Yesterday I took the leap and upgraded my primary PC from Vista Ultimate to Windows 7 Ultimate. The upgrade took 3 hours, given the large number of applications and data files on my tower PC. (I also upgraded two Macs to Snow Leopard 10.6.2 while waiting for the Windows 7 upgrade to complete.)
So far, all is well. Having said that, I haven’t seen the performance boost I was expecting. So far, so good in terms of software compatibility.
The primary glitch I’m seeing on a recurring basis is that Outlook is often unable to close the data file properly. It’s not obvious to me what program is preventing Outlook from closing. Under Vista Plaxo was the culprit, but I uninstalled the Plaxo software before upgrading to Windows 7. Outlook’s inability to close the data file properly has prevented my PC from shutting down or going to sleep several times already in the past 24 hours.
Compatibility List
The following business programs appear to work as expected, although performance is not noticeably better than under Vista SP2:
- QuickBooks Pro 2010 (the program launches more slowly than under Vista)
- Quicken Premier 2010 (marginally faster launch time)
- Timeslips 2008 (no problems yet, although I haven’t put it through all of its paces)
- Adobe Acrobat Extended Pro (version 9)
- iTunes v9.0.2 – including iPhone synching with Outlook
- Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4
- TweetDeck
- ESET Antivirus v4
Unknown results (programs I haven’t tried yet):
- Adobe Creative Suite CS4
- MindJet MindManager 8
Niceties
Printing glitches that occurred under Vista with Quicken appear to have been resolved. The LaserJet printer driver offers a wee bit more control over my printer’s features, which I appreciate. [Edit 12/21: QuickBooks 2010 continues to display printing system glitches when printing checks, which were issues under Vista as well, so the problem is probably a QuickBooks issue, and not caused by Windows 7.]
Waking up from sleep is much faster – although still much slower than on my Macs with Snow Leopard.
Backing up the PC over the network to a NAS drive is much more convenient. [Edit 12/21: backup over the network to the NAS drive is no longer working, and I’ve not had time to troubleshoot it.]
Problems
Besides the problem I noted above, Outlook’s inability to close the data file properly, I’m also seeing memory or rendering problems when composing emails in Outlook 2007. This has occurred several times already on 2 PCs that have been upgraded to Windows 7 (Professional and Ultimate versions).
In both cases the symptoms are lines of text that appear in duplicate within the message body, or lines of text whose font outlines have been corrupted somehow. If you print the message or forward a copy to another email address, you see that the message is actually fine; however, it’s difficult to edit the message body once this problem starts to happen. When you place your cursor, you don’t know if you editing the actual text or a “phantom” version of a seemingly duplicated phrase.
Saving the draft, closing Outlook and relaunching the program is probably the only solution. (It may be a restart is also required — not sure yet.)
Revised on December 21, 2009
{ 2 comments }
Thanks for the informative post. I was wondering if you’ve had any further observations on Timeslips 2008 and Windows 7. I’m ready to upgrade to the 64-bit Windows 7, but can’t get assurances that Timeslips 2008 will work. Are you running on the 64- or 32-bit version of Windows 7? This is the one issue keeping me from executing the upgrade, as I need Timeslips is one of my most important apps. Thanks! — Larry
Larry, I’m using Timeslips 2008 with Windows 7 Ultimate on a 32-bit machine that’s 2 years old. I’ve not had any problems with Timeslips to date. Having said that, I used Timeslips with Vista for several years, and it’s possible that my issues (if any) were ironed out while using Vista.
Good luck with your upgrade.
BTW: I took the easy way out and did a simple upgrade to Windows 7 (not a “clean install” per se).
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