My Windows 7 Experience - Part 1

Guess I'll be posting quite a bit on Microsoft's latest OS for the PC market. Decided to switch to the new Windows 7 Ultimate from my Vista Ultimate over the weekend. Not that I have any complains on my Vista setup. Really.... On my system, Vista was smooth, almost crash proof and I had everything running just the way I wanted. I actually preferred it over XP. You can blame it on my curiosity but I just wanted to experience 1st hand what the buzz was all about, the improvements over Vista and XP, etc. So do bear in mind all the points here are based on my personal experience with the OS and I cannot guarantee the same result for other people. :)

My setup:

CPU: Intel C2D 8400 3ghz
MB: nVidia 630 / 7100
GPU: nVidia 9800GT 512mb
RAM: 3gb Kingston 667
HDD for OS : 100 / 320GB WD 7200
Other HDD : another 320GB WD 7200, Seagate 160GB 7200.10, Seagate 1TB 7200.11
Display: Primary - Acer AL1916W 1440 x 900 (DVI) , Secondary - Sony KLV-40V400A 1960 x 1080 (HDMI)
OS: Vista Ultimate x86

My 1st advise: Do a clean install. 2+ hrs into the upgrading process and I decided to abandon it for a clean install. Took me less than an hour for the Windows 7 to install and another later, I had most of my software like Office, PS, AI, DW, itunes, Firefox and Chrome all working.

Before I complain about the problems I had to go through during and after installation, I would like to answer the question of how fast is it, at least compared to Vista.

Not much difference in the start up times for me. (Don't ask what scientific proof I have, this is purely by "feeling" - to me, a difference of a few seconds does not make or break an OS). Shut down is relatively faster in Windows 7. Opening and running of programs like Office, PS, etc is also about the same as in Vista. This should be in line with the reviews I read on the web that Windows 7 makes more of a difference in speeds in lower end systems like ATOM or Celeron based CPUs. I do not have a ATOM to test the installation, suffice to say there's not much speed difference between Win 7 and Vista in my setup.

Now comes the 1st annoyance I found in Windows 7. When something crashes/hangs/not responding, the whole system becomes unresponsive!!! In Vista I could always (well... 95% of the time) bring up the Task Manager and kill off the offending application and/or process(es). Now in Win 7, a single non-responsive program means I have to hard reboot the PC. So far I have not encountered any applications that could hang and not force me do a hard reboot. The applications that hung on me in Win 7 included Windows Media Player 12, Region / Language Settings in Control Panel, Bitcomet, Explorer (in Music Library).

I guess I'll stop here for the moment. Will continue with another post soon!!! In the meantime I'll "mess" around more to see if I ultimately like this new Windows 7 better than its predecessor.