Without incurring the wrath of our system administrator here, I think I am not giving away too much to say that we have a Windows Server 2003 R2. As media company too, we have a mixture of Windows and Mac machines, varying from XP and Vista to OS9 and OSX variants.
With version control a major element of what we do, central storage for files is vital. Windows 7 integrated into this better than Vista did.
One old Mac machine attached to a particularly fine colour scanner for example, always seemed to be a problem for Vista to access, for some unknown reason. Various work arounds were required – not so for Windows 7 (W7).
Browsing for network resources, be they file, print or shared, network attached devices, seems to be very easy indeed. In fact, the old tweak that even Windows XP needed to reduce wait times for network resources to be displayed is redundant. W7 is responsive and reliable when browsing the network, even for high resolution graphics where previews on either browsing or as search results present quickly. Now we do have 1Gb Ethernet links, but there is a noticeable increase in performance over Vista.
This is very useful for example when using a content management system and browsing for a graphic for an article. A simple file browse window now has full preview capability without having to download with no noticeable delay. This is vastly better than what Vista seemed to be able to do in similar circumstances.
As many organisations will likely get W7 in drip fashion, the easy network handling is certainly a boon as many W7 machines are likely to see service in hybrid environments.
However, one odd element of much the same operation for W7 is file previews. If you have a mapped network drive and you browse to a folder within it, you will see a file listing which is all normal. But if there is a Word document there, an initial click opens it in a preview pane on the right of the file window. A double click then opens it. This does not seem to work 100% reliably, as sometimes even the initial double click seems to initiate the preview instead of opening. It took a few clicks to work this out, especially as I had a mouse configured with a scroll wheel button to double click with one depression. Also, it seems to happen when accessing a remote file for the first time, which might have a bearing.
As regards the 64 bit experience, being able to use all of the installed 4Gb of RAM is certainly a boon, and the only thing that refuses to work with W7 64 for me so far is an Olympus voice recorder. The odd thing is that the software package that comes with the recorder to import files and even facilitate dictation, works no problem as it was updated for Vista 64.
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