Playing with Windows 7

I've been playing with Windows 7 RC1 for a couple of months now and I must say I'm really enjoying it. My self-build system (Pentium E6300@3.2GHz, 2Gb RAM and 320Gb HDD) is certainly powerful enough to drive it along well and the graphics card (nVidia 8600GTS) allows me to play games on it easily such as my present favourite Anno 1404.

It certainly is a 'Vista that works' and works well. It is a pity that mini-applications such as Windows Mail, Photo Gallery and Movie Maker didn't make it over into this version. Thunderbird is a great email client though and it works well on Windows 7. But how does a lower specification system perform with Windows 7?

So, I resurrected an old eMachine box based on an AMD Athlon X2 4000+ CPU at 2.1GHz with a new AsRock AM2+ motherboard but used the existing 1Gb memory and 160Gb hard disk drive. Software installation went well without any problems though the integrated VIA sound chip needed the Vista drivers from the motherboard's support CD-ROM. I also loaded the overclock utility and used that to bring the CPU to 2.3GHz.

After downloading Kaspersky's AntiVirus for Windows 7 trial there was about 68% of the memory used. Not much left over for applications to run with. A bit of trimming required. So I set the user interface style from the default Aero to Windows 7 Basic and then stopped Windows Defender. I also grabbed an extra 96Mb from the integrated video using the BIOS setup. Memory used is now 30%. Good enough for word processing, web surfing and email etc. Just to push it a bit, I installed the Anno 1404 game demo. It worked well if a bit slow on reduced details settings on the Geforce 7025 integrated graphics.

Now if only I could get rid of the faint tobacco smell from the previous owner it would be fine!