So I installed Windows 7 beta, and I decided I wanted to give my thoughts on it.
To start things off, I kind of like the new task bar. I know it is still in it’s early beta, but I have a small complaint about driver support. It is possible to use vista drivers on windows 7. I found this out from reading something on the internet. I say this because I have gotten my webcam drivers to install by using vista drivers. There is a catch though. I had to run the installer under vista compatibility mode. After that though, the install went perfectly, and now I can use my webcam perfectly. Now onto the driver compatibility issue. I wanted to see if windows 7 had drivers for ati graphics cards… they kind of do. ATI has come out with a pre-release beta driver for some of their cards (mine being one of them). I installed said drivers… but now my second crt monitor doesn’t work. The strange thing though is that my tv will work. I guess there is something messed up with crt monitors, because my primary monitor is an lcd, and my tv is also an lcd tv. I just need to go jack a lcd monitor from somewhere else in the house, and see if that one works. To see if I could fix the problem, I downloaded the vista drivers for my card. They downloaded and installed perfectly… that sucks, they didn’t work on my xp computer (so I am stuck with semi working older drivers, I wont get into that, but lets just say, I can get the control panel to open). Anyways, no luck! I still can’t get my second monitor to work. Oh well, I’m not using windows 7 as my primary OS anyways, xp still works with both my monitors. I can’t really say much more, because I haven’t really done much else with windows 7. I may update this post after I have used windows 7 longer.
Update: 1-11-09~ Turns out my crt monitor didn’t work in xp either. Windows 7 borked my monitor! Now I am down to one monitor until I can get a new one in a couple of days.