Windows 7 Experience Index

My Windows 7 Experience Index is very interesting this time. (I guess this doesn’t count as a benchmark…)

Compared to my Vista WEI:

• My CPU is now alot higher, maybe it detects some of the new features in my Core2Duo that Vista didn’t for some reason.
• My RAM has a lower score now, despite the fact that that:

1. I have the same amount of memory and:
2. W7 is supposed to be less memory hungry than Vista is even

• Graphics for Aero: well that’s go up two points, maybe due to the WDDM 1.1 being more efficient on 7 now.
• Gaming graphics has stayed the same, which is good I suppose.
• The hard disk! What has happened there?! 3.0! I’m guessing that 7 doesn’t have proper drivers for the SATA hard drive … or it’s just confused. I might look into it, though I don’t notice anything using the system….

UPDATE: According to this forum page the hdd score is to do with Write Caching and how the score is calculated in 7.  Microsoft does not recommend changing it just for the WEI score so I’ll just assume that if I did, it would be about the same as Vista.

Nice install size.

Windows 7 base install is so tiny! That was as soon as I installed, didn’t even have Live Essentials on yet.  So I was probably missing some things like the .Net Runtime Environment etc. but even less than 9GB is pretty good.  It seems they actually did a decent job keeping the size down this time.

and the point is…

So, with the default taskbar on Windows 7, two previews are linked with the icon on the taskbar.  Why would I want to be able to see a preview of my own display picture and status?  Ok, I suppose it could come in handy…

But I think the real reason is because the default behaviour is a strange combination of the taskbar and system tray (notification area) from Vista and prior.  Because if I close the main window, normally it would be hidden to the tray area (in Vista or XP say), however here, the one (grouped) icon represents both the taskbar icon and the tray icon.

Setting the compatibility options on the Messenger executable to Vista, sets the icon to the tray area like previously, and the previous behaviour is returned (i.e. no taskbar icon if you hide the window to the tray area)

Windows 7: The First Blog

Ok so, Microsoft released Windows 7 Beta to the world, I thought, yeah that could be fun... But I didn't think I'd really be able to download it within the 2.5m limit. But then, they lifted the limit for two weeks, so I thought, hey cool, why not... (No quotes, because I probably didn't actually think that.)

Over the weekend I proceeded to download it. Getting there was easy enough: microsoft site / windows7, Download the Beta, or something like that. Login, give them information, and get the fancy downloading plug in. Click on the link and up comes a Java applet (remember those?) to pause and resume. I thought it was nice that you could use Firefox or other non IE browser, maybe MS is getting better at that? But it's Akami hosting so who knows. (They have an ActiveX plug in for IE of course). So I start downloading it at 8:10 pm, should be finished by about 10am the next morning, wake up around 8am - oh no it broke at 78%! So now I'm trying again in ActiveX version...

The Install

Apologies for these first two, I was too close to the screen. So after about 3 attempts to boot of DVD (due to ASUS's drive selection method), I came to this screen. Actually I got a "press any key to boot from DVD" message, which was nice; and a "loading files for Setup" screen, which was.. well, obviously necessary.

Then it sat there for five minutes, with no drive activity. (Maybe my disc was weird from the lame ISO burner I got.) Finally I got this next screen:

Ohh, that's pretty! Except again, it took 10 more minutes to get to the following screen:

Sigh: what is up with my disc? I really hope it's not the installer!

Finally the Setup appears to run at a normal speed.

The EULA. And now they have switched to the Vista/Windows 7 style windows. Not sure why they didn't just use the new style in the first screens, but anyway....

Selecting the drive or partition was pretty easy, and nothing broke for me. (Windows Vista still works perfectly fine)

One restart later and it's pretty much finished. At some stage they found some basic drivers for my graphics card and ran at the native resolution. That was clever. Even when I got in W7 I had Aero enabled without installing the nVidia drivers. Nice touch. (Obviously need the nVidia drivers for games though.)

I now have Windows Live Essentials 2009 installed on Windows 7 so I'll be blogging about it further from there. Over time I'll be installing more software on W7, I'll write anything interesting - I'll try to post often from there as I discover it.