Greetings, salutations and furniture. Are you well? I am transposed. Barley!
I installed Windows 7 on my desktop a couple of weeks ago. It’s the full proper real technet version, so it’s not pirated and not going to expire and screw me up shortly. Which is nice. First impressions are pretty much positive.. it’s certainly a set up from Vista. Given I was one of the few geeks in the world to voluntarily use Vista over XP, (on both my laptop and desktop in fact!) I really appreciate the differences. The slightly revamped task bar is definately an improvement for one thing. I like being able to pin my constantly open apps to it for two reasons; it saves on quick launch bar space and they’re always in the same order. Being the pedantic fellow I am, it’s something I’ve been wanting for a while now. There’s a pile of little changes too that all add up to a big positive change in usability. If you’re dragging a window around and pull it to the edge of the screen it’ll automatically maximise. If you grab the task bar of a maximised window and pull it somewhere, it’ll restore (go to its smaller window size). There’s native support for shuffling the desktop background image. Admittedly these are somewhat minor given there’s been basically no changes to the core UI since Windows 95, but if we’re honest it’s always been a nicely functional design. The start menu is the same as it is in Vista and aesthetically there’s little difference. But again, that’s not really a bad thing – especially given all the customisation that’s possible for those who want it.
Under the shinyness the experience feels more smooth and solid. I’ve not done any comparative boot up timing or anything (I’m not that pedantic..) but it seems to be more efficient in what it’s doing. The UAC is far less invasive now, which is definately a welcome change. Pretty much all the screen darkening prompts that I come across are due to running software that was designed for XP or earlier – other items will have the shield on the button but pressing it won’t cause the disruptive UAC prompt we all know and revile. Most everything I’ve thrown at it will install and run however, though I was out and about getting the latest versions of things before I started. Drivers for pretty much everything were fine, except for my Logitech stuff – as of writing their drivers don’t recognise 7 as an operating system that they’ll run on. The keyboard one refuses to install and the mouse one offers to install anyway.. but I didn’t. Given the mouse stores the changes I made to the thumb buttons (who’da thunk it, the on board memory is useful!) it works better without the drivers anyway. I’d really like the media keys on my keyboard to be functional though..
The only other major quibble I have with 7 is that VLC doesn’t scale properly in it. Apparently this is due to the graphics card drivers not supporting under Win7 whatever scaling method that VLC uses.. so I just use WMP. There are other players out there that will work apparently, but WMP has been remarkably non-irritating so far. We’ll see how long that lasts.. but signs are promising. Certainly it’s less irritating than it was under Vista, and there’s now the option to completely remove it if you so desire. Things for MS to work on for the inevitable Win8 include seperate background controls for multiple monitors and not burying the keyboard controls so badly in the Control Panel. Also, for some reason the icons are wider spaced now.. both in the system tray and in Windows Explorer. Not sure why.. but it’s less good. Get on it, eh?
Sperm whales sleep vertically with their heads pointing towards the bottom of the ocean.
The bats of the sea!
