Windows 7 - is it any good?

I have been trialling the 32-bit Windows 7 Ultimate Edition release candidate and Beta for a few months now. I thought I would share my experience and thoughts so far.

The test machine is a Dell Dimension E521, AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual Core 2.2GHz CPU, 2Gb Ram and 250Gb Sata Hard Disk.

First impressions are that it looked liked Vista and I was gonna be in for a bumpy ride. However, I have been pleasantly surprised. The install was painless (although it did take its time) and so far I have no serious issues. It is certainly faster than Vista to boot up and over time has not slowed down like my Vista machine did.

I could have run the 64-bit version of this software but I came into some compatibility problems. I couldn't run the Cisco IPSEC VPN client in 64-bit mode. This has been well documented by Cisco, and I concluded that most people will be running the 32-bit version of Windows 7 anyway.

The most troublesome part of Windows 7 has been the web browser, noteably Internet Explorer 8. It just seems very slow and frustrating to use. A quick download of Firefox and all is well.

The rest of the OS seems to perform fine. I have it connected to our Windows 2003 domain and Exchange 2007 server and everything works smoothly. File shares, networked printers, Samba shares on Ubuntu can all be accessed. I have even encrypted the hard disk using Bitlocker and TrueCrypt. Again no issues.

As a huge Windows XP fan I was disappointed with Vista. Windows 7 however now seems like a good move. It certainly seems quick to use and compatibility has been good. Using the Dell PC has been fine and did not require the download of any bespoke drivers. I just used the Windows 7 drivers and it detected all my hardware without an issue.

I will keep updating this blog if anything interesting happens, or if I find any 'gotchas'.

The official release date for Windows 7 is October 22nd 2009.

Pricing of the software seems to be up in the air at the mo. PCPro have an article about pricing which makes an interesting read.