Two Weeks Later, Living with 7

Microsoft is PC operating software king. Windows is the most dominant platform on PCs today, holding just over 96% of the market. So when the company brings out a new OS it’s time to sit up and listen. Their latest, Windows 7, launched with much fanfare two weeks ago today, on October 22nd, 2009. I promptly installed it on my desktop and on my laptop, replacing previous incarnations of Windows. So 14 days in what’s the new system like to use?

[Ramble: Feel free to skip this]Well first off let me start by saying that, in the interest of fairness, I need to do a little background on my PC experience. I’m a self-confessed gadget geek, I love them to bits. I also love computers to bits, my desktop is the third that I built myself, but I’ve never been overly-enamoured with a particular operating system. Sure Apple’s Mac OSX looks pretty and does a damn fine job but gaming on Macs is pretty poor and I’m a gamer. The same flaw hits Linux, which I dabbled with for a while but that left me sans Civilization (the game, rather than other people) so that was out. Microsoft Windows then was the only refuge and since the days of 3.1 we have had some good times. I’ve used every version of Windows from 3.1, through 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP to Vista. To various degrees these have improved as time and technology progressed. That last one, Vista, caused me some trouble though. I wasn’t alone in this, friends and family all suffered from issues with Vista. In my case it got so bad that I took my shiny 3 month-old laptop and wiped it clean in order to install XP. This was a drastic action but made necessary by the constant glitches, hangs and crashes I suffered through during those 3 months of Vista hell. On the other hand I was and still am quite happy with XP.[/end ramble]

So back to Windows 7 then. The new system is very pretty. I mean it looks really, really nice, save for a hideous default background that you’ll immediately look to change. For anyone used to Vista, Windows 7 will seem very familiar. It keeps the Aero Glass theme with its translucent window borders, and while there are some differences, the window borders and taskbar no longer go opaque when you maximize a window, the new OS looks very much like the old one. Except that it’s shinier. Windows 7 has removed the Sidebar, the portion of screen that Windows Vista reserved for Gadgets such as a photo viewer, clock and the weather app. That thing was a memory hog and it’s good to have it gone. Now instead of being in the Sidebar, Gadgets sit directly on the desktop, so that when you open a window they automatically go to the background. There were few things worse in Vista than having a quarter of the screen being used up for the Sidebar, particularly on older, smaller screens. There are a few more nifty little things included. Push a window into the left or right edge of the screen and it’ll expand to fill half of your desktop. Push another the other way and it’ll expand to occupy the other half. That’s brilliant for comparing folder/page contents or for transferring files between folders. If you push a window into the top of the screen, it will maximize to fill the screen. Show Desktop has disappeared, instead on the right-hand side of the taskbar is a small rectangle. Mouse over it and open windows become transparent, revealing the desktop below. Click on it and the windows disappear to show the desktop below in all it’s glory.

Another thing you’ll notice is this new Taskbar. The new Taskbar replaces the old small icons and text labels of open windows with larger, unlabelled icons. Yes it looks a lot like the Mac OSX dock, but there are a number of differences (you can see Ars Technica for full details). The key feature is the addition of jump lists. Jump lists are triggered by right-clicking the program icon to give a menu of functions within the program. You don’t even have to be using the program to access them, making it possible to visit one of your top 8 visited websites without physically opening Internet Explorer first. Many programs have yet to utilise this feature properly but Apple have been quick to cotton on giving the functionality to iTunes. Another thing new thing is that Windows 7 has eliminated Quick Launch and merged it into the Taskbar. Drag an programs icon from the Start menu or desktop to the Taskbar, and Windows will pin it there, making it possible to launch the program without going near the Start menu. You can also reorganise icons in the Taskbar by moving them to new positions, which is a feature I’ve long wanted but has never been available. If utilised correctly the new Taskbar design really does reduce clutter, but if you don’t like it, you can shrink the icons and/or bring the labels back. What you can’t bring back (and you could in Vista) is the old XP Start menu. This is no biggy as the Vista/7 start menu was/is actually better. Typing with the Start menu open performs a search, to provide quick and easy access to programs and documents and is an awesome feature. Once you get used to the search and the new menu you’ll never want to go back to the one in XP. Jump lists have also been integrated into the Start menu.

The System Tray (the little box to the left of the clock) has received a welcome make-over. As all Windows users are painfully this box can quickly fill with icons that under no circumstances did you what there. These pesky little buggers usually announced themselves with word balloons or pop-ups to alert you to something you didn’t care about at a time when you really didn’t want to see them. Under Windows 7 all of these potential nuisances reside in their own little box, under an icon beside the clock called the ActionCentre, and will only appear when you click on it. You can now choose whether you want alerts and it is quite simple to drag them in or out if you require them to be permanently displayed. I have done this for volume but nothing else. Similarly Windows 7 has reduced the amount of warning messages from the OS about potential issues and security problems. A new area on the taskbar, again beside the clock, called Action Centre and has a nifty little flag icon, keeps track of these notification so that you can deal with them in your own good time. ActionCentre does issue notifications of its own from the System Tray, but you can shut these off if you you want.

Windows Explorer, the thing you use to view all your files, has also received an upgrade, albeit a minor one. Gone is the hideous blue-green bar and in comes a muted, cleaner look. Thankfully the clickable breadcrumb bar and search box remain from Vista. However this search box can be tricky if you want to do advanced searching for anything other than keyword (say creation date). You have to know the search tag is before you can utilise it and I’m sure I still don’t know half of them. Control Panel hasn’t changed much either, it’s still a mess. One very welcome new feature are the Libraries and HomeGroups. The Libraries in particular are very neat. By default, you get 4 of them: Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos. What the do is amalgamate all of your content into readily searchable folders. Right-click any folder on your hard drive, and you can add it to any Library. Say for instance you have one with pictures taken on holiday; right-click and add it to the Pictures Library. Alternatively you can create Libraries from scratch, say Holiday Pictures, and divide your files amongst them as you will. The Libraries can also contain folders/files from External drives, as well as from other Network computers/devices. Then there’s the HomeGroups. This feature is designed to make networking PCs easier. Computers that are part of one HomeGroup can selectively grant each other read or read/write access to their Libraries and to the folders they contain. The HomeGroups can also stream media, enabling you to pipe music or video from one computer to another networked device. They also allow you to share a printer which connected to one PC with all the other computers in the HomeGroup, which is a useful feature if you can’t connect the printer directly to the network. Hidden away the HomeGroups have another function in that they will allow you to share an internet connection from one with all the other devices.

Windows 7 comes with Internet Explorer 8 by default, but the option is there to remove should you so desire. It also comes with Media Player 12, a new version of Media Centre and even a new version of Paint! This venerable classic now has Office 2007′s Ribbon toolbar and adds various prefabricated geometric shapes and other tools including a watercolour brush. Conversely Windows Mail, Windows Movie Maker, and Windows Photo Gallery have fallen by the wayside making for a much cleaner install. The cleaner install makes the amount of hard-drive space Windows 7 occupies smaller. Changes to the Device Manager also make it much less memory intensive than Vista. It just all feels quicker.

I did a clean install as I was moving up from XP. It is possible to upgrade if you’re using Vista and wish to keep all your documents and settings. The clean install is a safer option but you have to back-up all your stuff and then reinstall all of the programs that you like to use. this took me the best part of the weekend to accomplish. There are essentially 3 packages available of Windows 7 for ordinary users: Home Starter, Home Premium and Ultimate. Ultimate sounds great but it has a lot of features you’ll probably never need and it’s prohibitively expensive. Home Starter is a non-runner as it’s primarily designed for really low-end systems and netbooks. Home Premium is ideal for everyday ordinary usage. If you are coming from XP or Vista then you can available of the Home Premium Upgrade edition which is cheaper than the standard retail version. Even if you are going to perform a clean install Home Premium Upgrade will work.

In my experience, Windows 7 doesn’t differ hugely from Vista, it just feels better made. If you had something that worked with Vista then more than likely it’ll work here, if it didn’t then it probably won’t. Windows 7 does have an XP compatibility mode but I’ve yet to actually use it. So while it doesn’t magically fix every Vista problem it is a superior OS. I’ve been using the Release Candidate version for months without a hiccup on my laptop, and while I have had a driver issue with my Ethernet card on the desktop, Windows 7 has been running very smoothly there too. If you have XP and a relatively modern system (mine is just about 3 years old now) then I suggest you upgrade. If you’re on Vista and are having no issues then you might be best off waiting till us early-adopters find all the flaws and Microsoft release Service Pack 1. Bottom line if you have a PC you owe it to yourself to have the best Operating System available today.

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For the record Microsoft recommends a 1-GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of free disk space, and a DirectX 9-compatible graphics card for the 32-bit version of Windows 7, while the 64-bit version requires a 64-bit CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 20GB of disk space. (If you’re especially geeky Ars Technica have done a 15 page in-depth look at the new system, the also used the Hasta la Vista headline that I was so craving to “borrow”)