I received a new laptop approximately two weeks ago. It is a HP EliteBook 6230p, with a 2.5GHz core2duo, ATI graphic and 4 gb ram. I had hear rumours that the university had access to Windows 7 so I decided to give it a go.

Since I had 4 gb of ram I also needed the 64 bit version of win7 – which could make things even more problematic.

My first impression of windows 7 is that it is really nice. Default settings are flashy with the aero user interface. As I’m not that geared towards this kind of interfaces I turned off everything and chose the “old-school” windows XP look. Which I find is a lot more efficient to work with. I find the possibility to disable these kind of things highly important to have and it is really nice that win7 includes them! I believe also the performance will be better when turning of the animated UI. And so far, the performance has been really great! Far better than my older laptop with XP, although that has a slower CPU and of course is packed with useless data.

One of my worries about going for win7 and especially the 64 bit was the compatibility of programs and in general the infrastructure at the university. To my surprise everything works more or less out of the box! There have been some issues though. First off there are missing some drivers for the laptops devices, nothing serious though, only the specific hotkeys for the laptop such as “volume down/up” key and similar and a driver to an unknown device which I haven’t figured out what is yet – which probably indicate that I don’t need it:) The university supports a VPN network primarily using Cisco’s VPN client. I knew from before that this client didn’t support 64 bit – and I still haven’t found a working VPN client – although I experienced a bluescreen while trying an open source client:) The lack of VPN isn’t really a big issue since I do not use it as I find it terribly slow and not providing any significant benefits.

Another problem was, of course, with the network printer which didn’t support windows 7 and especially 64 bit. However that worked out by contacting the IT-support which figured out that the current drivers for the printer was actually for an older printer(!). The drivers for the printer did actually support win7 and 64 bit(!).

So far in to the windows 7-experience I can strongly recommend it! It is fast, and reliable – and probably better than XP. (Vista was never an alternative.)