Too much time has passed since my last blog entry, so I figured another entry was LONG overdue. Some of you may know that I have agreed to be the first to have Windows 7 installed and configured on the computer I use for all of my daily work and technical support activities in SCE Academic Computing. Late last week I backed up everything on my SCE laptop, wiped the hard drive, and installed Windows 7 on my system. Initially, the installation took only about 35-40 minutes to complete. I pretty much used the default settings, and let the installer do it’s thing. I’ve had three full workdays using Windows 7 including last Friday, as well as Monday and Tuesday this week. So far, everything seems to be working pretty good. Aside from a few minor things I’m still working out due to changes in where Windows 7 stores User profile information, this new operating system works pretty good.

My laptop is no spring chicken, but it has a fairly decent Intel Centrino Dual Core processor running at 2.0 ghz with 2.5gb of 667mhz DDR2 ram. Windows 7 is pretty responsive on this computer, and so far I haven’t experienced any issues that would prevent me from doing my work. I’m not impressed at all with the Aero Glass visual enhancements, so that got disabled pretty quickly. Some people like visual enhancements, but I prefer a cleaner looking interface so transparent title and scroll bars are not important to me. The Start menu works a little different than on Windows XP, but I think most staff and students will be able to get accustomed to it given some time working in Windows 7. Some items that you may be used to using in the Start Menu are probably turned off by default, but they are easily enabled with a few clicks in the Customize Start Menu from the Taskbar properties window.

The Control Panel is really different, and will take time to find things you’ve used previously as many applets have been renamed. For example, the familiar ‘Display’ from Windows XP has been folded into a new Control Panel app named ‘Personalize.’ I also discovered that you can reorganize currently running applications on the Taskbar. I think I’ll find more stuff that’s been updated or changed as I continue using Windows 7 over the weeks and months ahead. So far so good.