Microsoft promises improved usage of system resources for Windows 7 compared to vista.

I downloaded the public Beta 1 of Windows 7 in order to see what these marketing promises and hypes about the performance of win7 are worth this time. I used my old MotionComputing Le1600 for this purpose. That is a neat Slate Tablet PC with – well advanced in years – hardware: 1.5 GB RAM, an Intel Pentium M (1.5 GHz) and a 60 GB harddisk. For more details you can find the specifications of the latest version (1.6 GHz)  here (pdf).

Motion Computing LE1600 with XP

The LE1600 was originally designed for and equipped with Windows XP. Everything worked reliable and smooth.
There is nothing to add except two hardware issues: the SD-Card reader would not work reliably and from time to time the LE1600 openend the “Addjust Date/Time” dialog due to some electromagnetic interference.

Motion Computing LE1600 with Vista

As Vista hit the shelves I really wanted to benefit from the improvements Microsoft  had built into it for Tablet PC users. Praise Motion! They were one of the first who had devolped drivers for their older tablet pc generation on time. That is not something you should take for granted these days!

Vista did not make real problems on the LE1600. It worked better than I expected, but not quite as well as I hoped it would. Vista used so much resources that even with 1.5 GB of RAM there was not much left for more than 3 programms in parallel at a time without significant performance degradation. LE1600′s  Graphics  (Intel 915GMS s. GMA 900) is a technology from the days before Vista was released. The LE1600 does not support Vista AERO. Vista Basic works. When using more applications at the same time like Microsoft Office 2007 (Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Visio) and two or three Webbrowsers and some Open Source Software you are really waiting for the responses of the applications. Especially when switching between them.

So the benefit of Tablet-PC improvements in Vista were completely neutralized by the bad overall performance.

Then there was one really annoying driver problem with Vista: the fingerprint sensor would not work. Once you  became used to logging on with your finger, then you won’t ever again want to type your credentials on a screen with a pen. The latter takes too much time, attention and is a security risk, since everyone standing around you in a conference or a meeting can easily see what you tip.

XP drivers would not work under Vista (like the XP-sound drivers which were a requirement if you wanted to hear sound under Vista). Motion provided an upgrade for Vista, trial-version of the Softex-Omnipass solution. Even though I bought the full version and I spent an incredible amount of time trying to reslove the issues with the support of Motion and Softex the Omnipass software never got to work! My impression was they only had Level 1 support.

Vista also opened the  the “Addjust Date/Time” dialog due to some electromagnetic interference from time to time …

Motion Computing LE1600 with Windows 7

Installing Windows 7  is much like installing Vista, unspectacular and I won’t go into any further detail since that topic seems to be covered all over the Internet. Windows 7 seems to be Version 7 of Windows 2008 Server …

Hoping that this time Microsoft would be serious about the planned biometric support (s. Windows 7 Blog)  with the Windows Biometric Framework I looked for a driver for the fingerprint sensor. I wanted to avoid Omnipass. The company that produces the fingerprint sensor is Authentec and they provide a beta-driver here: http://www.authentec.com/win7beta32.cfm. And guess what! It really works!

It seems you can use all other Vista Drivers for the LE1600 for Windows 7 too.

To hear sound of the speakers from the LE1600 with Windows 7  you need to do some manual steps to install the Sigmatel XP drivers. You can find more details on how to install Vista on the Motion LE800 here. These tricks work in analogy for the LE1600 on Vista ans  Windows 7 beta1. As stated for the LE800 I recommend deleting the registry-key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\igfxcui in order to get the right click to respond immediately.

I installed the  LE1700 version of the Motion Dashboard because then you can configure sound and video from the dashboard in Windows 7.

The only device I could not get a driver for is the infraret-port. So I deactivated it in the bios.

First Impression of Windows 7 on the LE1600

The Motion LE1600 is significantly faster and more responsive to user interaction than Vista. Well, that is not too dificult. The important things: switching between several Office Applications works instantly. No waiting for applications or redraws. Impressive. At first glance more responsive than XP.

During installations of  Office, Opera and some other applications  Windows Explorer crashed several times. But the crashed process is automatically restarted and you can continue to use the tablet pc. And hey – it’s only a beta one.

From time to time Windows 7 also opens the  the “Addjust Date/Time” dialog due to some electromagnetic interference…

I will post an update  once I have more on Windows 7 beta 1 in daily operations.

Links Windows 7:

Antivirus Utilities for Windows 7: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/antivirus-partners/windows-7.aspx

Performance Comparison von Windows 7 mit Vista und XP http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3236&page=2

Read about installing the Windows 7 RC on this machine and the first impressions of it.