Windows 7 RC 1 can have my baby

No, I am not a windows fan boy, ok yes I am, but windows 7 is pretty sextastic. I have been using it since beta, and boy oh boy, is it ever awesome. If you haven't been trying it out I pity the fool. Yes, I did just say that.

Windows 7 just feels smarter, and leaves you with a much fuller experience. When I first installed it I expected that most of my devices would not work. Not so, my GTX 285 displayed the wallpaper perfectly.

Do not get me wrong, I did have to install drivers, and hell, I know better than to just use the default ones. I will not even use the drivers that come with my video card in the box, but just having it appear like that from the get go was really nice.

The windows 7 task bar is epically useful. When minimized I am able to preview the window by simply placing the cursor over the icon.

If there is more than one window open in Firefox for example, the minimized view will pop open however many previews are needed to see them all! It gets better, place the cursor over a minimized preview and it will open that select window. Click on it, and it open only that window. Windows' IQ just went up a standard deviation.

The windows themselves are even smarter as well. I hate having to re-size windows in order to either fill a screen or move or to a different monitor. Now all you have to do to maximize a screen to fit the monitor it place it at the top of the screen and it will auto-fill. If I need to move a window I just grab it from the top with my cursor and throw it over without having to re-size it first. What the hell was the point of locking the screen anways?

It really is all the little things that have delighted me. Of course there are a ton of improvements, but honestly nothing will substitute first hand experience. Windows 7 RC 1 has left me asking, were the hell was this OS hiding? It may be based off of Vista, but is feels like a whole different animal, and I don't mean a leopard.

Clearing the Cobb Webs, with a RAID

It has been an eternity since my last posts, and yes I know shame on me. I am working on some projects right now, most currently, a raid 0 with windows 7 RC 1. The configuration consist of 2 750gb caviar green Western Digital drives. They combine to make one 1.36 TB drive. I have dubbed such drive "The VOID". Hopefully I will fill it with awesomeness soon enough. The other drive is a Seagate 320gb drive which is near filled. So at the moment I have two windows 7 RC OS one on each drive. I was surprised to see a boot menu appear, that allows me to choose which hard drive I want to boot from. I am used to seeing that with windows Vista, as it will list "earlier version of windows". I don't really understand the logistics of not just saying what OS it is, but whatever. One issue with having two windows 7 OSs is that it is impossible to know which is which unless you just know that the first is the raid and the other is the 320. Ideally I would just transfer everything I want from the 320, to the RAID, clear the 320 and then back up the really good stuff on it. This way it would be sans OS, which saves room for....yes.....awesomeness. Setting up the RAID was as easy as people would lead you to believe, and particularly easy on my motherboard (EVGA 780i).

First step was to enable the RAID on the SATA ports

Second step was to press F10 on boot up and set it up

Here I was presented with a bios like screen. All that needed to be done was to move over the 2 drives to the compile selection box, and select "striped" which I wanted cause I am looking for performance. Then it asks if all the crap can be deleted, which I pressed 'Y' to. I found I also needed to delete the master boot sector for windows to be able to install on the raid. You may or may not get the prompt.

The installation of windows 7 RC 1 took about 20 minutes, which was pretty impressive. I am used to a good 40-45 min for it to complete. I am getting pretty used to this whole RAID thing.
It is pretty effing awesome actually.