Windows 7 – it’s here
Windows 7 is released today, but I feel a bit detached from the buzz in the social cloud about this, having played with for it nearly a year.
However a couple of things happened recently that made me remember what life was like before windows 7. I was in a well known burger bar and my windows 7 laptop saw the free wi-fi and advised me that I would need to enter additional information and gave me an option to go to that page straight from the wifi icon on the taskbar. So I am on-line, unlike the charming Norwegian girl sitting next to me struggling away in XP.
I naturally offered to help and finally got round the problem by using the native connectivity rather than the tool that came with her laptop, but it was a struggle (even allowing for the Norwegian dialog boxes).
My second epiphany came when I need to print an airline ticket to go to Edinburgh earlier in the week. My home printer is attached to my gaming rig which is also running windows 7 and has a HomeGroup setup on it. HomeGroups in windows 7 allow simple sharing of resources based on one password. The clever bit is that my domain joined office laptop can see the HomeGroup resources but my home computers can’t see the office laptop.
BTW If you want to see this in action I have made a 4 minute video of it..
as part of my YinYang series on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
What I also like about this little feature is that not many of my colleagues know about it which usually leads to a “yeah that’s good, but have you seen this..” conversation and so we all learn from each other.
I could go on all day about this stuff, but my advice to you is to have a play with windows 7 from your TechNet subscription, if you haven’t already. There is also 90 day time-bombed copy here if you don’t have a TechNet subscription, but read the “read me” before you use it and I would recommend using a virtual machine if you’re using that.