Windows 7: First Impressions

Today I tried the latest Windows 7 beta on my old Athlon XP 3000+ (1GB RAM) desktop, and I have to say it was a very pleasant experience. I hated Vista so much and never did anything more than install and evaluate it for a while; but Windows 7 was much much better.

Installation was quick (~25 mins), and the system was up and running in less than 45 mins. The OS felt very responsive and fast and it was taking only about 500mb of my RAM which was pretty good.. Boot speed, login speed and shutdown speeds were all good. IE 8 beta felt very slugish compared to Chrome and Firefox, but everything else was nice and fast.

However I did have several issue with it. My XP partition was missing in Windows Explorer, but got it sorted soon. My SoundMAX onboard sound is still not working. I'm still struggling to get the disk shared so that I can access it from my Ubuntu laptop, but I think I'll figure that soon too.

In conclusion, MS seem to have nailed it this time. They have managed to make a good looking, but (relatively) light weight OS with good performance, that will appeal to a lot of people.

Windows 7: How to edit the boot menu

There's no built in tool in Windows 7 to change the boot menu. However if you need to change the default boot OS to be XP instead of windows 7 or you need to change that ugly "Earlier operating system" line to a nice "Windows XP", or any other boot menu related task, you can use a small free tool called EasyBCD.

IMPORTANT:
If you need to rename the "Earlier.." to "Windows XP" or something, first make sure the XP partition is visible in Windows Explorer. If not follow the instructions in How to add the missing XP partition, and then do any changes.
(When I installed Windows 7, I had my XP in the boot menu but it was not visible in Windows Explorer; using EasyBCD then made my XP not bootable. Adding the partition to exporer and then running EasyBCD fixed the issue).

Windows 7: How to add back the missing XP partition

If you find that your Windows XP partition is not shown in Windows 7 (beta), you can add it as follows:
* search for "computer management" in the program search box and launch it.
(or via Control Panel> Administrative Tools> Computer Management)
* under Storage> Disk Management you should be able to see the missing XP partition (without a drive letter)
* now right click> "Change Drive Letter and Paths", and specify a drive letter.

now you should be able to see the XP partition in Windows Explorer.