Some might call it fool hardy to install an alpha version of an operating system on your Media Center, but after seeing Charlie Owen’s beautiful screenshots, I had no choice.
True, the upgrades might be considered minor, if mostly cosmetic, but the interface, look, and feel of the software continues to improve and mature and that is its biggest selling point to me, right after its feature set.
I spent many hours setting everything up, and everything isn’t perfect yet. At this point, I’m debating whether I should continue wrestling with the things that aren’t working, or admit that this is not finished software and go back to Vista. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
For an alpha operating system, Windows 7 is remarkably quick and stable. It has only rebooted spontaneously once, and that was at some unknown point between the first reboot and when I logged in for the first time. I haven’t actually witnessed it happen.
By contrast, Vista alpha was so unusable I barely made it past the login screen and explorer endlessly died and restarted itself!
Instead of describing what other people have described and posting screenshots you can find anywhere else, I’m just going to list the things I like and the things I don’t like (or are broken at this point).
Things that work…
- While the interface is still lacking coming enhancements like the “superbar”, the improvements this release contains are still…improvements.
- The cosmetic changes are good…I like them. They seem to be steering towards minor changes that make the whole experience “feel” better. Which, like it or not, is a big part of how people perceive an operating system.
- Usability wise, things are continuing to improve. They have reduced the number of steps to some common tasks, and, more importantly they have made finding some screens easier. (But not all)
- The color scheme of Windows 7 seems to be centered around blue…which is good. I like blue.
- Media center looks gorgeous (if I hadn’t mentioned it). The tweaked main menu is great. The music wall is a nice touch. The new “Play Pictures” slide show is mesmerizing.
- Gadgets have been moved off of the sidebar and onto the desktop. Good call.
Things that don’t..
- The interface is still too complicated. Grouping things by task in the control panel is good…but it shouldn’t take me 10 minutes to find the “Network Connections” screen. Each release of Windows seems to bury this one further and further under a maze of “helpful” task oriented lists that make me want to kill a small animal. Make easy things easy to find, and put the not-so-easy tasks in a list for people who have more technical skills than John McCain!
- Adding items to the menu strips in Media Center doesn’t seem to work right now. I tried many ways of doing this and it just doesn’t seem to work like it used to.
- Windows Media Player 12 doesn’t work with Netflix Watch Now.
- nVidia nForce drivers (and all other drivers I found) for my onboard network card (ASUS M2NPV-VM) fail. The adapter resets endlessly. I had to pull out my USB wireless dongle to get consistent Internet acesss.
- Internet Explorer, Windows Media Center, etc hang occasionally.
- Gadgets are still mostly distracting and almost completely useless.
I had to run a couple of other things in compatibility mode to get them working properly, but other than that…no major issues.
All of these things are minor…except for the first item (and the last?), I’m confident all of them will be fixed by release. (Christmas 2009???)
The question for me is: shall I continue to give Microsoft feedback and suffer through the lack of Netflix and slightly reduced stability? Shall I try to hack it to make it do what I want? (at the risk of catastrophically breaking it) Or shall I go back to Vista and wait expectantly for more stable releases in the future?
I have no idea at the moment.
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