travis' brain dump

You know, so far so good is all I have to say.

I had some struggles with some of the media features at first (mainly due to my GPO (see vista x64 blogs)) but once I figured them out it was smooth sailing.

Overall I have to say that some of the immediate features do have some appeal. “Out of the box” installation was really painless and was ready to go in under 30 minutes. I’m sure the install times will vary for most people but I have to say this was a pretty good experience. I’m running a Dual Core 3.0 GHz w/ 4GB of RAM and two striped Seagate 400GB drives in 64bit mode if anyone wants to compare for install times.

Post installation and domain join the system was ready to go. Some of the features that jumped right out at me was the creative (or should I say not so creative) approach to the task bar. It reminded me heavily of the Mac OSX Dock, however it was a nice refreshing approach to the crap we’ve previously had since the inception of Windows 95. Good job there kids.

Aero peek was an interesting feature. Nothing like “looking through” your windows to see what’s below. Interesting but I haven’t found a real use for it yet. I’m sure with time.

Back to the task bar and start menu, something I kind of liked was the jump-list feature. It offers up a list of items based on the application, not just an encompassed “Recent Documents” approach. You hit the IE icon, you see lists of previous websites. You hit the Word icon and you get previously opened documents. Kinda cool if you’re into that sort of thing. 🙂

Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player actually gave me a double take. Similar to their previous versions in operation, but slightly different in presentation. WMP actually has some nice features to it and the library loads up exponentially faster. To those that know me and have seen my frustration when doing a library refresh that takes a few hours with WMP 11, you’ll be pleased to know my angry rants were solved here. WMP 12 loads up the entire collection from the SAN volume in under 10 minutes. LOL With that, WMC is just as responsive. The WMCE experience on the XBOX 360 was much improved and much more responsive. It was nice to actually see instant response to a movement request instead of the 2 second pause I keep seeing on my Vista MCE experience (despite moving to x64 which was a dramatic improvement over x32).

Something I hope to play with a little more is the Device Stage. It’s kind of a like a task center based on the devices you plug into your system. I would assume Zune users would see the most benefit here, but I haven’t had enough time to really test or play with it so I can’t really give a good review of this function right now.

Overall I would have to say that while Windows 7 has some really cool features at this point it’s not too different in function than Windows Vista. Yes, they have addressed a lot of the issues surrounding UAC and other annoying Vista “features” but there is still much to be done if they’re going to aesthetically please the masses. Performance however is greatly improved and I have to say that the backing off the resources is greatly appreciated. She’s still a beast, but a much more tamer beast now which I and my sanity greatly appreciate the effort.

Hopefully I will get some more test time in with this animal. Maybe I can find some more things to rant or rave about. 🙂

Till then…