Windows 7 impressions

I've recently been working on a Windows 7 machine (32-bit).

My impressions:

* much faster than Vista, not hard to do.

* printer drivers were painful. This is not Microsoft's fault. HP hasn't written printer drivers for 7 and instead are choosing to rely on the HP Universal Printer Driver, which doesn't work. Solution: Don't use it. I was trying to connect using an HP 2200 which has an internal print server and trying to print via IP. I used the HP 4200 printer driver instead and IT WORKED. The printing might be wonky, but it hasn't so far. How to write up instructions for end users? I'm not really sure. This might have to be one of those things where we do everyone one for new Windows 7 users.

* the U has special activation instructions for our Windows 7. It amounts to an 180 day lease of a license and you have to be on campus to do it. This is a pretty big change, but I can see why they'd do it. Licensing was a huge headache for us. Some of those license numbers have made their way onto the internet. But I don't think that normal end users can do the activation themselves. I may have to write a batch file to do it.

* upgrading from Windows Vista, required SP1. Most users already have SP1, but getting it is pretty easy. It's big though, and required a lot of downloading. I think we ended up blowing away the Vista install anyway, but hey, good to know the way these things work.