Win7 - The first couple months

[Brett_Tabke]

I'd tried the beta's and found the switch to win 7 to be pretty easy. Having had some experience with Vista, the jump to win 7 was uneventful.

Pros:
- Speed: I find it considerably faster than Vista and it feels a touch faster than XP machines.
- Stability. I always found XP to be exteremely stable, but I have yet to lockup a win7 machine.
- Screen drivers. I run 4 monitors in portrait mode and switch config down to 1 remote screen twice a day. XP requires special drivers for the 4 monitors in portrait mode. XP's handling of this setup is pretty slow. Win7 is pretty fast at it.
- Windows Shortcuts. The first thing I do with a new keyboard is to rip the capslock key off and the windows key. However, win7 has some very nice shortcuts on the windows key these days.

Cons:
- The screen adjustment utility is poor. It takes me 7 seconds to switch config on XP. Under Win7, the same move takes about a minute and is mis-click error prone.
- Security and networking. It s a constant fight to keep machines on our office network connecting to various NAS's and network boxes in a mixed OS environment. Win7 is always asking for network passwords and denying shared access to machines. We finally just setup remote access to the machines to get around the restrictions.
- Task bar and start menu. Hate it. Absolutly can't stand what they did to the start menu and task bar - useless. (insert 5 page rant here). I have made most of the tweaks to get the task bar and start menu back to XP like behavior.
- Search indexing. Most of this *!&@ can't be turned off. However, the indexer doesn't bring the machine to a grinding halt the way the various versions of MS system indexers do for XP.
- Printer Drivers - Vista worked with 2 of 8 printers at our office. Win7 is working with 3 of 6. So we have to keep XP machines around for now.
- Other drivers. Most hardware (other than disk drives) that doesn't come with a Win7 driver is not going to work. I went through 4 web cams yesterday and not a one will work with Win7.
- Thank goodness for "godmode [webmasterworld.com]" so that we can get a functional control panel back.

Other than those few things, Win7 has been enjoyable so far. The over all stability and speed are the real/only reasons I see to upgrade.

[lammert]

I thought that the printer compatibility would be the main problem too when I moved to Win7 recently, but many vendors have made tremendous effort to update their drivers. The problem is that those updated drivers are not visible in the Win7 driver selection screen and the new driver lists aren't pushed automatically to the client machine via the Windows update cycles.

You have to manually upload the new driver lists with the "Windows Update" button in the "Add Printer Driver" wizard. This button appears left to the "Have Disk" button in the list of printer drivers. For some unknown reason--maybe a bug, maybe by design--that button doesn't seem to appear on all occasions. I had to trick the system by telling it to add an LPR/LPD printer on a remote system from which it obviously couldn't get any device information, and as a result it to showed me this button.

After this trick the system downloaded a whole new list of printer drivers which now gives me native Win7 printing support for my 16 year old Laserjet 4 workhorse and a younger but still outdated color deskjet.

[claus]

The first thing I do with a new keyboard is to rip the capslock key off and the windows key.

Nice. Why didn't I ever think about that? But now I will ;)

As for Win7 I'll wait another year at least. So far I've skipped Vista and held on to XP. Mere user interface "improvements" won't cut it for me, especially as the improvements visioned by MS often turn out to be usability catastrophes. If it ain't broken...

[Brett_Tabke]

Couple months later:

Biggest problems:
- print drivers. This has been an ongoing nightmare. Every printer we have has had problems under win7.

[bill]

Did you get the 64-bit version Brett? I've had some printer driver issues with 64-bit Vista and Windows 7. A lot of the older machines simply don't provide the 64-bit drivers. If you have the 32-bit OS then it seems there are more drivers available.

[Brett_Tabke]

Ya, 64 Bill.

- hp500 (42 inch wide). Simply won't print under win 7. 4 win7 machines, not a one will actually produce a page.
- dell 3130 laser. every time ip switches on network printer, we have to reinstall drivers.
- hp9600 wide, no printer drivers available and win7 wont allow us to use via an xp machine.
- hp8500 again, drops printer when printer ip changes.
- dell lx80 - no drivers.

[J_RaD]

Security and networking. It s a constant fight to keep machines on our office network connecting to various NAS's and network boxes in a mixed OS environment. Win7 is always asking for network passwords and denying shared access to machines. We finally just setup remote access to the machines to get around the restrictions.

Are you authenticating under a domain? Or are you just a bunch of stuff connected to some hardware?

[Brett_Tabke]

Bunch of machines connecting on the same work group.

[J_RaD]

That would explain the quirkyness of authenticating with all the attached hardware.

Setting up just a simple domain contorller would sort it out.

OR just keep most of your data centralized in 1 or 2 places to prevent having to auth with a bunch of other clients. Map the drives tell it to remember the passwords and reconnect at login. Make sure all the 7 computers are all set for the (work) network mode so the firewall drops its guard more.


I do have another theroy too...i'll test and report back!

dell 3130 laser. every time ip switches on network printer, we have to reinstall drivers.

hp8500 again, drops printer when printer ip changes.

why arn't your printers static? The driver gets mapped to an IP, when the printer isn't there anymore..... If for some reason you can't static IP your printers when you install them do it manually, then (add local) then create a new port (standard TCP/IP) then when the printer changes you just got into the properties and edit the port to the new IP.

[Brett_Tabke]

>Map the drives tell

As far as I can determine - win7 will not allow you to map a shared "root" drive. Even if both machines are in admin mode and you share root, Win7 won't give you access to it.

> why arn't your printers static?

The whole network is DHCP. I don't think I want to root around a manual to figure out how to switch it to static.

[coopster]

I have been having troubles with the Windows 7 machines on our network. I finally pulled the Debugging Tools for Windows from MS and started analyzing the dump files. Yeah, that's some kind of fun I tell ya. Every time, and I mean every time ... Probably caused by : NETIO.SYS

I wish I knew more about the Windows OS but the details of the analyze messages always refer to the kernel and I'm just not ready to head down that road. MS has plenty of developers and I'm hoping they are working on a patch. I've sent the BSOD memory dump in every time it happens and I hope it's not just the two machines on our network that have this issue. I hope there are plenty of others pushing the same dump files over to MS for review.

[vik_c]

Task bar and start menu. Hate it. Absolutly can't stand what they did to the start menu and task bar - useless. (insert 5 page rant here). I have made most of the tweaks to get the task bar and start menu back to XP like behavior.

Could you elaborate on how you managed to do this? I had to buy Windows 7 because a new Intel i5 system we put together won't work with Windows XP (and in any case XP is hard to get now). I absolutely hate the new start menu and task bar. Win XP had a 'Windows Classic' option. This one doesn't. How do I get back to the Windows XP interface?

[bill]

I absolutely hate the new start menu and task bar.

To each his own I guess. I think the Windows 7 taskbar is a great improvement. But then I preferred Vista's as well. When I have to work on XP I feel hobbled.

Win XP had a 'Windows Classic' option. This one doesn't. How do I get back to the Windows XP interface?

Right click on the taskbar and use small icons. Then unpin any pinned applications. Then you can choose the "Windows Classic" theme under the Desktop \ Personalize section. It should now look and act a bit more like XP/Vista.

[vik_c]

Thanks Bill. I have already implemented those changes after searching on Google. They make marginal improvements to the appearance. I'm still missing the XP look and feel. What makes it worse is that despite using the compatibility wizard almost nothing works initially, some of the softwares don't work at all. I've had to spend a lot of time installing and reinstalling before getting many utilities to work. These are small software that I use, created by little known companies and most don't work with Windows 7. Asking them to update is pointless. Some haven't issued an update for over five years. Even my ISP's China make USB modem gave me a tough time. I'll take Windows XP over Windows 7 anyday. It's just that the Intel i5 processor I got talked into buying won't run XP. I think these anti-trust guys should haul up Microsoft and Intel for conspiring to get people to waste time and money arm-twisting them into buying newer versions. It's like one day your car's carburetor conks off and you replace it but you're also forced to change all the upholstery and repaint the whole car for it to be functional again. I should really start looking at Linux as an alternative.

[hugh]

I'm very pleased with windows 7 as well so good to know it's not just me. Start up and shutdown times for hybernate and power down are much improved, windows backup (block level incrementals forever, yeah!) is good but very slow, and action centre might be a little annoying but led me to memory checker which helpEd me inditify a single failing DIMM which I think is pretty cool...

[vik_c]

FWIW, I replaced Win 7 with Win XP. Turns out that i5 does run Windows XP. Everything's fine now except I'm stuck with the Windows 7 Home DVD that I paid $90 for.