When I last wrote about my Windows 7 adventures last weekend, my system was in a mostly usable state but with several big question marks hanging over it.

1) I had no sound, since I could not convince my X-Fi sound card to work with Win7.
2) My system was initially crashing, something I’d been experiencing for a couple of months in Vista as well.

I’m happy to report that issue 1 is now resolved; it was a relatively simple matter to fix. I simply installed the Windows Vista X-Fi drivers using compatibility mode, and much to my surprise, they worked fine; I can look forward to some testing of various games over the weekend. (My hit list of choice: Half-Life 2 and it’s various episodes, Portal, and Fallout 3. I’d try The Sims 2 as well, but there aren’t enough hours in the weekend.)

As far as issue 2 goes, the system has been rock solid since I blasted years’ worth of dust out of the fans. Funny how that works, huh? I can’t say for sure yet that it’s fixed. The machine did run for a good 2 weeks straight over the holidays under Vista. But at this point, I’m pretty confident in saying Windows 7 is very stable and my machine is definitely liking things as they stand. Stay tuned for my post-gaming report sometime early in the week.

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Usability land isn’t all rosey good news, though. The first program I tried to get set up was Google Chrome, my favorite browser. It turns out it has known compatibility issues though, and while technically it will run, it can’t render pages, making it kind of useless. So I installed my second choice, Firefox 3. That one, I’m happy to report, does run perfectly well right away.

Windows 7 has a lot of new features, and I won’t go into them all here because, well, because Microsoft isn’t paying me for this. That, and I haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s changed in this thing. The new task bar is both good and bad. I like how you can pin applications to it, similar to the way MacOS works. I like the preview windows; they’ve improved over Vista’s previews and now act as a selection mechanism for apps that have more than one window open. I don’t, however, like the fact that the quick launch icons are gone now. I can understand why, since you can pin shortcuts to the bar, but as a creature of habit, it’s going to take me some time to get used to that change.

I’ve had some issues with audio as well. At the time I write this, my Creative X-Fi sound card isn’t supported, so I won’t get to test out Fallout in the immediate future. It’s a good thing the games I’m actively playing right now are console games; Animal Crossing: City Folk on the Wii and Persona 3 FES on the PS2 are going to be getting most of my gaming attention for a while, I think.

The Win7 interface has been cleaned up a lot from what we got in Vista, and for the better as near as I can see. I haven’t dug too deeply into things like changing network configurations and other nitty-gritty details yet, but I was up and online with it in no time, and those things I have tried to configure have been pretty easy to get to. My adventures with Windows 7 are just beginning, and I’m sure I’ll have more stories to tell, both good and bad, in the coming days and weeks.

For now, thank you for putting up with my long-windedness!

Having done more than my fair share of installs with previous versions of Windows, I expected it to take a lot longer. Windows 7 first impressed me by identifying my TV and configuring it as a secondary display device before it had even finished installing itself. Every previous version of Windows I’ve used has had to be told there was another monitor attached, and this one picked up a TV. I like that quite a bit; it reminds me a bit of BeOS, an alternative operating system I used to use years ago.

All in all, I would say the install took maybe half an hour. Possibly up to 40 minutes, but no more than that. That, of course, is before you get to all the post-install work that needs to be done on a clean computer – installing apps, setting it up the way you want it, etc. I’ll begin to get into that in part 3.

Windows Vista has been crashing a lot on me lately. Two years with barely a hiccup and suddenly it’s very difficult to play Fallout 3 for more than maybe an hour or so without the computer locking hard on me.

I know, many people will be thinking, “What, Vista, crashing? Say it ain’t so!” But it’s true, it was extremely stable for me for years. Others have had their bad experiences, I had my good one, at least until recently.

This is where Windows 7 comes in. Just yesterday, Microsoft released the public beta of Windows 7. I’ve always been prone to living on the bleeding edge, and even beta versions of Windows aren’t too bloody for me. I put it on a blank DVD this morning and went to work installing it.