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Entries tagged [windows7]

Windows 7 Beta First Impression

by Sunny Chan


Posted on Sunday January 11, 2009 at 11:22pm in Anything


Well, Windows 7 Beta is out and thinking that I have a spare machine I would give it a try - I have downloaded Windows 7 and then install it from DVD. The installation was pretty quick and painless. I decided to wipe the machine clean rather than doing an upgrade, as my out Windows XP setup has too much crap in it.

This machine is an old single core Pentium M 1.7G, with 2G of RAM. Once the installation completes it boots up fairly quickly, and much more reponsive then Vista on the same machine - the hard drive doesn't work as hard as Vista, and it seems that it doesn't work the CPU as hard.

Interface wise it is not that much different from Vista, however, they copied some of the elements from Mac, for example, you can now pinned the Icon onto the task bar, and you can organised a whole bunch of Windows according to app - just like Mac OS X Tiger.

Out of the box it has already contained most of the driver I need for the Thinkpad, and they are available via Windows Update. However to my surprised they dopn't have Intel Pro Wireless drivers isn't available - considering that Intel is a close partner for Microsoft I would have thought that it should work straight out of them box. Luckily, it seems like Vista driver works fine on Windows 7 so I just download the driver from Lenovo and the wireless works fine.

One of the main problem is that I spend most of the Sunday afternoon trying to sort out is trying to connect to Samba shares. It seems like Windows 7 has tightened up much of the security in terms of SMB shares. Most of the instructions on the net says you need to change the security policy manager, Local Policy to allow NTLM authentication. However it didn't work and after switching off most of the encryption and security options for SMB it finally works.

So I will spend a couple of days with Windows 7 and see how it goes - I am impressed so far.