Four Screens Media

(note: this post is off-topic)

The lousy reputation of Vista is so well earned at this point that I was curious to see if Microsoft had learned their lesson with Windows 7.  Based on my day 1 trial, It seems they have.

I installed Windows 7 on a four year old Pentium 4 2.4 ghz, 2GB SDRAM PC.  Installation went smoothly with the only hiccup being difficult in getting drivers for the built-in LAN card.  However, once that was fixed, all other drivers were downloaded and updates without even hitting a button.

And it runs fast.  Really fast.  Faster than Vista and almost as fast as the XP installation on a separate partition of the same computer.  This is based on human usage.

I’m still testing all the features but one that really leaped out is the ability to access media and files on the PC from anywhere.  I can’t figure out exactly how this will work as it seems the Web end of this service is not yet built in, but the ability to turn this feature on was easy enough to find in the Windows Media Player (which, by the way, runs a lot faster than the player in XP). 

However, I was able to quickly access my Windows 7 stored media from my Playstation 3 without minimal configuration (just hitting the share option in the media player).

Once amusing driver plus is that the driver for my TV tuner was not working with the XP Media Center Edition, but there were no problems with Windows 7 (and Media Center runs faster as well).   

All in all, it’s fast (did I saw that), seems to have strong driver compatibility, and looks to be focused on sharing PC-based media both locally and across the Web.  In other words, this is the real XP upgrade.