W7-1: Windows 7 Beta

Killed the crapware with a fresh install

In my previous post I bemoaned the amount of value added software crap that Toshiba installed for me on a new Satellite-Pro U400. Straight out of the box and after a good hours worth of installing Vista Business etc. the machine was taking 4 minutes to boot from cold to a usable desktop.

I have just 2GB of RAM installed at the moment (should have been 4GB but the supplier screwed up) but even so 4 minutes is a long time!

I was going to just do a clean install of Vista Business, but the lack of installation media because it’s an OEM copy meant that would be a pain in the arse. So I thought I’d jump right in and stick Windows 7 Beta on there and see how things work out. I’ll try and keep a decent log of how I get on and any bug reports I file to MS on this blog, filed under the ‘Windows 7‘ tag.

So onto Report 1:

The install went very smoothly, a little over 40 minutes and I was up and running with very little effort at all. The installer ran straight from a double-click in Vista with the large portion of the happening before a re-boot occurred. I can’t remember if this was the case when I fresh installed from XP to Vista but in any event it’s very slick and a +1 for usability.

A nice clean OS installed and ready to go – time to check the boot-up speed. Again from cold it took just 1 minute 20 seconds to arrive at a fully usable desktop! OK, it’s no instant-on OS, but it’s one hell of a lot better than before.