I’m making this rare weekend dispatch from a faraway place. After dealing with a ridiculously bad rollout of the Windows 7 public beta all day on Friday, I managed to get license keys for both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the betas. It was only recently that I learned that the beta has been extended beyond the initial 2.5 million licenses. I guess my little club isn’t quite as exclusive as it previously was.
Anyway, first, I tried installing the 32-bit version on my old laptop. It installed easily, and actually worked a decent speed. That’s quite impressive considering how old that laptop is. The only problem was that the video resolution was terrible. Normally, I’d install updated drivers and everything would be fine, but I’m afraid the on-board Intel video chip is so old that none of the drivers will work. So I ended up restoring my old WinXP. (Thanks to having a Windows Home Server, I could just restore last night’s backup from the server—about an hour of set it and forget it.)
I also installed the 64-bit version, but on my main desktop. Rather than do an upgrade (which I couldn’t do to a 64-bit version anyway), I decided to install on a 250GB hard drive and set up a dual-boot system.
So far, I quite like it, though I liked Vista, too. (I know some people think that to be ridiculous, but I’ve been using it daily for a long time, and I’ve found it rock-solid and easy to use.) It seems pretty speedy, but then it’s a fresh install, as opposed to my old partition that has gotten a bit bloated over time. I haven’t had any compatibility problems yet, which is nice, but also I haven’t really tried out a ton of apps yet. Steam installed just fine, and I’m currently installing a few games, so we’ll see how it goes.
I did have one problem with Media Player 12—it wouldn’t automatically add my MP3s from the network drive, which irked me a bit. It seemed to resolve itself, however, once I got the Media Center set up.
I plan on using it for everything day to day for the foreseeable future, so if there’s anything to report, I’ll mention it here.
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