Windows 7 RC - I think I'm in Love.....

So I've been running Windows 7 RC for a while now (a little over a month) and have some updates to this post that I'd like to make.

First of all, I am, in fact, still in love.  It runs really, really well.  I've thrown all sorts of nonsense at it, from watching YouTube videos to recording high-definition audio tracks through a Firewire audio interface.  Thus far, it has handling everything I've used it for very well, with some minor glitches.

Let's start with the functions that most people will use most of the time: word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing... the bread-and-butter of modern computing.  I've done all of this stuff, and it's handled it as well as you'd expect from a modern operating system.  I was most interested in the web browsing, since my journey into the world of Windows 7 was inspired by the fact that Windows XP had started to get really flakey on the browsing front.  The particular machine I chose to install 7 on was set up to dual-boot XP and Fedora Core 5.  XP was having all sorts of trouble browsing the internet.  It would work for about 5 or 10 minutes, then I would start to see "Page cannot be displayed" errors all over the place.  I knew it wasn't a hardware issue, because Fedora would run Firefox just fine, no issues.  So I started to consider an upgrade to Vista for this machine.  That's just about the time Microsoft released the Windows 7 RC.  I decided to give it a shot.

Browsing works.  I mean, it works.  That was the test for me.  It wasn't speed, or any other benchmark for that matter... is was that it WORKED.  Win7 passes my test there.

I'm a musician, and I like to make recordings on my own equipment in my basement.  I need a machine, and an operating system, that can handle high-definition (88.2kHz sampling at 24-bit resolution) recording without glitches, hiccups, or artifacts ending up on the final product.  I was really excited when I read that Microsoft had streamlined Windows 7 for performance, and that a lot of the "improvements" they had made in Vista were actually improved in 7.  I was not disappointed when I installed a borrowed PreSonus Firebox audio interface and it just WORKED.

So all-in-all, I've been pretty impressed with Win7 RC.  There have been a few weird problems (I still can't get my 22" monitor to display in it's native resolution), but I'm guessing they're going to be fixed in the final release.  I pre-ordered two upgrade disks, and can't wait to get my hands on them.

Cheers!