Windows 7 RTM

Well I got my copy of Windows 7 RTM yesterday and I installed it during the evening. The experience was really good.I installed 64-bit Ultimate after toying between Ultimate and Enterprise, but I wanted to be able to play with Media Center. Including the time to install a Dell BIOS update the whole process took […]

Well I got my copy of Windows 7 RTM yesterday and I installed it during the evening.

The experience was really good.
I installed 64-bit Ultimate after toying between Ultimate and Enterprise, but I wanted to be able to play with Media Center.

Including the time to install a Dell BIOS update the whole process took less than an hour from a DVD – More like 45mins.

One nice touch for me was that as part of the process it was able to install the driver for my wireless network card automatically and at the end of setup as part of the OOBE I was asked what network I wanted to join – The network I wanted wasn’t actually listed but that’s semantics!

Compared with my previous installation of Build 7100 it’s really flying. I’m going to assume that this is because it’s a clean new installation and not an upgrade from Vista, however it’s still excellent.

Office 2010 is working nicely is 64-bit also, and courtesy of my 20Mb inter-pipe I was able to get my POP and Exchange mailbox all synchronized in less than 30mins which is pretty impressive for a circa 750MB mailbox (I try to keep it lean).

Over an hour or so this morning I’ve managed to get the majority of my LOB and personal applications installed and everything is working great so far. The only exception to this is a printer driver for 64-bit was not installed on our print server, but a quite Remote Desktop and a link to xerox.com fixed that, and thank you to the Windows 7 feature , my default printer automatically gets changed according to my network location.

All said, there are still two things bugging me thus far.

1. The wallpaper selection in Windows 7 RTM is quite limited. Some of the wallpapers from Build 7000, 7048 and 7068 are excellent and I’m not sure why Microsoft haven’t included them but it’s a shame. Fortunately, the people over at RedmondPie (link) have archives of all of the wallpaper sets for download.
2. VMware updated their Virtual Infrastructure Client in ESX 4 to become vSphere client, however this is still not working in Windows 7 after much commotion on the VMware forums about it, but now that RTM is available hopefully this will be patched up soon.
3. I’ve still yet to experience a USB / FireWire etc device that is making the use of Device Stage which is a shame. It looks great in all the demo shots etc so I’d like to see products get updated to include the support for this.