I’ve moved to Windows 7, I’ll update this post as I get to grips with things!Yesterday I successfully installed a clean copy of Microsoft Windows 7 RC.  Once I’d realised that everything was running on my secondary monitor and not my main monitor (spent a silly time clicking at a blank screen ) everything was alright!  Foolish me…

Here’s a list of pros and cons that I’ve found so far…

Pros

• Looks better than Vista
• Works faster than Vista
• Better use of space on the taskbar
• You can hide all of the taskbar tray icons (by the clock) so it looks less cluttered.  You can choose icons you’d like to have constant access to though
• Funky window scaling, you just drag a window to the edge of the screen to maximize it

Cons

• The new Windows Media Player 12 isn’t recognised by 4OD (I know this isn’t a Windows fault but it’s annoying lol).  Incidentally, when choosing a version of WMP to download on the Microsoft site, it thinks that Windows NT is installed and recommends WMP 6.4 – OLD!
• Occasionally annoying when you’re browsing the applications open on the taskbar.  Hovering on an app makes all the visible windows go transparent which is pain when viewing video full-screen
• M-Audio Delta series sound card drivers (and I suspect most of the M-Audio range) aren’t compatible.  Thankfully the on-board soundcard seems to be performing fine so far!
• Here’s a pretty major one – NO support for Blu-ray/HDDVD (well, not so much the HDDVD as it’s a technically dead format).  Microsoft say that it will apparently cost an extra $30 per copy for consumers to implement.  That would be OK apart from the next point…
• …which is that none of the 3rd party software for playing HD stuff seems to install!  So that’s Cyberlink PowerDVD, Corel WinDVD and Nero Showtime – useless!!  Admitedly I still want the ability to play my collection of HDDVDs so I had to use the older version of PowerDVD.  The install of PowerDVD is completely fine, but it requires a patch from Cyberlink to play the HD discs.  Unfortunately, you get an error message halfway through the install and then PowerDVD is removed from your computer.

Also found that my synthesiser programs and other programs made using Popforge seem to run without any audio glitches.  This is either down to Windows 7 generally being more efficient or that the sound drivers are better supported.  Either way, I’m a happy chappy – those glitches are ANNOYING as anyone who’s had shoddy audio drivers will know…

UPDATE - needed a compromise for the non-existant HD support in Windows 7 so I’ve made a partition for Windows Vista and I’m using that just for the HD discs… Seems a bit too much effort to play the HD stuff, and I could’ve just reverted back to using Vista completely, but as I said in the previous paragraph, some of my programs just seem to run much better in Windows 7!

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