If you haven’t been living under the IT equivalent of a rock the last couple of months it has been hard to miss that Microsoft will be releasing a new Operating System soon. With the public (retail) launch planned for the end of October and the Release to manufacturing (RTM) version predicted to be done somewhere mid July I figured I would give the Windows 7 Release Candidate a spin.
Computer manufactures like Asus receive a final version of Windows 7 long before you and I will be able to buy your copy in the shops. This enables them to upgrade their product line with Windows 7 based computers. As this requires extensive preparation and testing they get their version early so they can have their product ready and in the shops for the official launch date. To ensure that people don’t stop buying new computers, because why would you buy a new computer with Vista if in a month’s time you can buy one with Windows 7, many manufacturers will start upgrade programs around the same time which will allow people that buy a new computer too cheaply (or free) upgrade to the new OS once it’s officially released.
As I want to be able to test both the way the N50 handles in Vista and Windows 7 I opted to perform a clean install instead of upgrading the existing version of Vista on the machine. As most people will never ever get to sit through an actual installation I will not bother you with the details, but installing Windows 7 is not only very easy it’s also very fast. Not all hardware was automatically detected / installed but one trip to Windows Update solved all that. I opted for the 64bit version to take full advantage of the capabilities of the N50 and I wasn’t disappointed. Although the laptop was already fast in Vista it runs even smoother in Windows 7.
Usability wise Windows 7 is certainly a big improvement over Vista and although the new taskbar is a bit hard to get used to at first, once you’ve gotten used to it you’ll never want to go back. Everything just seems to work just that little bit better. It seems Microsoft has listened to Albert Einstein when he said “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” and removed all those “useless” screens to streamline everything from connecting to a wireless network to adding new hardware.
At the moment the fancy alternative function key OSD pictures don’t seem to work as they require some software I haven’t installed yet. The same applies for the facial recognition login but the biometric fingerprint scanner functionality is built into Windows 7 natively so that does work. This means there is no doubt in my mind that once Asus have tweaked the installation for the N50 it will work perfectly when you buy one with Windows 7 pre-installed.
