Went against common sense and ran a pre-beta product in production!
And that product is, Windows 7 M3 Build! In fact, I am so happy with the performance of this build that I have actually killed all instances of Vista on my home network! (Ok, I only had one Vista which my wife uses on her laptop, since I deployed Windows 2008 on all the machines I use because of HyperV).
There are a lot of things I like in Windows 7. The most important one is performance! Anyway, I'm going to list down all the points I like and dislike.
Performance
Performance increases by a lot. In fact, I'm taken by surprise by the performance this M3 build delivers, even in pre-beta stage, though I suspect performance is optimised because it is planned to be released in PDC.
One of the pain points I absolute hated in Vista is the windows explorer. On my T42, which is a 1.7ghz mobile processor (doubt it is even a duo core), just a simple clicking on a local folder (not even network), takes more than a minute to display the content. It absolutely makes Vista unusable. Put in Windows 7 on that laptop kills this problem. Now I'm just waiting to see if my wife still complains that the laptop is slow.
Graphics is damn smooth too. Especially when I just drag my mouse across the unlocked taskbar, and watch the preview window slide smoothly from one window to another.
Task bar
I had mix feeling about the new taskbar though. I'm still trying to get used to the new interface, and I wonder if the grouping actually gives a better user experience to the end user. I for one sometimes uses different IE windows to group researches I am doing concurrently together. But with the new taskbar, it is a bit more difficult to find the window I want, since I cannot just ungroup IE windows.
But I like the new "pin menu", for lack of knowledge of the official term.
This is what I get when I click on the up arrow besides the IE Icon on the taskbar. Notice the history and the feed section? In fact, I didn't even click on any feeds when I was browsing, IE picked them up itself.
This is what I get when I click on the up arrow besides the media player. The smaller icon compared to the IE one, means that I have pin Media Player to the taskbar, but didn't start any instance of it. From the Pin menu, I can now play my favorite playlist without starting media player first, or play all the music in the library. So now I don't need to click so many times, nor do I need to wait for media player to start. I just select what I need media player to do, and continue to work with media player loading and playing.
Even some older applications that was not build for windows 7 can take advantage of this. The above is a screenshot of snapit editor, showing all the recent screenshots I have taken. Now I wish Live Messenger can pin all my favorite contacts here, instead of @ the main window.
Program opening the file
Another feature I like is the ability to tell which program is accessing a file when I tried to delete it. What happens is Windows 7 was not able to restore after a sleep or hibernate operation on my work laptop (but it is able to do so on my wife's one, which is not heavy loaded with applications). Colligo, which I used to synchronise my company's fileshare which is not accessible over Internet to my own SharePoint repository, complained about a corrupted database, and crash. The resolution to this is to delete the folder which Colligo used to store the files and other information.
Colligo wasn't running when I deleted the file. Windows explorer shows me this dialog.
Oh, so Outlook is accessing the file! Closed outlook, and I was able to delete the file. Just want to make sure Windows is not lying, I started Coligo, which recreated the file. Tried delete the file, and this is what I get.
Neat!
I'll continue with some points to take note of in my next blog post.