Okay, I’m being overly dramatic in that headline. The RC isn’t a giant step backward or anything – but it always wasn’t (at least on my Dell XPS) quite as trouble-free an install as the Win 7 public beta was. Both installations were clean installs to new partitions. Both were done on the same computer, with no hardware changes having been made. I installed the same applications on both; even made a list based on my beta installation to ensure that.

I had read that the RC would have support for more devices than the beta had, so I was surprised when two cards that had been recognized automatically when I installed the beta required me to go hunt down drivers in the RC. Neither my sound card (a very common Creative Soundblaster X-Fi) nor my external TV tuner (a not so common AutumnWave OnAir Creator) worked off the bat as they had in the beta. Finding and installing the drivers wasn’t a big deal, but I’m just saying … .

Then there’s this quirky little problem I’m having with settings not “sticking.” When I installed, my middle monitor wasn’t set as the primary monitor. No big deal, easy to change. But then this morning, for no apparent reason (without rebooting or doing anything related to the display settings), it suddenly reverted back, making my right monitor the primary monitor again. Changing it back caused the gadgets that were on the middle screen (where I wanted them) to move to my left monitor and I had to manually move them all back to their proper places. Again, this isn’t a huge big deal, but it’s annoying and I hope it doesn’t become a habit. That never happened in the betas.

Much more serious is the bug that Ed Bott calls a “doozy” in his blog post at http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1003 . This one can cause programs you install to be unable to run if you install them before installing the fix that was released a few days ago. If you have updates configured to install automatically,  sure to install the update before you install any programs to save yourself some grief.

Speaking of programs, I was absolutely thrilled when I found that my ancient Corel PhotoPaint v10 installed and ran on the Windows 7 beta (it wouldn’t work at all in Vista). Well, that happiness was short-lived; I was able to install it on the RC but it won’t open. No matter what compatibility mode I use, I get this disheartening message:

Then there’s the fact that IE 8 in the RC keeps giving me the “Welcome to Internet Explorer 8” spiel every time I open it after rebooting, and wanting me to go through the little setup wizard to select my search provider, accelerators, etc. Why?  Also of note: in the beta, Windows 7 made whatever partition it was installed on appear as C: (only when you were booted into Win 7; if you had a dual boot configuration and booted back into your previous OS, drive letters reverted back to whatever they had been before). In the RC, that doesn’t seem to happen. I installed it onto the drive I had named E: in the beta and it was still called E: in the RC OS. However, this might be because I started the RC installation from within Windows, rather than booting from the installation disc.  Or it may be because I already had an instance of 7 installed (the beta). I’ll have to do further experimenting to determine whether there has really been a change in behavior here.

On the positive side, performance seems a bit snappier than the beta. It’s also easier to distinguish the active/open programs on the taskbar from programs that are just pinned there (I had no problem distinguishing between them before, but Tom did so I guess this is a good thing). I haven’t had the problems with Adobe Reader and Flash that I had in the beta; they installed and worked without a bunch of hassle this time.

So … I don’t hate the RC. I still like it much better than Vista. But I also don’t love it to death, which was the way I felt about the beta. From my point of view, on my particular computer, with my particular configuration and applications, it seems as if they broke more than they fixed. Too bad the beta expires soon. Anybody else had a similar experience or am I the only one?

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com