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Fun with Windows 7

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WARNING COMPUTER JARGON!

I have been test driving the Windows 7 beta and Release Candidate (RC) on an old Athlon XP 3200+ based PC.

This is a 64bit CPU so I installed both the 32bit and 64bit versions of Windows 7 before settling on the 64bit version when it managed to find all my hardware. Athlon XP 64, Abit AN8, 2GB DDR400 RAM, 200GB HD, Avermedia AverTV Duo Hybrid PCI-E, ATI 2600Pro Video card, Receiver and Remote (MS compatible). Windows 7 beta and RC installed cleanly, installed all the drivers and things worked.

I tested the new media centre and it supported both digital tuners, both analog tuners and the FM radio that were present on the TV Tuner card. Being in Canberra there is nothing on Analog TV that is not on digital so for a production media centre PC I would not bother with the Analog tuners but it was nice to get FM radio working. I still occasionally listen to the radio. The music library is nicer than Vista except it refuses to add all my music - it always seems to be missing something however looking in the Library, a new feature of Windows 7 is the libraries, all the music is there. Hopefully that will be fixed for the GA (computer jargon meaning General Availability - I am a software developer so I know all the jargon)

Then I found a piece of hardware without 64bit support. A cheap web cam. There are 32bit drivers, as the hardware troubleshooter informed me - the help available in Windows 7 is definitely improved over Windows Vista and light years ahead of XP! I don't actually use the web cam but it was interesting to see something that was not supported in 64bit.

For an interesting read head over to the Windows 7 Engineering team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/
Plenty of interesting information about the development of Windows 7 on there.

Will I switch to Windows 7? For a new PC definitely. For an older PC? If it is a Media Centre I will be very tempted. Not having to hack support of four tuners as you do with XPMCE and VistaMCE is attractive. However I would not need four tuners very often if Media Centre did not use two tuners to record two consecutive shows on the same channel. A problem that is still in Windows 7 RC! Why change a XP or Vista PC, especially if it is running fine. Windows 7 may perform better but it depends on the hardware whether you would notice it other than when running benchmarks.

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