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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.

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What’s not working for you in Windows 7?

I’ve got a short list of bugs in my Windows 7 install and while I know some of these issues are “standard” on my hardware, I have not seen anyone else talk about a few so figured it was worth a share …

  • Sound & Brightness controls don’t always work when resuming from standby.  This is frustrating but at least the NC10 boots back quickly …
  • Bluetooth seems like a mess.
  • I’ve found if I try to open My Bluetooth Places, I can actually cause the Explorer to crash.  It usually freezes up and stalls, but the full Explorer restart seems pretty major.
  • I can pair devices, but they don’t always work.  My mouse needs to be repaired frequently in order to continue working.  I’m using the Apple Mighty Mouse …
  • Dial-Up Networking is a non-starter.  I have my N85 Paired, but find I can only get a data connection over USB.  This is far from awful, but certainly an inconvenience.  The upside is that the N85 charges like this …
  • Desktop Gadgets are flaky.  I only use the Weather but find that sometimes they like to stay on top of active applications or simply disappear.  I have two of them running and right now one (the first one if that makes any difference) seems to have gone away.  This is usually resolved with a reboot.
  • Full Screen mode in Firefox is hit or miss.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it fights with the taskbar to see which one gets to stay on top.
  • Time – I keep finding the clock is off by quite a few hours.  This morning the time was reading tonight and the time server preference seems to fail on most of the server options.  I usually try manually when this happens and eventually it updates.  I’ll have to try setting it manually and leaving it.

    • Think that’s about it – at least in what I’ve noticed and tried.