A Quick Look at Windows 7

We got Millenniumed. What I mean by that is, like Windows Millennium Edition (Me), Vista hit the market before it was ready for prime time. Me and Vista suffered many of the same problems. They were bloated, slow, and not as reliable as what they replaced. But like Me, if you really looked at Vista, you could see what they were going for, and as Me begat XP, Vista has begotten Windows 7. Having run the release candidate for several months I am happy to say they have gotten it right!

Windows 7 has taken what was good in Vista, expanded and in many cases improved upon it. To start, let's take a look under the hood. Probably the number one complaint about Vista was the amount of horsepower it took to run it. Using the release candidate I was able to run it on a PC with a Pentium 4 2.3 GHZ processor, embedded graphics, and 2GB of RAM. This was the baseline business PC of about three years ago and the software ran perfectly. Officially Microsoft sets the following requirements:

1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor

1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)

16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)

DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

Keep in mind that these are the minimums; it'll work; but probably not very well. Also Windows 7 comes in four varieties, Starter, Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate. Starter is the stripped down version intended for low power notebooks, Home Premium will come on most consumer PCs and will lack the advanced security features that businesses require. Professional is the business version and includes features such as BitLock encryption, but does not include Media Center. Ultimate, as the name implies has all of the toys.

Most machines that are running XP should be able to meet the requirements with minimal if any upgrades. The installation itself took just over 45 minutes and there were no driver problems at all. Now for the bad news. There is no direct upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 7. There is a migration tool, Windows Easy Transfer, which can be downloaded from Microsoft and is similar the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard from XP. But even when using Easy Transfer, upgraders will have to move their files off of the PC before installing Windows 7. Only the clean install option will work on an XP machine and this will format the hard disk. For this Microsoft recommends purchasing an external hard drive, which is a good idea, but represents an added cost to the upgrade. Online backup services such as Mozy can be used for this as well. Once Windows 7 is installed the user must manually re-install all programs and then restore the data.

Upgrading from Vista is a snap. Insert the disk and choose the upgrade option, then go do some yard work or something, you're going to have a couple of hours to kill. It requires almost no interaction from the user beyond entering the product key, so you don't have to sit in front of the PC while the upgrade proceeds, just check on it every now and again to make sure it is progressing.

The major complaint that I had with Vista was driver compatibility. At best it was hit and miss, and at worst you were just out of luck. On my test machine I have a number of devices; a scanner, CD carousel, a PDA, assorted game controllers, and both video and still digital cameras, along with a photo Inkjet printer and an old HP LaserJet printer. On some of this hardware the newest driver was written for Windows 98. Windows 7 took it all with no trouble, and everything was working correctly on the first try.

Now that the software and all of the hardware is up and working it's time to check out the desktop. For Vista users it will look familiar. The Start Button has been replaced in the default scheme by the "Orb" although there is an option to use the Windows "Classic" Scheme. How the System Tray (The area by the clock.) displays has also been changed as have many of the icons. Hidden startup icons can be found behind a drop arrow that when clicked leaves them displayed until it is clicked again and customizing which icons are always displayed and which are hidden is also easy.

The Desktop in general is very similar to the Vista Desktop. The familiar My Documents folder is gone, replaced by an icon labeled with the user's name. It is also replicated by an icon in the Quick Launch bar called Libraries that allows the user to create new groupings of folders containing documents, photos and other media. In general the look and feel of the icons on the desktop has been improved and in general the desktop simply looks better.

Gone is the Windows Sidebar. This was an area that could be brought up on the right side of the Vista desktop that held small applets referred to by Microsoft as "Gadgets". They included a clock, system monitor, weather applet and several others. The Sidebar was a notorious resource hog. Happily they have ditched the Sidebar and kept the gadgets which can now simply be installed and placed anywhere on the desktop the user prefers. In Vista there was some limited third party development of Gadgets, perhaps with the new functionality we will see all kinds of useful tools appear in this category.

Another issue with Vista was the User Account Control feature. This was designed to protect the user from malicious software by confirming with the user certain actions before taking them. In practice most users found it so annoying that they simply disabled it. User Account Control is still with us in Windows 7 but it has been made more flexible allowing the user to set the level at which it will pop alerts on the desktop. It is controlled by a slider that has four positions but in reality only has three settings. At the highest level it will dim the desktop and pop an alert when any changes are made to the computer. The two middle settings are basically the same, the higher one dims the desktop and the lower one does not. Either pops an alert when a program attempts to make changes to the PC but not when those changes are initiated by the user. The lowest setting simply turns user account control off.

A couple of new and useful tools have been added. One, the Snipping Tool can be used to take screen shots of portions of the screen and these can be e-mailed to other people at the click of a button. This is a big improvement over the old Shift+PrtScn method that has existed since Windows was introduced. Another called Sticky Notes allows a user to make small memos and "stick" them to the desktop. Hopefully Sticky Notes can help to eliminate the forest of labels and Post It notes that we find on so many users' displays.

Media Center users will not find anything surprising in Windows 7. There are a few very minor changes but it essentially works the same way it has since XP. Windows Media Player is identical to the one found in Vista although there appear to be some improvements in performance. In my case syncing music to my Blackberry in Vista was difficult as it refused to recognize it and required several disconnects and reconnects before it would. Windows 7 picked it up immediately and I have had no problems. The Windows firewall has received some improvements including a rules based configuration that will make it more customizable to fit the way the PC is used. It's not as good as most third party firewalls, but they are making progress.

There are some interesting new features in Windows 7. If a user has multiple windows open and needs to get to one quickly he can simply click the title bar of a Window and shake the mouse. This feature, called Aero Shake, will cause all of the open windows except the one clicked to disappear. Simply do it again and the windows reappear. A companion feature to this is Windows Peek. Peek can be activated by pointing to the small rectangle at the far right edge of the taskbar, which also serves as the Show Desktop button. This causes all of the open windows to become transparent. I wonder what the usefulness of this is because they simply appear as outlines with none of their information visible. If you have lost a window behind several others I guess it would help you find it. The final part of this trio of windows tools is Windows Snap. This feature allows the user to resize windows by dragging them to the edges of the screen. When dragged about halfway off the screen the window automatically resizes to so that no part of it is off the screen or blocking any other window.

There is no mail client included in Windows 7. Outlook Express and its Vista progeny Windows Mail are both gone from Windows 7. These apps have been replaced by Windows Live Mail which can be downloaded for free from Microsoft. The thinking is that Microsoft does not want to clutter a user's PC with applications just assuming that they will be used, although WordPad, Notepad and Paint are still present.

The evaluation? It's excellent software. It does all of the things that Vista did well and doesn't do any of the things that made us hate Vista. My recommendation? If you have a PC that is running XP now and you are happy with it, stick with it. While Windows 7 is a big improvement over XP, XP is stable, familiar, and reliable. While there are a lot of improvements in Windows 7 they are not worth the difficulty and risk of lost data associated with upgrading from XP to Windows 7. If you are using a PC with Windows Vista, go for it. The upgrade is easy and a whole bunch of problems go away.