Long article.
I downloaded it directly from Microsoft, I had XP so I did a custom install, all went smooth, save for having to hunt for two drivers for my sound card and printer. So far, so good.
I normally would wait for the Service Pack, but curiosity got the best of me, and I wanted to clean up my PC anyway and get rid of old files I don’t use anymore to free up hard drive space, so I figured I’d kill two birds at once.
People shouldn't have to buy new stuff every time Bill Gates has a wild hair!
From page 5....
The Rough Edges
**********************************EXCERPT************************************
The first thing that bothers us is a technical matter, and that is the addition of various levels of UAC , and the security ramifications of that. We’ve talked about this before in our look at the release candidate, but it bears repeating.
With the changes made to Windows 7, at the default UAC level of 2, signed Microsoft executables are auto-elevated to admin privileges when run by an admin.
**************************************snip*******************************
It’s the security ramifications of this that concern us. Someone already managed to exploit this in the pre-RC phase (where the UAC control panel itself was auto-elevating) to disable UAC entirely. The concern we have is that all of these auto-elevating programs are an obvious target for a local privilege escalation attack to accomplish something similar, if not the same. Imagine finding a way to make the Display control panel execute a 3rd party application with admin privileges, for example.
Now to be clear, it’s not as if this is the only way to achieve local privilege escalation attacks. The Windows kernel itself is a target, and I can’t think of any major desktop OSes that haven’t seen such an attack in the past. But this makes that easier, potentially much easier. And that’s a risky proposition when a UAC prompt may be all that’s left between malware executing and running amok or not.
Certainly someone is going to bite my head off for this, but I don’t think Microsoft should have made such a fundamental change to UAC.
*******************************************************************
********************************************************
Looks like we still have an issue......
************************************
Had Vista x86, did a custom install for Win7 x64. Did not encounter ANY problems. Encountered significantly IMPROVED peformance ... I say go for it.
Are any of you having problems with lockups. The wife has been having quite a few with her new puter.
Has anyone who has 7 done any capture of streaming audio with it? From what I’ve read, early versions had a feature that degraded streaming CD quality sound to lower quality if you captured it. I was hoping they would eliminate that from the final release. I do pay for my music, but I don’t pay for operating systems designed to prevent me from being naughty.
So far so good. One Win7 Ultimate installation under my belt and going for the Win7 Pro tonight (on one of my own machines). Kludging a bootable USB thumb with a 64-bit OS from a 32-bit system was an interesting challenge but I finally beat it into submission. They really need to start releasing this sort of thing on thumbs for the optical-drive-less netbook community...
The XP mode on the pro version looks intriguing. I have the CS2 versions of Adobe Illustrator etc. and if they’ll run on Win 7 pro, it’ll save me a LOT of $.