So I recently downloaded and installed the Windows 7 Beta. It wasn’t an entirely smooth process, I (perhaps stupidly) decided to perform an upgrade on my existing Vista installation. For the most part this worked out well, however I’ve had a few teething problems with the transistion.
Firstly I was getting the dreaded blue screen of death about every 15 minutes, a quick search on Google later though and I discovered it had to do with my anti-virus. Bad Avast! I haven’t had any more BSODs since I removed it so I’m hoping that was the only program causing that.
Secondly, I seem to have lost all of the ratings in my music files, I think the blame for this can be placed on WMP12 and whatever new method it is using for its database.
I’m currently working on an elaborate and extensive work-around to the rating problem. I’ve run Virtual PC and installed a copy of Vista, then I copied over the backup I made of the “users” directory. I then opened up WMP11 and have got it to store the ratings inside the MP3 files themselves instead of as a database. Hopefully this will fix the problem somewhat. (Edit: It did!)
Regardless the upgrade was fairly well done, especially considering Windows 7 is currently only in beta. Anyway I’m going to write up proper impressions of the OS later, so far I’m impressed but then I personally never saw any huge problems with Vista (driver issues were the only problem I had, and thats all fixed now) so anything that improves on that can’t be bad.
