Geek time
After seeing how well Windows 7 was doing on the desktop at home, I decided to try it out on my laptop this weekend. Overall it was an improvement over XP, but I did run into a few issues the desktop didn't. My graphics card didn't seem to want to recognize the directX install under 7, so I had to run World of Warcraft in OpenGL mode. Suffice it to say 1-2 fps and 2000+ latency makes for an unplayable game.
I liked the ease with which windows 7 was able to locate all the drivers for my system. I had a backup folder with all of them and I only needed to point it toward the upper level folder and it searched down until it found the correct one. The wireless network was mostly painless, except it once lost the 'home' setting and put it to 'public' after a reboot. With a laptop the default is to assume 'public' (aka don't allow internet traffic) until told otherwise, a good security feature. Learning where all the settings are hidden so I could tell it to be a home network again was the tricky part. It seemed like the network speeds were improved a little, but nothing like the improvement that was seen on the desktop.
I like windows 7 over XP enough, that I reformatted the computer again. This time splitting the hard drive into two partitions. I installed XP on one and Windows 7 on the other. On a restart I get the option to choose which OS to boot into. I did a backup to the external drive with 7 before I formatted and tested out the restore feature to get a few files. It seems to work well. I'll need to play around with it some more to see how much it can be customized.
I liked the ease with which windows 7 was able to locate all the drivers for my system. I had a backup folder with all of them and I only needed to point it toward the upper level folder and it searched down until it found the correct one. The wireless network was mostly painless, except it once lost the 'home' setting and put it to 'public' after a reboot. With a laptop the default is to assume 'public' (aka don't allow internet traffic) until told otherwise, a good security feature. Learning where all the settings are hidden so I could tell it to be a home network again was the tricky part. It seemed like the network speeds were improved a little, but nothing like the improvement that was seen on the desktop.
I like windows 7 over XP enough, that I reformatted the computer again. This time splitting the hard drive into two partitions. I installed XP on one and Windows 7 on the other. On a restart I get the option to choose which OS to boot into. I did a backup to the external drive with 7 before I formatted and tested out the restore feature to get a few files. It seems to work well. I'll need to play around with it some more to see how much it can be customized.