Thoughts on Windows 7:

After having had a half-day or so of testing the Windows 7 operating system (available for pre-order today, by the way), I'm still fairly impressed. My observations so far:

• No flash support out of the box. It's certainly no big deal to go get a flash player and install it, but I don't understand what it is with operating systems not offering full media/internet support from step one. With linux, it was always the issue of free/open software, which is bloody stupid and always has been. If you want to live in a free/open license world, you might as well go live in a cave instead of trying to toe an imaginary non-proprietary line out in Platonic heaven. Me? I use open source when it works because it's often better and less hassle. But you know what? When it doesn't work or isn't available, I'll take my flash plugin. This one might not be the fault of Windows 7 because this isn't an official release. I don't know.


• Warning! When moving from linux to Windows, I backed up my shit on an external drive formatted to ext3. Windows DOES NOT LIKE THIS. In fact, I can't even access my drive at this point. And, to reiterate, ALL MY SHIT IS ON IT. If you're gonna do this, use fat32 and you won't have problems. This is obviously my own dumb-ass fault.


• How I'm solving the previous problem, however, is thorugh the wonders of Sun Microsystems. I'm going to set up a virtual machine with linux running through my Windows operating system. How, you ask? Virtualbox. When Alan Turing came up with the notion of a universal machine, he wasn't talking about this. But he should've been.


• When I install an OS, there are a small handful of programs I need. One of them is Matlab. I've had problems with installing it on my 64 bit machine before, because it isn't supported. I seem to have big problems installing it in Windows 7, due to an installer exception that I haven't investigated yet. So, FAIL on this one. I actually don't know whether to blame Matlab or Windows on this one, but I'm leaning towards Matlab just because I've had so many damned problems with it in the past.


• I haven't used Internet Explorer in YEARS. It comes (obviously) with Windows 7, so I've been trying it out. Not much to say on this one, except that there seems to be a serious lag when you open up a new tab. Not sure why. Somewhat interestingly, there is an option in IE that lets you surf "privately," where I guess the browser collects no information about your activities, etc. Is that nice to have? Maybe. I tried it out, but it doesn't really do much of anything for me. I'm more of a Firefox guy, and I always set it to pretty much do this as soon as I install it. No remembering passwords, no cookie hoarding, clear all my data upon closing, etc. That's how it should be, because that's what bookmarks are for, and a remembered password isn't really a password, now is it?


• A definite plus of a non-official version of Windows seems to be how slim it is. There's none of the stupid shit (read: useless programs) you normally get when you install Windows. That saves the day after that's usually spent cleaning it out. Definite plus, here. Will it be that way on the official release in October? Almost certainly not, but who knows?

Stay tooned.