The Rabapab Blog

Over the course of the past few days I have done a complete clean re-install of the Windows 7 RC on my laptop. That was my first install of Windows 7 and I wanted to clean all of the junk that had built up from installing and uninstalling software that I was trying out. Now that I am not constantly downloading and trying out new software I figured it was time to make the laptop run a little better. I need to order a new battery for it here soon, as the one on it is toasted. It never really ever held a charge for long, but now it is totally pathetic, maybe lasting 10 minutes if it is that lucky. The fact that it is never unplugged prolly plays a part in the dead battery, pretty sure you shouldn’t leave them plugged in all the time like that.

Anyway, so far I really like Windows 7, compared to Vista it is leaps and bounds better. Right now I am running it on both my Sony Vaio laptop and my Asus Eee PC netbook. The netbook runs like a dream, I have been getting close to 8 hours out of the battery while running in Power Saver mode, around 5 hours out of it while in Balanced. I never booted it into Windows XP while it was on the hard drive, so I am not really sure what the battery life was like with the Asus power management software. I have not been able to get it running on Windows 7, but I have not really needed it. Most reviews stated that they were getting somewhere around 8 ½ – 9 hours out of the battery in realistic use conditions while in Power Save mode in the Asus software, so I don’t seem too far off. Overall Windows 7 runs fairly smooth on the netbook all things considered, being only a single core 1.66GHz processor and having a simple Intel onboard video chipset. I have been experiencing the video driver crashes that I have seen reported on numerous web forums, but Windows 7 has been able to quickly recover and remain running. Hopefully they fix that issue in the full release version coming this fall.

On the laptop it runs that much better. The Sony is an Intel 2GHz Core 2 Duo T7200 currently running in x86. I tried the whole x64 stuff and while it did work and seemed very smooth, finding drivers is still an issue, even for the more common components. Both the laptop and the netbook have 2GB of memory, which helps them both greatly. The laptop has actually become my primary desktop machine, and has been filling that role quite well for some time now. I have been enjoying the new features in Windows 7, as much as I have been enjoying the smoothness of the entire OS. And with the laptop hooked up to a 22″ widescreen flat panel running in 1680×1050, Windows 7 just looks phenomenal.

Everything is really just as it should be, but then again I only have previous versions of Windows to really compare it too. My most recent Windows install prior to 7 was Vista Ultimate. I went out and bought Vista the day it was released just as I will with Windows 7, the difference is that I am not sure that I will be splurging on the Ultimate edition this time around. But I can say that I am somewhat disappointed that they turned around and made Windows 7 everything that Vista should have been. I spent around $400 for Vista, which really kind of sucks because now I will be spending close to that for a copy of Windows 7. I am thinking that I may also just do an upgrade on the laptop instead of a full install, it will be cheaper since I will end up purchasing two licenses, one for the laptop and another for the netbook. I will also be taking advantage of the extended RC licenses, to help spread out my purchases of both copies of the OS, and that may allow me to purchase full installs for both machines. Obviously my preference would be to do it that way, but it all depends on the total cost. I may end up purchasing one copy of Ultimate and another of Professional. I would think that the obvious choice then would be to put the Ultimate copy on the laptop and the Professional copy on the netbook.

Look for future articles pertaining to Windows 7 over the coming months. As I am sure that it will remain a hot topic through its release date.