So I just finished installing Windows 7 RC1 on my home computer. So far, I’m very pleased with the operating system (I’ve been running Windows 7 Beta on my work laptop for the past month or two). I’m a huge fan of all of the additional shortcuts, which tend to make my life a whole lot easier. I’ll talk more about those in a future post.

Additionally, I’m a huge fan of the wallpaper artwork. There’s the typical beautiful photography, but it’s also intertwined with some additional cool, interesting (and occasionally psychadelic) illustrations. The Engineering Windows 7 blog describes some of the reasoning behind the wallpapers. One of my favorites is pictured below:

There are two issues that I’ve had so far during installation, however. 1) The computer isn’t recognizing my monitor’s native resolution (1680×1050), and instead displays at 1024×768 – and doesn’t give me any option to display above 1024; and 2) My internet connection seems to have slowed considerably. Re: my native resolution, I think this is partly due to the fact that my monitor is plugged in through the VGA cable (with a DVI adapter), but regardless, it seems like Windows 7 should recognize higher resolutions once I’ve installed all the drivers. If I can’t fix this, I may have to revert, because 1024 display makes my eyes bleed. The internet connection is working for my Xbox 360, laptop and other CPUs, so it also seems to be an issue with the new operating system, but I need to do some more research before I state that conclusively.

If I can fix those two issues, there’s no chance of me going back to XP/Vista. That said, those are certainly deal-breakers. So I will try to fix them at home tonight.