hexadecimal

I have recently installed the beta of Windows 7, and so far I can only say that it is everything that Vista should have been. It seems Microsoft really has listened to their customers, and changed the things that bothered the Vista users the most. Although Windows 7 uses the same kernel as Vista, and is just as sleek and visually appealing, Windows 7 is nowhere near the bloat ware that Vista is.

The performance increase between having Windows 7 x64 installed compared to Vista x64 is many times higher. Not only does the computer boot, shutdown and start programs faster, I even have higher FPS in games.

I have had little problems with running Windows 7 x64 on my system. All hardware was detected and their drivers were painlessly installed, save for the Intel .inf drivers, which I had to install manually. A few days after I installed Windows 7, Windows Update brought me a new driver for my Marvell onboard gigabit network … chip? It’s hardly a network card, since it’s onboard. Anywho, the driver blue-screened my system and I had to do a System Restore to just before the update (Windows 7 conveniently makes restore points at every Windows Update, which saved me a big headache). I ignored the update for a while and a few days later a new driver was available. I hesitated for a few days, but then finally decided to risk it. The driver installed without a hitch, and now all runs well.

I even installed Windows 7 on my work laptop, which has increased its performance significantly. There were no problems joining it to our 2003 domain or hooking it up to our network printers.

I like using Chrome for web browsing. It simply looks better. Its sleek design really appeals me. When I first installed Chrome on Windows 7, I was greeted with a there-are-some-known-compatibility-issues-with-the-program-you-are-attempting-to-install dialog, which I [naturally] ignored. There are, however, definitely some significant compatibility issues between Windows 7 and Chrome, but one Google search solved that (see solution). The workaround would let me open Chrome and browse the web, but would fail when I clicked hyperlinks in emails or about boxes or in any situation where I didn’t start Chrome by clicking on the icon on the Task Bar. So, I searched for all occurrences of “Chrome” in the registry, and manually applied the fix to all shell commands, and viola!

Simply search for all occurrences of Chrome.exe – “%1” in the registry and replace them with Chrome.exe –in-process-plugins “%1” while preserving the path name, of course.

I hope the final release will be just as good, or even better than what I’m seeing now!

Big kudos to Microsoft!