First impression: Much better than Vista. I tried the software out on a very weak little computer I had sitting around (Celeron at 1.8GHz, 1 gig of memory, AGP 4) and the software runs, slowly but stable. Windows & reported that box as a 2, on a scale of 1-7.9 for performance. The video was the problem. I now have it on a more powerful box that used to be my main computer. (P4 at 2.8GHz, Hyperthread, 2 gigs, AGP 8 with a 265MB ATI video card. On this box, it does not like the hard drive performance (same hard drive). I think that may be a driver problem, however.
Issues: Drivers are not on the system for some older hardware. I have managed to get some updated Vista drivers to work. This may be an issue for older computers in general, but it certainly seems better than the way Vista rolled out. Some of the generic drivers that do come with the system run fairly well, but installing the specific Vista drivers seemed to improve things.
Likes: Plays DVDs right out of the chute. I saw some breakdown at certain points while playing a movie, but that may be the drivers. Sound quality is very high – but I have the latest Vista driver for the audio chip. System seems rock solid and has been running well since I installed it – again, not much in the way of torture testing yet. No blue screens yet.
It’s a bit hard to put this system through its paces, however, since it comes with DirectX 11 – and none of my son’s games use anything higher than DirectX 10. So I can’t try it out on a challenging game. I’ll keep plugging away on it in my spare time. But I am going to swap out the Problematic disk drive for a SATA RAID before I finally try really running this thing.
Microsoft did a smart thing, though. They lifted the original 2.5 million license cap on the beta. Now all users can download the software through January 24, 2009. I may have to download another copy and try it out in a laptop.
It worked ok for me until — Once I began to explore and push and poke things around, troubles sprouted up. Nothing that wasn’t fixable, just lots of small stuff that broke. I have had it running in sort of production mode for a few days. Much better than Vista. Low power PC a 2.8 Ghz p4 with 1GB memory. I guess not to be unexpected.
But by the time it makes it, Ubuntu will have been turned again and ready to go again. You wonder if MS can catch up and if it weren’t for name recognition …
One thing a WinXP user I tried it on, totally freaked because it was so different. All the changing and geegaws can be bad.
Yeah, some things good, some really not fun. My Palm will not synch – hotsynch manager is incompatible. But Bluetooth headphones link instantly. A mix of annoying problems and nice features.
I got a Linux EEE PC with my Christmas money and I’m loving it. However, my desktop running XP will eventually crap out, so I am interested in whether Windows 7 will work, or whether I should nurse XP for another few years.
Throw a spare drive in your XP box and try the free beta version, Sam. It has some good features and some bad. It IS different from XP, but not all change is bad. I am having some problems with old – and much-loved – software, so it will probably be necessary to switch some stuff and buy some new things. But there are some really nice features and, so far, fewer hardware compatibility issues than Vista has.