Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Windows 7 x64

So I was at my friends house and decided to blow away my Ubuntu partition and install Windows 7. Shocking, I know.. what prompted my decision to give Ubuntu the boot? Well, the unfortunate issue was that I was not able to sleep or hibernate my laptop. Or, more accurately, I was able to sleep or hibernate... I was just unable to restore my computer from sleep or hibernation, I was forced to reboot my computer every single time. As much as I love Ubuntu, this was not a situation I could handle. I was unable to resolve the issue, so decided to go Windows 7.

As for x64... I chose that because that is what was available. I may switch to 32 bit in the future, as that works out better for me. For example, neither of my x64 machines are able to access TS Webaccess for remote apps from Server 2008... because you need to have service pack 3 installed. Service Pack 3 is.. you guessed it... only available for 32 bit versions of Windows. Which is a slight disappointment, but you can always publish the remote apps to a share and access them that way, which works out rather well.

My overall impression of Windows 7 is a good one. Just enough eye candy to make it look nice, yet still responds quite snappily. One of the new features I noticed that I hadn't heard about (not that I've really done a lot of research into Windows 7 features) is homegroup. Essentially, it's "My Shared documents" except that it makes it very easy to set up... cool.. but not a feature I would ever use considering I'm a network security major. Now here's where my idea comes in.. (Microsoft, I hope you are listening) create a nice button called "Customize my Windows Installation" which will allow you strip out everything you don't need in your Windows installation. If you allowed someone to knock some money off the price if they removed that feature... that would be awesome.

Other than that, I wasn't blown away by Windows 7, but I also wasn't pissed or bored about it either. I do miss my Ubuntu... but until I can safely put my laptop to sleep.. it will remain off my laptop.