Feedback I posted about Windows 7 Beta

It now occurs to me that I should have posted every single bit of feedback I've given to Windows 7. There have probably been upwards of 20. Oh well. Here's the latest, sent to Microsoft today.

I posted the following feedback on the Windows 7 beta on 21 April 2009

I'm not sure if this is the right category--my feedback is actually for the backup system. Also, I'm not sure if you track feedback by computer, but I hope so because this is a followup to a problem I reported a couple of days ago.

Following a major problem (my own fault, too) with the main partition on my laptop (this computer), I ended up having to start practically from scratch. The only one of my 6 partitions that I kept more or less as is was the one for Windows 7, because that is the only one that was able to recover itself gracefully. There were issues with the libraries pointing to devices that no longer existed, and I did end up having to fix the startup more than once, but in the end it kept on truckin'. The preinstalled Vista was not recoverable, nor were Ubuntu or OpenSuse. But Windows 7 came back as is.

Even with this remarkable recovery, I would not be so happy today if I had not also been able to restore the data I had backed up from both Vista and Windows 7 into a newly created NTFS partition in the area where Vista used to reside. Sometime in the next couple of weeks, I'll try to get Vista running again so that I won't be in too much of a mess when the beta test for 7 runs out, but in the meantime I'll just use 7 to get my work done. I had previously written to complain that the backup was not working at all once I had restored the system; I think that problem went away on the subsequent reboot, although that might have been one of the times I had to repair the startup files. That problem is the reason this rating is 6 instead of 7. However, once backup did work, I was very impressed to be able to pick files not only from my backups of Windows 7, but also from two installlations of Vista, the one that used to exist on this machine and the one on my desktop (Dell Dimension 8521 which btw was not able to run the Windows 7 beta--that's where I was going to put it first because I do most of my work on this laptop).

I still don't feel like Windows 7 is a new operating system; it still feels like a version of Vista that finally works right. Actually, there is a lot about Vista that works right already; I've been one of its champions rather than one who jumped on the bandwagon that was trying to send it to oblivion. But that is another issue entirely. The reason for this feedback, which I'm also posting on my blog, is that I am very impressed with the restore capabilities of the backup program and the overall resiliency of Windows 7.

Thanks.