So I’ve advocated just how great Windows Home Server is many times. It’s also saved my bacon, from a backup perspective on more than one occasion.

One of the great aspects of a WHS is the ability to develop add-ins for the WHS Console. I have a number installed which extend the functionality of WHS signifcantly (the integration into Amazon’s S3 service via the Jungle Disk WHS Add-in for automatic offline storage is one for example that I rely upon greatly).

A new add-in has just been released that allows your Home Server to ‘tweet’ its Health status via Twitter. By following my WHS’s Twitter account, I can now monitor the home Server and network health irrespective of where I am.

Such a great idea and given that the alerts themselves are totally extendable, this means, add-ins, when coded correctly can alert their users of almost any issue irrespective of where they are.

My home server’s twitter account is RedDogWHS if anyone’s interested in knowing how healthy my current server and network is (although I have protected them).

You can download the WHSTweet add-in from the Home Server hacks page.

I came into my Home Office this morning to find my corporate laptop totally and utterly dead.

It was working on Friday, powered it up this morning and nothing. So this, given I’m planned on a lot this morning, was a real curve ball. However all wasn’t lost *too* much.

With the power of WHS, I had a full image of my data so could easily open my image from Friday and access the files I needed.

Email was again not too much of challenge as I have my Blackberry and WebMail.

What this did mean though was I’d need to use my newly built Windows 7 desktop for work this morning as opposed to my Vista desktop.

Overall, actually having to use it ‘properly’ for day to day work has been a pleasure. I also did discover some other fun bits whilst moving open windows around that I wasn’t fully aware of.

Windows Gestures

As Windows 7 is designed for Touch screens as well, there are a number of built in Gestures to assist users when using a touch screen interface. these also work with the Mouse (Click and then perform the gesture).

“Cut out the Clutter”
Ever had a whole heap of windows open and just wanted to clean everything up and only have the one window left showing that you're working on?

Click and ‘shake’ the title bar of the window you want left open. All others will be minimized. ‘Shake’ it again to restore your desktop to the previous (cluttered) state. Kinda cool and I think actually will become more useful that it first sounds.

I had accidentally done this a number of times and thought “What?! What did I do there, where have my windows gone?”. Now that I know it, I may well use it more often.

Jump Lists
Jump lists can also be initiated by a ‘drag’ of the Application icon on the taskbar(as opposed to a right click). Purely for touch user’s I’d say as right click is quicker (but a right click doesn’t fade in like it does with a ‘drag’).

There are a large amount of others as well, some I find I’ll use, some I won’t. Tim Sneath has a great post for Windows 7 that shows a lot of the secrets of the new UI. Check it out here.

I’m also trying out Tip 22 (The Widescreen Tip), by having my taskbar now vertical. Tim’s right, the whole design does now suit a vertical toolbar.

So I’ve always been a fan of Media Centre and although I’ve never really used it to its full potential (never had Live TV through it) I have used it sporadically on both my old Vista machine and via my 360 acting as an extender. What's stopped me from really moving to it full time, from a media playback perspective, was it’s lack of support of other 3rd party codecs (DivX, XVid etc).

However, whilst playing with Windows 7 over the last few days, I noticed something that didn’t really hit me until now.

Windows 7 out of the box now seems to support DivX and XVid formats (amongst others). All content I have on my WHS was fully playable in Windows 7 without installing ANY codecs. These formats are now able to also be able to played back in Media Centre (as opposed to Media Player).

Tonight, I’ve finally got a little time to connect my 360 to Windows 7 as a Media Extender and amazingly, all codecs can now also be played back via the Extender. I don’t believe this was ever possible prior to connecting to a Win 7 Media Centre and in addition the UI of the extender now reflects the Windows 7 UI (so I suspect the recent NXE update to the 360 also enabled it to also receive updates to the Media Centre Extender client).

All good news and another step towards me having a fully integrated Media solution at home. All I need now is for the next version of Windows Home Server (which will be based on the Windows Server 2008 R2/Windows 7 architecture) to also include Media Centre so I don’t need to keep two machines on constantly to serve media.

As I’m sure no one in the IT industry will have missed, Microsoft released their Release Candidate of Windows 7 to MSDN and TechNet subscribers a few days ago.

Well, I couldn’t resist. Having played with the beta on my old Dell Dimension a few months back and being very surprised at just how stable and complete it was, the appearance of the RC really meant it was time now to give it a proper appraisal.

So over the last few days, I decided to say goodbye to my incredibly stable and astoundingly quick Vista x64 build on my Vostro. Having ensured all aspects of the system was backed up onto my Windows Home Server, I popped the DVD in and rebooted.

Now, I’m an advocate for clean installs of O/S’s as I know a lot of people are. Upgrading O/S’s, although convenient, forces you to bring along with you all the crap you’ve installed and hoarded since the last time you installed an O/S. “No” I said to myself. Even though I’d kept my x64 install of vista relatively clean (and I was sorely tempted just before of the work involved in reinstalling and restoring all your data), it was still time for a clean out, no upgrade for me…so I formatted the 500Gb hard drive and clicked install.

Ten minutes later I was staring at my new Windows 7 desktop. Yes you read that right. TEN minutes. That’s all it took from the second I clicked ‘format’ to seeing Windows 7 boot up. I tweeted just after I’d clicked the ‘Format’ option, and then again once I was staring at a Win 7 Desktop.

NO matter what anyone says, Microsoft have to be commended for having an OS that installs so darn fast.

There are a number of sites that detail the changes of Win 7 far better than I ever could, so I’m not going to attempt to. Paul Thurrott’s WinSuperSite has a huge amount of content on Win 7. Instead I’m going to concentrate on my impressions to the changes as well as my overall experience.

Installation

Absolutely flawless. My experience is getting Vista x64 to initially recognise my Vostro’s hardware was a real struggle back in March of last year. With Windows 7, not one unknown device and everything works as you’d expect. Wireless keyboards, mice, onboard sound, networks all worked right from the go.

On my older Dell Dimension 4500 (P4, 2.4Ghz and 1Gb RAM), again installation was very quick (~15 mins), and everything worked (except sound) from the go. As soon as I logged in, Windows Update immediately started to download drivers for my sound card and sound became available (with no restart I may add).

Application Compatibility

There was one issue though when I booted up. The 32 bit version of IE 8 kept crashing the instant I opened it (64 bit IE8 was fine strangely enough). As I only needed to get to Google to download Chrome (still my preferred browser), this sufficed. However for completeness, I wanted to make sure the 32 bit version of IE8 worked. Turning on and off the InPrivate filter seemed to fix it which was rather strange. However I had also installed Office 2007 inbetween attempts to run it so I’m not sure which of these steps actually fixed it.

Chrome also had issues with the default install. However this is a known issue with a 64 bit O/S and 32 bit Chrome (although I never got it with Vista x64 it has to be said). A lot of people reported that Win 7 RC didn’t have this issue, but mine did. To fix, you simply need to change the Shortcut parameters to have the parameter “-in-process-plugins” like so: -

C:\…\chrome.exe -in-process-plugins

This resolves any startup issues with Chrome. Apart from the two issues, I’ve found no issues whatsoever so far in the applications that I run day to day.

Performance

Now this is a hard one to compare on this machine. My experience with Vista x64 has been nothing but exemplary on this system and I sometimes think if only Vista worked like this for everyone I know it wouldn’t have such a stigma attached to it. Blindingly quick and never a crash, my 64 bit install far exceeds my vista 32 bit experiences (sometimes painfully slow, error prone and to be truthful, sometimes an absolute bloody mystery as to why the hell the hard drive was spinning at a gazillion rpm’s when the machine was doing ‘nothing’). Vista really hasn’t help itself in this regard it has to be said.

My WEI has actually increased by quite an amount as well between Vista x64 and Windows 7 x64 (4.8 to 5.3). The bottleneck in Vista seemed to be my memory (4Gb of 667Mhz). In Windows 7, my memory performance is a far healthier 5.4. This clearly seems to indicate memory management in Windows 7 has had a major overhaul.

My bottleneck is now my ATI HD2600 XT 256Mb video card for gaming. As gaming is mainly done on an Xbox 360, this doesn’t concern me too much.

Unable to really compare on my Vostro, it’s a lot easier with my older Dimension 4500. Performance has increased from Vista significantly. Everything runs a lot lot quicker, even with the system’s modest specs.

The TaskBar

A lot has been said of the taskbar and I was a little cynical at first. It’s a total overhaul to the traditional task bar that has served all Windows O/S’s since Windows 95 and this is a real sea-change. Now that I’ve grown accustomed to it, it’s a serious improvement.

Now saying that, it does takes some getting used to, especially in the default settings it gets installed with (which I do prefer if I’m truthful). Once the way it works is known, it truly is a evolutionary step compared to what was there before it. How this will be changed and tweaked in future versions of Windows will be interesting.

The best way to describe it is a combination of the quick launch bar and standard windows task bar.

Below is my current taskbar (in the default behaviour at installation) and you’ll see both the applications that are ‘pinned’ to it as well as the applications that I have running.

Another mode of the task bar allows it to perform more like the current Windows Task Bar and only combine the icons when the task bar is full (as well as displaying labels): -

However I just don’t like the hybrid mode and much prefer the fully combined icon only view. I could probably write posts and posts about the Taskbar and its new behaviours. But the real great improvements are: -

• Jump Lists
• Much Improved Preview
• Aero Peek

Summary

Windows 7 is a serious improvement on Vista in almost every way. I use Vista day to day within my corporate environment and have grown accustomed to its idiosyncrasies and pitfalls. However I can see Vista getting very old very quickly now I’ve seen the improvements to the usability that has come about with the redesign in Windows 7.