's interface is nearly identical to Vista's, save for the obvious differences to the taskbar. While I was hesitant at first to accept the taskbar appearance change, I think I've come to like the new one more overall. Unlike the old bar, in Windows 7 the taskbar shows previews of pages you can open if you hover your cursor over the corresponding icon on the bar (see the three Firefox windows open above). This is pretty useful and is definitely an upgrade over the Vista system, where you could only see the name of each window. Smaller taskbar icons also allow for more windows to fit onto the taskbar.
A key difference for me was also the addition of gadgets, which are surprisingly nice. I have installed two. The first is a webmail gadget which checks your email periodically (I think that's how it works, though it does seem to pick up on new email pretty fast) and chimes when you have new e-mail. When I first log on, the gadget is one of the first things I look at and can save me a bit of time if I don't have any new mail. It's also great to have when I'm multi-tasking, or working on a document for long periods of time, as it does a good job of alerting me when I have new mail. The weather gadget is also fairly nice, since it saves me the trip to weather.com every morning.
Vista's visual changes are take-it-or-leave-it, (I'm on the take-it side) but one other nice graphical addition has been the inclusion of dynamic backgrounds. Windows 7 allows you to set your background to change periodically, which is a nice touch if you get tired of looking at the same thing all of the time. I have a nice rotating setup of art from games that I'm following or a fan of, as well as some Halo 3 pictures I've taken while playing that game.
Performance-wise, I haven't had anything to complain about. One of my concerns when I was making my purchase (I opted not to go for Windows 7 professional, which includes some XP reverse-compatibility pack) was that I would be able to play all of my old games. All of the games that I have tried to play on it have run just fine. While I haven't booted up my copy of Sim City 2000, I have booted up copies of Alpha Centauri and some pretty ghetto Paradox Entertainment games, which have both worked very well on the new platform. Moreover, I haven't had any issues with drivers (though I'm running the 32-bit OS and I'm told that the 64-bit versions of Vista and Windows 7 have most of the driver-related issues). Since I didn't upgrade from Vista to Windows 7, I can't comment on the framerate changes I've seen in some of my games yet, but I can say that my framerates are not noticeably down from Windows XP.
On the included applications side of things, I also haven't noticed much of a difference, but Paint does seem to have a few more drawing options, which I've actually made use of for a project I have been consulting on. You can see the fruits of my labors at the right (sorry, can't share images from the project, but this will give you some idea of the additional capabilities). Notable additions include transparent colors, additional commonly-used art pieces (arrows, thought bubbles, speech bubbles, etc.) and different brush styles. While we're not exactly looking at Adobe Photoshop for Windows here, the additions are pretty substantial and were a nice surprise.I've bulleted most of my other application-related observations to save me time trying to tie all of them together.
- WordPad still does not have spell-checker, so you're going to still have to buy MS Office or go download OpenOffice for free.
- Internet Explorer 8 is still worse than Firefox.
- Vista's new games are back in Windows 7, though they got rid of my favorite one, Inkball. Chess Titans is definitely the best of the bunch if you haven't seen Vista's game selection.
- Windows Live is another promising addition, but unfortunately I haven't done much with it other that look around.
- If you're a math teacher, there's a handy-dandy math writer. You can do all sorts of crazy crap now.
- Microsoft Security Essentials (not included but launched recently) is a great freeware security system.
One of the benefits of a small readerbase is that you get 1 to 1 feedback, so if you have a question about some aspect of Windows 7 you don't see covered on other blogs/websites, I'll check for you!
-Jon
1 comment:
now that i joined the world of blogging, i decided to follow you, as the only other blog that i know...and my jaw just dropped about the windows 7 math writer, i had no idea they had one. is it part of office or is it part of the windows package? how does it compare to open office math (which i all too often forget that i even have)?
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