Windows 7: First impressions
With its much-maligned Vista operating system now fading quickly into the history, Microsoft is putting the final touches to Windows 7, the Vista successor. The company has already conducted a public – and by all accounts successful – beta release of the operating system. We took a copy of the Windows 7 beta release for a spin to see what it had on offer.
Quick
The first thing worth noting is that installing Windows 7 was quick. Very quick. I didn’t actually time it but a short while after I started the install, a window popped up announcing that the install was finished and ready to go. For a long time just installing a copy of Windows was resulted in a good couple of hours of clicking, restarting and entering codes. No more. Windows 7 does pretty much everything unaided and with the minimal amount of user interaction.
The other thing worth noting is that Windows 7 recognised just about every piece of hardware installed on my desktop machine. It’s not a long list but it’s got a couple of disk drives, a wireless card, and video card. The wireless card it didn’t configure straight off the bat but as soon as I connected an ethernet cable the OS downloaded the necessary software and seconds later the wireless network was ready to go. Considering this is a beta release of Windows 7 and this particular wireless card is not a well-known brand, it’s pleasing not to have to fiddle with anything.
Desktop
It has to be said that the Windows 7 interface is very appealing. It’s clean and fast on my dual-core PC equipped with 2GB of memory. Obviously the 2GB of memory helps but it is not just the speed that impresses. It is also that a default install is noticeably clean and stays out of the way as much as possible. Really, that is what you want on a desktop. You don’t want a never ending onslaught of popups warning you at every possible opportunity that you’ve made a mistake or failed to setup some piece of hardware. Just as much as you don’t want that annoying Clippy chap constantly asking you if you want help.
The taskbar in Windows 7 is significantly better than anything that Vista or XP ever had to offer. But, having said that, there is a tendency to undermine itself with its own cleverness, making it something you’ll either love or hate. For the uninitiated, the taskbar displays just icons and has a series of flyouts with previews of open windows that appear as you hover over the open application icon. So, for example, with a few IE8 tabs open a preview of each one is displayed above the task bar. It makes it easy to select the window you want. Of course, being able to simply click on the application icon and bringing that to the foreground would be better than having to wait for the popup previews and then selecting one. It’s just a little too clever for its own good.
Windows 7 also boots reasonably quickly. Not as quickly as many may hope but from power-up to a working desktop (including login) in just over 30 seconds is not too bad. Microsoft has said that it is hoping to reduce these startup times to a range closer to 15 to 20 seconds. Whether that will materialise only time will tell but right now Windows 7 is every bit speedy as a relatively new Ubuntu Intrepid installation.
Not derivative
Microsoft has been doing a good job lately of copying rival Apple – think mobile app store, Zune – but Windows 7 could never really be classified as a Mac OS X knockoff. It’s not. Windows 7 has its own look, its own feel and its own metaphor. I’m not sure that the task bar is actually as good as the Dock on Mac OS X, but it’s certainly a significant improvement over previous releases. And, most tellingly, it is a lot nicer looking than a default Ubuntu install’s taskbar.
In the relatively short time I have been using Windows 7 it worked really well. Managing files and documents is a snap and organising and playing multimedia was straightforward. It can’t be overemphasised how much good work appears to have gone into keeping the operating system out of your way and just letting you get on with the job at hand.
Windows 7 looks like it is everything that Vista was meant to be but never managed to pull off.
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