My Big Fat Review
Yell, "Yippie!"...
...as Microsoft puts another gun to your head and tries to make you and everyone else on the planet buy another new and "improved" operating system. Now I know that sounds like all I'm going to do is bag on Windows 7, but in truth it's not all bad news. 7 is not some big steaming pile like Vista was, not even close. In reality for the average user it's a great new operating system. Sleek and very reliable. In fact I initially liked 7 a lot, beyond having to learn some new tricks to get the customization I wanted, the interface is very friendly and a lot prettier than XP ever was. The problem with 7 starts when you start to push it's boundaries. If you are like me you like to do everything on your computer and to do that you cram your pc case full of every kind of new tech there is. Sadly you don't even have to push far. I had a myriad of issues when I tried to simply use my Plantronics 590 Bluetooth headset with 7 to make some calls on Skype. Long story short it turns out, even thought 7 came with Bluetooth support, it sucks when it comes to A2DP. Sadly other Bluetooth stacks didn't work for me either and after three days of crashes and uninstalling and reinstalling various drivers, stacks and Bluetooth tools I abandoned it. I'm not alone in having this issue and it's not localized to my headset, it's affecting a lot of users. My second major problem was with my Asus eah5770 graphics card. This is a solid card and I have no issues on my XP side, but 7 hates it with a passion even thought it's a certified compatible card. No driver sets would work out of the 15 or so sets I tried. When I was able to get it working I would get this horrible little message, "The driver has stopped working, but has been recovered...yada, yada, yada." This message would invariably follow a crash of what ever program or game I was running. Again I found this is an issue many users with different cards are having and it seems the only solution is to go back to XP. My final verdict on 7 is that if you are running on a cookie cutter machine you probably will love it and have little to no issues, but if you're building your own or like to tinker you will have some impassable issues, impossible to pass, impassable. Hopefully when the first service pack comes out it will fix a lot of these issues, because I'd really like 7 to work for me, but until then it's back to XP Pro.