Happy 2009!

Having skipped on Vista, I’ve eagerly signed up for the Windows 7 Beta. It’s been getting good press and I think I see why. I’ve installed it in a dual-boot config. on both Em.’s 5 year old Ben-Q laptop and now on my own dual-core system. It offers a very smooth experience on both machines (the laptop has less than a gig of ram!), especially with aero running on my desktop system.

I’ve yet to experiment with my audio apps, but I think that’s going to have to wait for a Win 7 driver from M-Audio. I installed the Vista 32 driver for my M-Audio Fast Track Ultra in compatibility mode, and although it works (I have sound) I’m noticing a glitch in mp3 playback with the Win 7 Media Player and in Firefox every 10 seconds or so. While it’s good enough to play music with in the background while surfing the net (Win 7/Firefox is performing like a champ in this capacity), actually making music with this driver is another question.

I’ll probably go ahead and install Reason and Sonar soonish. For all I know the glitchy playback affects mp3’s only. Either way, I’ll be booting back into XP to do production work until Windows 7 is officially released and available in retail.

My desktop specs:

Asus P5B-E motherboard, Intel 6420 CPU (2.13 GHz Core2Duo), 2 GB ram