COMMENT
It soon became apparent I had no biometric fingerprint capability, no touchscreen and no wireless WAN. This was not a massive surprise to me - installing previous versions of Windows 7 on my two Lenovo machines left me with the firm impression that Lenovo has not had its finger on the pulse.
Whereas other analysts I have spoken to with HP or other tablet devices have found it easy to install Windows 7, my experience with Lenovo has been horrendous. Its main site has no Windows 7 drivers on it. If you manage to find the site where the Windows 7 drivers are being dribbled out, it offers no explanation of what's really needed and what's not.
On Lenovo's support forum, its engineers stated they did not see why Lenovo should be issuing drivers for an unreleased operating system, but that full support would be available when the final version of Windows 7 was released.
I've got news for you guys: Windows 7 is here for much of the world! Yet your website still only has Vista drivers and your Windows 7 beta drivers don't work in many cases.
Now, Microsoft cannot escape all the blame here. If it can provide out of the box support for the majority of other tablets, a bit of pressure on Lenovo would surely have been productive.
Despite the hiccups I now have a fully working Windows 7 desktop machine, and a laptop with no biometric security and no WWAN capability.
So what's my view of Windows 7?
It's fast. It's got the looks.
Windows 7 should be capable of running the vast majority of Windows-based applications that a business could want to run. It has a much better security model than Windows XP, which is the platform that most businesses are still dependent on. It isn't the resource hog that Vista was, and so can run on far more existing machines than Vista can.
However, there do seem to be a few problems. Explorer is somewhat fragile, and the dreaded 'Explorer has stopped responding' message appears on both machines with alarming frequency. Thankfully it does rescue itself successfully on the whole.
Windows 7 Media Centre (Image credit: Clive Longbottom)
IE8 renders pages differently to Firefox or Chrome, and the compatibility mode will not be intuitive to the average user. For those who have stumped up the dosh for Vista Ultimate, they'll find that DreamScene is no longer (although there are hacks on the internet to get it to work again).
Now onto the bigger question here: will Windows 7 be Microsoft's saviour?...
Comments
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1. Clive Longbottom
An update on the experience: Finally managed to get fingerprint recog working on the Tablet: needed to get the drivers and software from Authentec's site, and disable the Lenovo attempts. On the WWAN connectivity, had to downgrade from Lenovo's Windows 7 driver to its Vista driver, and it worked.
An install on an old ThinkPad (non-Tablet) took around 30 minutes overwriting previous disk partitions and ssemed to go very smoothly.
Still experimenting to find what works and what doesn't, but generally happy with the overall performance, look and feel.
2. anonymous
Didn't you think of just trying the Vista drivers? Windows 7 is just a point release on Vista after all.
3. Damian Quinn
Personally, I like Vista. I had it for a year or more now, and I've had no problems with it. I can't see all the fuss with it. Am I the only one who likes Vista? But still, I'm going to have a look at Windows 7 and see what its all about.
4. Graham Thomas
What a useless bit of writing, what does it tell us, err that there are probably driver issues with wierd hardware at the moment, so what if your biometrics dont work they will I am sure when it ships.
The idea isnt to put it on a laptop and expect to see it work with everybit of strange hardware, thats for the manufacturers to sort out.
Yes windows 7 is very good there are a few bugs i have seen nothing major,
It is just like vista V2 except for some strange reason it does seem to run much smother,
2 hours for an upgrade is shocking. my 16 year old sone took less tha 30 mins for the whole thing. every single driver including the tv tuner perfect.
"Hands on with windows 7 how it worked for me" sounds like a date not a review. she was so well behaved on my pc, but when it came to my laptop she wasnt as sweet. LOL :)
keep up the good work.
5. Chris Parsons
I found Vista fine, too. Ok, you need a lot of memory, but that's cheap. I found it, on the whole, rock solid and unobtrusive. I have moved to Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise, it seems fine...a few things don't work, but nearly everything is just fine. It sure is pretty!