Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 03 November 2008 17:52
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
There’s plenty more testing to be done – indeed text at the bottom right hand corner of the screen above to taskbar states that Windows 7 is “for testing purposes only”, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.
I’ve already loaded Windows 7 onto an Asus Eee PC 1000H (Atom 1.6Ghz processor) and Windows 7 runs beautifully there too.
It even seems to give the Via C7-powered HP Mininote 2133 a boost in speed – it just doesn’t feel “slow” like it did with Vista, although it’s still not as snappy as the Asus. That said, Windows 7 and the HP Mininote 2133 seem made for each other far more than Vista ever was, and that’s a very good thing.
Indeed, I’m far more impressed with Windows 7 on the HP than I am with Ubuntu 8.10. While Ubuntu
loaded relatively nicely, I had to complete the installation in “safe
graphics mode” as it would otherwise freeze, and then once it finished
loading, the resolution was 1280x720, not 1280x768!
This
meant that things just didn’t look quite right, and that’s very, very
annoying. Windows 7 on the HP loads first with a “Generic VGA” driver,
and runs in the right resolution.
That said, Ubuntu 8.10 looks like the best version of Ubuntu yet, and a Linux distro that gets all the publicity despite a plethora of other distros. Ever since I got my hands on Windows 7, playing with Ubuntu 8.10 has stopped.
In
the time that I used it, I was impressed – and I’ll certainly continue
testing it. I was able to easily get online, activate a commercial Broadcom driver for my wireless card, surf the web in Firefox, create documents in Open Office 2.4 (Canonical have not included the newer Open Office 3.0 in this version), play media files and more.
If you have an older computer and want to give it a new lease of life, downloading Ubuntu 8.10 is a good idea, it’s free and it works better than ever, which is a welcome change over earlier versions. Ubuntu can also be run through Sun’s free Virtual Box virtualisation software, so if you want to give it a go, both are free and awaiting your download whether you’re running XP or Vista.
Still, just as some people prefer cats over dogs or vice versa,
I personally prefer Windows over Linux – despite all the claims that
Microsoft is the evil monopolist that is trying to DRM the world, its
competitors and worse out of existence – no amount of hysteria from
Linux advocates has changed my opinion on this.
I just wish Ubuntu 8.10 had worked out-of-the-box with a better video driver. Ubuntu
obviously has a “Generic VGA” driver that works, but it needs to work
at more resolutions – hopefully they can do that in future versions.
There is a Via driver available for Ubuntu but it only works in 8.04, so hopefully Via is working on an Ubuntu and Windows 7 driver at the same time.
There is a Via Graphics Vista driver for the Mininote, and while this does work in Windows 7, the Aero
Graphics part of it doesn’t, so Via will need to update that driver for
Windows 7 – at the moment I’m just running it in “Windows 7 basic” mode
which looks the same without the Aero Glass transparency.
The new “superbar” works in Windows 7 basic graphics mode too, you just don’t get the graphical previews, and the taskbar is a silver colour that looked too bright, so I restored the old taskbar instead, although my Tablet PC has the new superbar in all its glory and that won’t be changing back ever!
I couldn’t find a way to change the taskbar colour – I looked everywhere, so hopefully that option is built in to Windows 7 RTM.
Please read on to page 3 for my pre-final thoughts on this new pre-beta!
