Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (RC)

Background

Its Windows 7, its Microsoft's latest edition of their Operating System.

For these tests, Windows 7 Ultimate Edition is installed on a IBM Lenovo X61 Laptop 4096MB RAM, 320GB SATA HD, Fingerprint reader, tablet, and a handful of other goodies that are automatically on this version of the Lenovo laptop.

On a slight performance view test by eye, Windows 7 performed better than Windows Vista on a straight install on the IBM X61 laptop. Same default setup and a noticable gain in performance. This is due to Microsoft removing some background services that were turned on by default for Vista, but now are on-demand services.

Some Noticable Features

A subset list of notable features that appear right out of the box on Windows 7. In no way is this complete, but it does outline some of Microsoft's standout upgrades.

Action Center

It appears that the Security Center was too confusing for most computer users. Microsoft has renamed it to the Action Center. In doing so, they have combined Security and Maintenance in one easy to use screen.

Boot Configuration Data (BCD) - Hidden

A quickview of msconfig showed that there is no boot data anywhere on the root partition. But, after some time of poking around, the BCD was located on a 512MB partition that Microsoft decided to "hide".

There was no drive letter associated with this partition, but as soon as you assocated a letter, you could effectively work with bcdedit. The commands of bcdedit /store z:\boot\BCD became an easy workaround for such problems.

Biometrics

Windows 7 has now incorporated biometrics. This will integrate directly into Active Directory if you are running Windows 2008 Server R2. The biometrics installed all necessary drivers from within Windows 7. No drivers were loaded from Lenovo's Vista drivers section.

exFAT

When inserting flash memory, Windows 7 asked how we wanted to format the drive. A suprise occurred to see the exFAT option. The exFAT filesystem was originally developed for Windows CE devices, but Microsoft has now ported the filesystem to use with other devices where NTFS is not feasable such as floppy drives and flash media.

Trusted Platform Module (TPM)

TPM has now been utilized out of the box. Though, you still have to enable TPM through the bios and operating system, the componenets are all there to get TPM to work. Enabling TPM requires one reboot of the Windows 7 OS.