This stumped me for months and I eventually arrived at the point where I just didn’t care anymore. I blamed it on my computer’s NIC, and then just left it at bad signal levels from the cable company when I found that all the other computers on my network were almost as slow. A couple of nights ago, in a fit of disgust I decided to go downstairs and plug my netbook directly into the cable modem. The speeds were fast as lightning, as things should be. What device on my network could have caused such a bottleneck?

The culprit was an old Intel 16-port switch I had thrown into the mix when I mounted a small contingent of servers and networking equipment in the basement. Back then I didn’t have enough ports on my Netgear wireless router to support everything, so I had everything going to that switch. Over time things kept getting slower and slower. Now that I use one of my servers as the router, I can take the old switch out without impacting the network.

Lesson learned. I’m getting acceptable speeds now.

That’s the new taskbar. I can’t help but think this new look brings it a lot closer to the Mac OS X dock, because you can place programs on it independently and if they’re running, there’s some sort of subtle indicator to that effect. In Mac OS it’s a light dot under the icon, in Windows 7 it’s a sort of box around the icon. If a program’s running and you hover your mouse over the taskbar where that program resides, the box is highlighted in the dominant color of the icon. You can see Thunderbird’s blue in the example above; Firefox gets highlighted in orange and Chrome’s color is yellow. Windows 7 also brings back the live preview as you can see. There are a few other features in the new taskbar that I think people will like.

As for performance, Windows 7 is rather sketchy. The computer I’m using it on largely meets the recommended specifications (2.0 GHz Pentium 4, 1 GB of RAM… the recommendation is 1 GHz and 1 GB) and the system still seems a bit sluggish. Perhaps Microsoft understated what you really need to run Windows 7. I installed iTunes shortly after installing Windows and it took about 30 minutes to install, which for most people is unacceptable. After disabling AVG 8 which I had found pretty much continuously uses around 60% CPU, things got a bit better in the overall performance department. iTunes has a few hiccups here and there, and forget about installing Office 2007 or OpenOffice.org 3.0. Both pieces of software will fail installation with error code 1935, which after a tiny bit of research I have discovered is a .NET runtime error that I will not even try to fix.  JavaScript performance in Firefox 3 is horrible. While typing an update into the Twitter web site, the entire system will easily slow to a crawl, to the point that even the DWM becomes disoriented and windows start disappearing from the screen for a split second. Even writing this blog entry is taxing. Google Chrome really isn’t all that much better, and I haven’t even thought to test how well IE8 (included with the OS) works.

This is just what I think after a couple of days. Hopefully Microsoft starts releasing a few updates that will make the experience better. I’m impressed because Windows 7 works very well for a beta. It’s certainly better than Windows Vista was at this stage of development.