Windows 7 RC1 64bit on my Dell D630

As much as love tolerate Vista on my small-enough-sturdy Dell D630, it is time for something new. I make my living writing software, so some early testing is in order. We looked at the beta using VMWare, but now it is time to start using it on a real machine. I'm installing the 64-bit version. Living on the edge and all. Mostly because I want to see what will break. We still have a legacy app written in a Windows 98-era development tool. That hurts all kinds of bad, but it has to keep working nonetheless. I figure if I can get it to work on Windows 7-x64, the 32bit version is not going to be an issue.

We dodged the issue with early vista releases. Our software didn't even properly run on Vista until about 6 months after it came out. I expect it to be somewhat different with Windows 7, so we need to be here earlier than our customers.

In summary

The good:

• The windows explorer is a standard item on the task bar.
• Our software works, even the really old legacy stuff.
• The new way of switching between multiple copies of the same application is cool (see picture).
• All my hardware was correctly detected.
• Application switching with alt-tab is fast and the desktop is one of the options.
• The taskbar is much, much improved.
  

Selecting one of the three running Windows Explorer windows:

Notice the three shadows on the icon (click for larger version)

The bad:

• The stupid 'start navigation' sound is still here
• The nice fish background will be just as cheesy in a couple of days
  
• New windows explorer doesn't expand the folders in the left navigation pane by default.
• Still can't mount ISO disk images natively. To install Visual Studio 2008 and MSDN, I had to download SlySoft's VirtualCloneDrive (freeware). 

First impression... I think I like it.



Windows 7 Installation

My D630 sports 4GB and 2.4Ghz Core2 Duo, the nVidia NVS 135M with 14.1" 1440x900 screen and 160GB disk and the Dell 1395 Wireless card. The D630 is the same as the Dell D830, just smaller.

The first "problem" I ran into is you cannot upgrade from Vista-32bit to Windows 7-x64. Too bad, but I can think of several very good reasons for this, so no matter. The downside is I had to backup all my downloads too, because I had no idea the installer wasn't going to wipe my hard drive. It just adds Windows 7 the drive. This is actually a very nice thing: All your old stuff will be moved into Windows.old, including your old program files and users folders. They won't be there in a bootable way, although I'm sure you can use a system Vista recovery disk to move everything back and make it boot again. I won't be trying that today, though.

A user password is still only a 'recommended' thing, and then the password hint becomes required. I suggest you do not actually type a hint there. Not on a laptop anyway. It would have been much better if the password was at least strongly recommended for laptop class machines, and you get a visual feedback of how good your password is.

Windows starts at the wrong screen resolution, 1024x768 with a standard VGA driver. However, it does correctly detect the video driver and if you allow windows to auto-auto update, it will download the nVidia NVS driver and after reboot, the screen is fine. No manual intervention required.

A bit of performance

So I want some pointless numbers. They don't really mean anything much, but still. Here they are.

Out of the box, nothing else installed, Windows 7 Rates my D630 "Windows Experience Index" a 3,9:

• Processor (Calculations per second): 6,0
• Memory (operations per second): 6,0
• Graphics (Desktop performance for Windows Aero): 3,9
• Gaming Graphics (3D business and gaming graphics performance): 5,1
• Primary hard disk (disk data transfer rate): 5,4

I'm not too worried by the 3,9. I use this laptop for software development, which is far more affected by the first two and the last numbers. Dragging a window is somewhat sluggish, though.

The GeekBench (32-bit) score is 2784. I seem to recall a similar score for Vista, and the results browser at primate labs has very similar results for D630/830 laptops with XP and Vista. That tells me Windows 7 isn't hurting raw performance. I'm not all that interested in 64-bit performance, I don't have many 64-bit apps yet.

How the battery performs... I don't know yet.

Our Own Software

My day job is writing software. Most users will not notice this, but there are some fairly annoying changes with each major release of windows. Registry keys get moved around, directories renamed, windows calls behave somewhat differently. It is needed to make progress and Microsoft generally gets a lot of flak for changing things and then breaking old software. I don't mind so much, as long as it is for the better. However, Windows 7 reeks of Vista at first glance. Our application uses an .ini file (don't ask) which used to live in the c:\windows system directory. Windows 7 puts it in C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Windows just like Vista does.

Windows 7 seems to break with this tradition. There seem to be numerous additions, sure, but things haven't moved. Or not too much.

All I can say is it just works for our applications. If you have written your software for multi-user use on Vista and Windows Server 2003/2008 and/or terminal services it seems you're okay. Ours is business software, we throw lots of windows and controls on the screen, print a lot, run some background tasks, grab things from the registry, with tons of disk reads and writes, etc. Both the new and the old generation are most happy, a quick scan, covering maybe 80 to 90% of critical code just worked.

There will be issues, no doubt, but nothing major it seems.

Windows Bits

I love my command prompt, but for file system management a good explorer is really important. Windows 7 finally puts this very important tool where it belongs: as a default application on the start bar. What saddens me is some new dumbing down of the left hand "navigation pane". By default, it is not set to "show all folders" and will not "automatically expand to current folder". This makes using folders within folders with the default settings a horrible experience. It also doesn't say what "show all folders" actually means. Sigh... I know there are tons of alternative file managers out there, but I actually move from computer to computer quite a bit. A number of other behaviours seem to have changed as well. I actively hated the Vista Explorer, time will tell if this one is better.

My favorite registry key, HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders\ now not only sports the "!Do not use this registry key" entry, but also a number of GUID named entries to the newest members of the flock. These are doubtless meant to make you use the SHGetFolderPath functions. Too bad. The new entries include Downloads, Libraries, Contacts, Saved Games and some others. Useful stuff. The nasty Run and RunOnce are still there. Yuck. Those need to be replaced by something a lot more transparent.

Installing the development environments

This is where I make my living. We work with Windev 12 which we love to hate. Perfect for some things, good for a lot of things and not so much for a number of others. Just like all the other tools, really. This one makes building databased backed desktop applications so easy, it is almost a crime to charge money for them - we still do, though. Windev works just fine. No real surprises there. In fact, the HASP USB hardware key driver is part of windows now, or gets downloaded in the background. It was recognised without the need for a disk or installer, like with Vista and earlier.

Visual Studio 2008 setup was a bit more work. First of all, I don't like wasting perfectly good plastic on ISO images that get used two or three times in our organisation. Windows 7 still does not allow you to mount ISO images. You need to download a virtual drive tool like SlySoft's VirtualCloneDrive. Sad, really. This is 2009, Apple and all Unix flavors have had them for ages and ages. Microsoft even had a free tool which used to work with Windows XP. Mounting filesystems is core-operating system work, implement it already!

During the install, Windows warned that SQLServer 2005 Express edition has issues and needs at least SP3. The missed chance there was, of course, if you're including an incompatibility database in your OS, you might as well provide a website link. I then proceeded to download the SQL Server Service Pack 3, 350MB of it. Which was a mistake, I needed to download the SQL Server Express Edition SP3 installer instead. No big deal, but it takes time. The MSDN library was no trouble at all.

Next I'll have to play with the laptop. Video. Audio. Maybe a game.