Have You Pre-Ordered Windows 7 Yet?

Microsoft have allowed Windows 7 to be pre-ordered at a sizeable discount. Mayhem immediately ensued.

Customers were allowed to make advance payment for a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium (around £44.99) of Professional (around £88.99) prior to the official launch on 22nd October. Those prices are approximate as some suppliers have discounted below that. Almost immediately the websites concerned (Microsoft included) were swamped to the point of being unable to cope with demand. That's heartening as it means there are many folk out there who believe (as I do) that this latest version of Windows is well worth migrating to.

Many suppliers have sold their pre-order quota by now. I waited for my favourite supplier, ebuyer to offer the deal and promptly discovered it had sold up before I even got there. I eventually ordered from Currys online, not out of choice (they are really hard to deal with in the High Street) but out of necessity - the Professional version will retail at around £212.00 after 22nd October, a price I would be grieved to pay.

I see that Comet still have the offer on their site, but as I write the Home Premium offer has been withdrawn.

I think this is fantastic. Win 7 is certainly the best Microsoft operating system to date. Obviously many others share my opinion. And it is being rolled out early after a thorough Beta testing period so it should be stable. The only downside I can see is that a clean install is required (just did that for the Release Candidate), though that should not be too much of a hassle using my backup drive and the program disks I keep to hand.

At least the junk and clutter will have gone.

Oh, one last thought. Make sure you download Internet Explorer 8 before you reformat and install - European customers will find themselves browserless otherwise. You can use it to download Firefox ;-)

Locked Files

One utility that I found invaluable when running Windows XP was WhoLockMe. It is a small utility with one simple purpose - to unlock a file in order to perform an operation on it, usually a file delete.

Normally, Windows protects a file from deletion when it is being used by another process (and quite rightly so). There are times, however, when it is necessary to delete a file that is in use - when dealing with malware, for example, or when a process stubbornly refuses to quit or release the handle on a file. WhoLockMe always came to the rescue. This utility installs as a Windows Explorer extension, so a right click on the file to be removed allowed the file to be unlocked and then deleted.

I recently found out that it didn't install under Windows 7. It appeared to install but there was no option to unlock in the right click context menu.

Enter Unlocker from Cedrick 'Nitch' Collomb. This is also a small utility - the install file is 255KB - and it performs the same task. And it works perfectly with Windows 7.

I'm not recommending unlocking and deleting files as a regular practice, but when you need to, this is the tool you wish you had.

Windows 7 - The Show So Far

So, I've had s couple of months living with Windows 7 RC as my main operating system, and I can happily say the good points far outweight the bad.

Actually, 'bad' is not the word as I have found no features I can't live with. Boot times are a vast improvement on XP. Similarly shutdown time is speedier. And I love being able to click the Shutdown button without having to confirm I really do want to shut down.

I recently upgraded my Adobe Photoshop CS to CS4 with no problems. In fact CS4 seems to run quicker than CS did.

So, what are my remaining problems in Windows 7?

Well, my accounts program still occasionally fails to display a button or two, though these reappear when I mouse over them. I admit I still use Quicken 98 so it's not surprising to find the odd glitch. Other than that, here's my list of outstanding problems:

- Winpatrol occasionally stops working (with a warning that Scottie is no longer on patrol). Not a biggie as it I can restart immediately, but something I must look up in the forums.

- WhoLockMe, a file utility I sometimes need for troubleshooting, should install to the right click context menu, but doesn't. Again, I need to browse the forums for a solution.

And that's it.

I was a keen XP fan before I installed Windows 7. Now, when I'm at work using XP I find myself wishing for Win 7 - it makes life easier in ways I don't notice until I swap over. Given the history of late and flawed offerings from Microsoft, I was skeptical (to say the least) of this one. It really is good. It makes life easy when I don't want to fiddle about yet it can be tweaked and altered when desired. Most drivers work, most programs work and I've never seen a BSOD (or even a recovery screen).

FOOTNOTE:
All these posts I make about Windows 7 must seem a little suspicious to the reader. Let me assure you I am not associated with Microsoft (apart from being re-awarded as a MVP this month). But if I thought it was crap then I would say so. I don't. It isn't. It will be overpriced over here compared with the US market, and it will ship without Internet Explorer in Europe. But I will be among the first to pay up when it goes on sale.