Posted on by Jonathan Greene

Windows 7 needs to get cleaned up before going out

I’ve been using the Windows 7 beta since it was released and I’ve updated through a few builds as well though admittedly not as an official MSDN partner.  I’ve acquired he build in the wild and have been using Windows 7 daily on my netbook.  The experience has been most good, but a few frustrating issues have remained through each update and these are going to frustrate people to no end.

The main bug I’ve encountered is that my network connection simply times out.  Sometimes I get hours, sometims minutes and sometimes it refuses to work at all after waking from sleep.  The repair utility has about a 40% chance of getting me back online, but generally I need to reboot the system.  The only upside here is that Windows 7 boots pretty quickly, but the average person is going to hate this.  This is a basic requirement for a computer and I expect networking to just work.

About 20% of the time after waking from sleep I lose the ability to control both volume and screen brightness from my function keys.  I can still handle volume from the taskbar, but there is no way to adjust screen brightness.  Brightness is locked down at the first level which is quite low.  I tend to run on the 3rd step up which is a nice balance of brightness and power utilization.  A restart fixes things.

I’ve mentioned these issues before and doing a general search around I can see I’m not alone though there’s no actual resolution from Microsoft yet.  The problems seem to actually be a part of Windows 7.  It took 2 restarts just to publish this post today … not cool at all.

9 Replies to “Windows 7 needs to get cleaned up before going out”

  1. yo. i have a MSI Wind with the first windows 7 beta and have not had any of the problems you describe ever. all MSI-specific funtion-keys (sound, brightness, sleep, turbo, etc) work flawlessly, incl. the network. must be a NC10/Windows 7 compatibility thing..

  3. I use build 7022 and i am very happy with it never had such problems (had some other). by the way after vista anything looks nice

  4. I've been running the 7000 build on my Gateway MX6950, which is essentially a glorified mobile DVD player in our house, and I've noticed that most of the time, when I resume from Sleep (which I've never really used on a Windows machine prior to Win7), my drives are not accessible. They don't show up in the My Computer view, and I can't browse them any other way, though apps run and whatnot. A quick (really) reboot sorts it out, but it's still inconvenient.

  7. I've been running the 7000 build on my Gateway MX6950, which is essentially a glorified mobile DVD player in our house, and I've noticed that most of the time, when I resume from Sleep (which I've never really used on a Windows machine prior to Win7), my drives are not accessible. They don't show up in the My Computer view, and I can't browse them any other way, though apps run and whatnot. A quick (really) reboot sorts it out, but it's still inconvenient.

  9. Yeah, that's why I'm camped out on 7000 build – no reason to keep applying updates when I'm going to have to hose it all anyways.

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