Thanks to Adam Cochran of TalkingDigital.org fame, and Rick Castellini of HelpMeRick.com fame, Grand Junction, Colorado had an extremely fun and informative Windows 7 party last night at the Grand Junction Realtors Association.

With the release of Windows 7, there’s been a lot of questions across the country about what the improvements are, how to upgrade, and if the benefits are enough to make the switch to Windows 7 right away.

Adam and Rick did an awesome job of answering all these questions and tons more.  They had two systems running Windows 7 on display for everyone to see and play with.

Adam Cochran and Rick Castellini

Microsoft says that networking with Windows 7 will be even easier, so Rick and Adam put it to the test.  They networked the two computers right before our very eyes, and showed off some of the features, like permissions, password protection, and deletion.  Deletion does have one pitfall that’s new for networking – once it’s gone, it’s gone.  There is no recycle bin for network deletions.

I played with Ricks laptop for about 10 minutes and immediately went to the admin consoles, to see what was in store for an advanced user.  In the process, I only had a UAC (User Account Control) popup window once.  Rick and Adam went on to explain that Microsoft has tuned the process, and that there are UAC controls to adjust how often you want to be alerted by UAC popups.  I was impressed by the finer control that users now have on UAC and the initial settings being very permissible.

The interface itself is a bit different,  and I think it would take a bit of getting used to.  The taskbar seems to have a quick launch and open programs buttons on the taskbar, but they don’t have a very good demarcation, and they tend to look all the same at first glance.  They also group things together, and create a sub-panel to choose which one you want.  So if I have two Word documents, it will put it into the same button, and display the two as a sub-menu popup when I hover over the button.  Might be fine for just two, but I often have 5 or more Word documents open at a time.  As I sit here after the fact, I have to wonder how 10 or more documents would look in that preview mode.

Another point they discussed was the release of Microsofts new Security Essentials anti-virus package, which is free, and talked about some of the other anti-virus packages, such as AVG ,  which is also free, but getting bloated, forcing upgrades to new versions, and pushing banners to upgrade to a paid premium package.  One point they made was that AVG is around 80 MB in size now, and the new Security Essentials is substantially smaller, and much faster as well.  I am surprised that they didn’t mention Prevx, which is a paid product, but is faster than AVG, requires no definition files,  is only a 800K download (4MB unpacked size on my HD), and takes only 3 minutes to scan my entire system.  Prevx saved my bacon years ago, so I am a bit biased.

The party was not only informative, but it was highly relaxing as well.  There were ballo0ns and streamers, coffee, drinks, and snacks to make everyone feel welcome and at home.  The final few minutes were filled with various questions about when and how to upgrade, and everyone left the party with a  new sense of things to come.

Great Job Rick & Adam!  You are my new Windows 7 Experts!