Well I got 32-bit Windows 7 installed. Not the 64 bit I wanted but Windows is Windows. And that's really my impression. Windows 7 with a library of third party software is just a barren OS. Sure you get Windows Media Center Player whatever. You get Paint. Wordpad. A few games and some essential utilities.
Basically there is nothing here to tempt me away from Ubuntu. Which has a whole library of quality software available to it from the Applications > Add/Remove menu option. The only thing resembling a free programming language was the power shell. Which doesn't really qualify as a development environment. It's a good step to at least include a programming language. Remember Steve Ballmers "... developers, developers, deveoplers ..."?
Basically there really isn't much to look at. Which is sometimes good. Everybody hates pre-installed trial ware. But trial ware isn't what I'm looking for. I'm not even looking for pre-installed software. I'm looking for a Linux style repository of usful stuff. Something to get me started and up and running. And there's really nothing but Paint and Wordpad. Is this the WOW factor? WOW there's nothing here!?! Maybe I've been using Ubuntu too long and I'm being unfair?
I said I'd be looking closely at the taskbar. I did. It didn't do anything special except tell me to find anti-virus software on-line. After it told me it couldn't find a network connection. For some reason it kept wanting to configure a wireless connection. It also had no driver for the VirtualBox OSE virtual network adapter. So no internet. Which I actually didn't mind when I saw the state of the IE8 interface. Even though there wasn't much to it, it still managed to look cluttered.
The installation process it's self felt like it took forever. But I think it was actually about half an hour. There were about two or three reboots. Don't know why Windows still needs to reboot during installation. But it does.
Note to Microsoft: Sort your damned OS installation routine!!!
After each reboot there was an annoying blank screen which will have any non-technical user bricking it and thinking somethings wrong. The reality is nothing is wrong. Windows 7 just arrogantly refuses to tell you what it's doing. Not a good sign me thinks.
After the installation is all completed you finally get to the desktop after some more labourious desktop configuration. Why doesn't it do that at install time? Anyway in my VM Windows defaulted to 800x600. But this was easily switched to 1024x768. I could have gone higher but decided that was enough for testing. Interestingly at one point Windows told me I had less than 64MB of video memory. But when reconfiguring my desktop it told me I had 128MB of video memory. Clearly a bug to be fixed. But I have no internet in Windows. How do I report it? DOH!
Screen shots will be posted shortly.
For the record. I still don't understand why the 32-bit version works and the 64-bit version doesn't. And the basic Vista theme sucks.
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