I’ve been running the release candidate on my, more than capable, desktop machine since it was released to the masses at the beginning of May. After hearing about how well it was performing across a range of machines; with differing specs, I was determined to get it on my Samsung NC10 netbook.
Despite it exceeding the minimum system requirements, I was still a little concerned about how well the 1.6GHz processor would cope. I need not have worried, it’s scaled brilliantly, even when running several apps. My only remaining concern was battery life, as there was seemingly no way to reduce the screen brightness through the Windows 7 power management. So, using an external DVD drive, I installed some software that came with the netbook to enable the brightness hot keys. Whilst it doesn’t seem to like booting up with the application to do this, at least it’s now possible to lower the brightness to make the most out of the battery life.
With two machines running Windows 7, and a third running Vista, I’ve found that they network better than ever before. I thought Vista was easy to network, but using Homegroup for the Windows 7 machines makes it so easy to print wirelessly from the netbook to the printer connected to my desktop.
Incidentally, it’s only been the printer software that caused any trouble in terms of compatibility. Compatibility mode didn’t work, as the installer itself was checking the version of Windows, as it didn’t match any of the versions it thought it could work with). Nonetheless, Windows resolved this easily using the plug and play feature, it recognised it correctly as a printer. I also love the way that the progress of file transfers appears on the taskbar, as well as the tweaked preview feature.
I’m not a fan of pinning things to the taskbar, but have since found an alternate way to reactivate quick launch (which I still find more effective than pinning stuff to the taskbar – as pinned items move around making the taskbar unorganised and messy). When I first blogged about my first impressions of the beta, I found it weird that Windows 7 no longer bundled its own photo viewer. Instead, you have to get it with a Windows Live Pack, which bundles other optional software, including Silverlight (a Flash alternative), Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Writer (which I’ve used for a long time to post to my blog), and Windows Movie Maker amongst others.
