The Shattered Sky

I have been playing around a bit with the Windows 7 Release Candidate, particularly at work where it resides on a Dell Latitude E5500 laptop in a dual boot configuration with Windows XP Professional. Lately I have been using that laptop a bit and I must say that I am loving this OS.

Working in a live environment

As a member of a Windows 2003 domain, Windows 7 sometimes displays a little exclamation mark on the system tray’s network icon, and the Network and Sharing Center indicates that there is no internet connection despite being able to connect to the web using both IE8 and Firefox 3.5. For the most part this remains little more than a bug that does not really impact any functionality and I suspect to be due to our proxy settings. That said, it’s a Microsoft network through and through, so as far as I am concerned this should not be happening at all.

Windows 7 is of course able to access the file server without issue, and Symantec Endpoint installed over the network just as well as with a Vista or XP client. All software thus far has worked flawlessly including a legacy 16-bit application. The laptop suspends upon snapping the lid about as fast as the XP installation on the same system and resumes to the welcome screen instantly upon re-opening the lid.

One feature that I liked is the fact that the screen dims after a period of inactivity while on battery power. I have seen this feature before on Ubuntu Linux but it is a newcomer to the Windows world, at least as a native feature of the OS. This is a good way to conserve battery charge before enough time has elapsed to shut off the display entirely.

Laptop Touchpad

The most significant annoyance I had with the laptop installation of Windows 7 RC was the loss of the touchpad’s scrolling functionality. Windows 7 detected the touchpad as simply a PS/2 mouse.  My advice is to forget the websites that suggest downloading the drivers from Synaptics’ website. You won’t break your touchpad but getting back your scrolling capabilities is strictly hit or miss. I suggest installing the Vista touchpad drivers for your laptop – it worked perfectly for me.

Preview Pane

One feature I am especially impressed with is the preview pane. At first I didn’t like the new right-side orientation of the preview pane, but once I got accustomed to scrolling through photos up/down instead of left/right it was like second nature. What excited me though is the ability to preview many different types of documents simply by selecting the icon in explorer. I have used this to preview not only images but text files,  PDF documents, Excel spreadsheets and even a C source file. I have included a screenshot of an Excel spreadsheet being previewed in this manner.

Windows 7 Preview Pane - Excel spreadsheet

Family Pack

I have encountered in my readings that Microsoft may be offering  “Family Pack” for Windows 7. It turns out there is some wording in the Microsoft Software License Terms for Windows 7 that suggests Microsoft may be offering a Windows 7 package that permits installation on up to three (3) computers in the same household. I wonder what the pricing may be like on an offer such as that? It does make sense for Microsoft to pursue this sort of arrangement as there are now a great deal of households with multiple personal computers. I ran across this at CNET News’ Beyond Binary by Ina Fried which in turn referenced Kristian Kenny’s Digital Life.

Conclusion

The more I use Windows 7 is the more I am finding it to be everything Vista should have been. It is just as sleek as Vista, but it is faster, just as stable as 2000, XP and Vista were before it and well thought out. It is not flawless, but it is still quite good especially considering that while the Release Candidate is close to the finished product, it is not the final build.