Windows 7

[JJonas]

Public beta not out yet but Windowsteamblog just fell over

 

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/MainFeed.aspx

[srochford]

Don't worry; it's still rubbish :-(

 

Installed it on a sacrificial Dell E6400 laptop. Installs pretty quickly, initial appearance very much like Vista - not sure if that's good or bad.

 

Not all drivers found - not a problem - so go into "Devices and Printers" to see what can be done. There's a quite nice layout and clear warning icons on the areas which need attention. Right clicking gives a "troubleshoot" option so I try it. First thing it finds is a problem with the driver for the SM Bus Controller and suggests that reinstalling the driver might help. Good suggestion so click "Apply this fix" and it tries to reinstall the non-existent driver. After a few moments I get a message telling me that "problem with device driver - fixed" and a nice green tick. At the same time a system tray message says "Device driver installation failed"

 

I know what's going on here - I just need to get the driver from Dell - but I don't think that the conflicting messages would help anyone who didn't know what was going on so not really sure of the purpose!!

 

Copying files is about the same as Vista - pretty quick on the local disc but very slow over the network (just dragged 320Mb from my home drive to the C: drive - it's now got up to 1.2Mbytes per second but it's really not impressive. A lower spec XP machine is roughly 10 times as fast at copying the same set of files over the same network.

[Domino]

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/windows_7.png

 

....a reasoned review from XKCD