Windows 7 RC has been out for a couple of weeks now, and I finally got around to installing it on a development laptop (Asus W2P) yesterday. Installation went fairly easily; my HD is partitioned into two drives; the primary partition (C Drive) being used for software, and the secondary (D Drive) is used for data.
I decided to go for a clean install; simply formatting the the C drive and installing Win7 there - it's not that I don't trust the 'upgrade' option; I just feel that with a fresh install I'll remove the cruft thats accumilated since my last OS install.
The basic OS install took around an hour. It was largely just waiting, but yet again, the install operation stops around half way through to ask questions. As the machine was at this point not connected to my network, I created a temporary user name to log on with. Rather annoyingly, this username was being used for all subsequent software installations (a quick hack around with regedit solved that little problem).
After logging on, the first thing I noticed was the new taskbar. Rather than containing a group of quick links like in XP and Vista which then open up in the taskbar, these almost-like-but-not-actually-quicklinks simply highlight once the application has been opened. Hovering over the icon brings up a preview of each opened window for this application. Rather suprisingly, although it looked alien at first, I now quite like this feature.
Next, I installed my bluetooth mouse vua the control panel (very straightforward), and then installed the rest of the applications I need for general day-to-day use (things like IIS, MSMQ, etc). This took around 15-20 minutes, and once done, I ran windows update.
WU picked up eighteen updates, which I then installed and rebooted from. After reboot, I was pleased to see that windows now had correct drivers for everything with the exception of one device (the TV tuner). I also noticed that my synaptics touchpad was using a generic driver, so I couldn't turn off the annoying click-tap feature, and none of the hotkeys worked.
One quick trip to the Asus website later, and the touchpad, hotkeys, and TV tuner were all plugged in and working fine. I simply downloaded the latest Vista versions, and everything was fine.
The OS was now up and running. All that I had to do to get the OS to a state where I was happy with it was turn off the annoyingly blurry "cleartype" (which actually doesn't seem to turn it off everywhere), stop the "smoothing of screen fonts" which isn't cleartype, but produces the same blurry effect, and then install the rest of my software...of which, more later.
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