TechKnack

Disclaimer: I never have gotten a chance to experiment with Vista, so I apologize if some of the “new features” I rant about here are actually old features carried over from Vista.

So I liked what I saw when I installed Windows 7 on VirtualBox. And I didn’t get to see Aero, and I kinda missed out on “testing” Vista, and I had an old XP install (which I never use anymore thanks to Kubuntu) taking 12GB of space. Can you really blame me for wanting to dive in?

Yes, I have installed Windows 7 (beta-build 7000) using an ISO I had gotten earlier off the torrents and one of the available activation keys. So I’m presumably set for now through August. (And if anyone’s wondering, the 7000 build ISO from the torrents and the 7000 build ISO from Microsoft have the same MD5 checksum — we checked).

The machine I installed on has a 60GB hard drive (of which Windows 7 has one 12GB partition to work with), 4GB of RAM (of which only 3.25 are available for 32-bit use, which is still nothing to sneeze at), and a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo processor. 12GB was the smallest I could shrink my Windows XP partition after I had decided that I wouldn’t be using it anymore, so that’s the reason I have so little space. The installation took around 20 minutes from DVD boot to usable desktop, though I probably spent a good few hours hunting down program replacements. After the install, I was left with a paltry 1.27 GB to install programs on, or so the Disc Properties dialog told me.

After the install process, I was pleased to find that sound, battery life, and wifi all worked perfectly without any driver frustration caused to me. I was only a little confused when Windows asked about my “Location” when I first connected to a wifi network. Since the main two networks I connect to are secured networks, I simply chose “homegroup” as my location. And I’m still not sure what exactly the benefit of setting “Locations” up would be.

My Synaptic touchpad, however, was a bit trickier. While it did work after the install, the edge-scroll feature wouldn’t work. After some googling, I downloaded Synaptic’s driver for Vista, ran it in Vista compatibility mode, rebooted the computer, and enjoyed edge scrolling. Even after tweaking the settings, though, it’s not quite as sensitive as I’m used to under Linux, but it works well enough.

Another pleasant surprise is that no desktop icons are forced on the user. Normally, IE, My Computer, and usually a few other icons are irremovably (except through registry hacks, of course) placed on the user’s desktop. Here, however, there are NO compulsory icons — they can all be easily disabled through the Personalize section.

One unpleasant surprise I came across was that Windows 7 replaced Grub with its own bootloader. This was easily remedied by reinstalling grub.

Overall, it was a rather painless install process (dare I say easier than linux?). One thing I can say I will miss is the ability to search for and install programs from the linux repositories. There’s just something about “sudo aptitude install”-ing a program that trumps “google, download, install” any day.