Santa Bill left us a going away present.
Windows 7 Ultimate, Beta 1, Build 7000, was leaked out to the net on Christmas. To show my appreciation to Bill for all he’s done to my computing experience, I decided to volunteer my services to testing this latest Microsoft operating system. Yesterday, I loaded in a freshly baked DVD, crossed my fingers and rebooted the hcg laptop.
On this laptop, I have 10GB set aside for testing out Linux distributions. When Windows 7 setup booted up, I told it to install into this partition, then held my breath. Just 3 system reboots and 30 minutes later, I was greeted with the Windows 7 logon, made a note to change the flower.
It was 7:45 in the evening when I first saw the fish wallpapered desktop. At around 11:30, the system reset on me, causing me to look up. Yes, I had turned into a kid, exploring this and that, what does this do? For 4 hours, this new operating system held my undivided attention, I liked what I saw.
Today, after taking care of business on the Windows XP side, I booted into Windows 7 to play. I felt the urge to tweak some more, get it just right, squeeze it here and there. A few hours more, and I came upon the Windows Experience Index, it hadn’t been calculated. I shut down all running apps, and while assessing the system, things started to happen.
WEI testing began to realize the capabilities of my components, and when Aero came alive, the desktop took on a whole different perspective. The laptop got a WEI base score of 2.0, not bad for a 3 year old laptop. The hard disk-2.0 and graphics-2.0 were the low subscores, with the processor-4.1, memory-4.2 and gaming graphics-3.2 doing just fine.
As I write this in Textpattern, I keep hitting save as draft just in case there’s that errant system reset. It happened again this morning, but since running the WEI test, the system has been solid. I’m proud to send 2 memory dumps Redmond’s way, it’s the least I could do.
Hot as a fever, rattling bones
I could just taste it, taste it
If it’s not forever, if it’s just tonight
Oh, it’s still the greatest, the greatest, the greatest