ZD's random thoughts » microsoft http://zdinfo.com technology, life, and more Sun, 23 Jan 2011 03:18:07 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= Test Drive Windows 7 on Dell Latitude E6400 http://zdinfo.com/2009/01/08/test-drive-windows-7-on-dell-latitude-e6400/ http://zdinfo.com/2009/01/08/test-drive-windows-7-on-dell-latitude-e6400/#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:07:40 +0000 zd http://zdinfo.com/?p=3 Continue reading →]]> One of the news for today is Windows 7. The beta version was released to MSDN. People in the business IT world have been arguing whether they should skip Vista and upgrade directly from Windows XP.

Nevertheless, I jumped the boat. DVD ISO download from MSDN subscription is close to 3G, a little bit smaller than Windows Vista . The Guinea pig is my Dell Latitude E6400.

The upgrade process is rather painless. After popping the DVD into the Latitude, I was prompted about a couple of different options – update or clean install. As planned, I chose to upgrade from Vista. It took about 30 minutes to complete the whole process.

The startup screen is a little bit fancier than Vista’s. Performance wise, I feel it is getting better (very subjective though). I like the new taskbar, which feels like Mac OS X. You can “pin” an application and its instances on the taskbar, which eliminated the need for lauch bar from Vista/XP. However, I was disappointed at the desktop composition feature (the new name for Aero). When I enabled it, my screen display literally went corrupted. I am not sure whether it is with my video card (Intel GMA 4500) or not.  Other than that, everything seems to be fine.

What’s your experience?

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