Where have you been?…I blame Windows 7
I recently broke my own blog admonition about Windows 7 and virtual environments. In my defense, I came across a laptop drive in my home office that worked in my Dell D620. That’s a sign right? You’re just meant to install it… :)
So I gave it a whirl fully expecting to either blue screen my laptop (at best) or end up with scorch marks in the carpet and a bad limp. I was thinking back to the beta of Vista that had all sorts of little maddening quirks.
I think I was struck most by just how uneventful the whole installation process was. The look and feel was pretty Vista like with some nice differences from my current 64-bit Vista install. I really liked the paired down feel with the removal of duplicated items like Mail and Photo Gallery (which can be replaced by installing Windows Live versions).
The largest effort in setup was getting the “superbar” or taskbar to show up like the demos seen at PDC. If you are interested Rafael has the easy steps to make that happen for you.
Knowing I was dealing with a spare drive I got a bit of a daredevil streak going. I tried installing the drivers for my broadband modem. I installed Office, I set up connection to my company’s Exchange server and started dragging email over. I then kicked off the Windows Live installer and fired up IE. With all this activity going on I still never saw higher than 1.3 gigs of memory utilization. Sweet. I continued to beat on the OS just waiting for the “well there you go…” moment where the beta rolled over. Never happened.
The only things that really never worked were installing Flash (I never pay attention to how many sites use flash until I’m on a machine without it) and using Live Mesh. While I can’t truly say Live Mesh didn’t work it did decide to change my color scheme at random intervals. Perhaps this is just a user interface “feature” I’m just not getting. I am a data guy after all. ;)
I even went so far as to use this OS for a week at my current client. There were no crashes, no problems. I think Microsoft really has a winner with Windows 7.
So hopefully this will explain a bit of where I’ve been in regards to this blog. Focus will be returning to SQL Server after this R&D boondoggle, just need to make a trip to Seattle first.