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The Good

Windows 7 seems to me to be, more or less, Windows Vista done right.  They could have easily called this something like “Windows Vista Second Edition” (if not for the negative association a lot of people seem to have with “Vista”).  Most of the improvements are behind the scenes, with more optimal use of memory, less stuff running in the background, and performance optimizations across the board making your computer seem much snappier.  If you are familiar with Windows Vista, moving to Windows 7 will not be a problem for you at all.  From the surface, it looks mostly the same.

There is a new boot screen that is actually pretty cool.  (I always thought that Vista’s boot screen was particularly boring.)  There is a “pulsing” Windows flag animation, and it’s the same rather you’re booting from scratch or resuming from hibernation.  There’s also a place for a status message that can change… it is used to show you some minimally informative messages during Windows setup.

Some of the bundled applications have been updated.  For instance, Paint now has a ribbon interface much like the Microsoft Office 2007 applications.

WordPad has a similar interface, making it look like a mini Microsoft Word.

There is finally the option to rotate your desktop wallpaper.  You can specify which images you would like and how often you would like the wallpaper to change.

There’s a new “Library” system for keeping track of your files, separately from the regular file system.  This has been tried a few times before, rather unsuccessfully I think.  I haven’t messed with this latest attempt much yet so I cannot comment on its usefulness.

There is new “Homegroup” functionality, which is supposed to make it super easy to share stuff between the Windows 7 machines in your home.  I’ll try this out when I have more Windows 7 machines up and running, and make another post on it if it is particularly interesting.

And then, there is the new taskbar — the first major change to a staple of Windows since it was introduced in Windows 95.  Gone is the long-standing “one button per window” approach, there is now just one icon on the taskbar for each application that is running.  If the application has multiple windows open, you can see them when you hover over or click on the icon on the taskbar.  Also, you can “pin” applications to the taskbar, so that they are there even when they are not running, and you can start them with a single click.  This works kind of like the Mac OS X dock.

I actually kind of like it.  As applications are updated to take advantage of this functionality, you’ll see applications reporting their progress on downloads, burning CDs, or whatever they’re doing by filling in a little progress bar behind their icon on the taskbar.  Also, application-specific commands can be added to the menu that you get when you right-click on a taskbar button.  You can already see this when using Windows Explorer, and other applications included with Windows 7.

I can see the new taskbar turning into something of a mess, once application developers decide that you would definitely prefer to have their application pinned to the taskbar at install time.

The Bad

One thing that I really appreciated about Windows Vista was having several editions on one disc.  Depending on the product key you entered at the beginning of Windows setup, you would install Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, etc.  You wouldn’t have to chase down a separate disc for each edition like you did with Windows XP.  Unfortunately, they seem to have gone back to the old way of doing things, with each different edition of Windows 7 being available on a separate DVD.  This will require a lot of space for me to keep a copy of all of the images for when I need them… compounded by the fact that most editions are availble in 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Many of the applications that were included with Windows Vista have vanished.  Windows Calendar, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Movie Maker, Windows Mail, and maybe others are no longer part of Windows 7.  Most of these have replacements available in the Windows Live suite of applications, which you can download for free.  There doesn’t seem to be any notice or link that points you toward downloading the Windows Live stuff, though, which may lead to a small amount of confusion for new users, say, looking for their mail client.  (Though most people use webmail these days, and I actually suspect that most of these applications will not be missed much.)  The Windows Live apps are offered to you as “Windows Live Essentials” if you enable Microsoft Update.

On a side note, I’m also disappointed that when I installed the Windows Live suite of applications, it included a beta version of Windows Live Movie Maker that had already expired, and made me manually download and install an update right away.  Since the Windows Live installer actually downloaded the applications as it ran, surely this could be fixed easily.

Finally, the name “Windows 7″ itself doesn’t really make much sense to me.  A while back, Microsoft released some reasoning on the Windows Team Blog that explained how to hold your head sideways and count 6 versions of Windows leading up to this one, but it seemed a little iffy to me.  Here’s a very rough sketch of the history of Windows releases (for a time, there were separate “home” and “business” versions):

Windows 1
Windows 2
Windows 3 / 3.1	Windows for Workgroups 3.1
Windows 95	Windows NT 3.5
Windows 98	Windows NT 4.0
Windows 98 SE
Windows ME	Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7

Doesn’t quite add up to 7, no matter how you count it.  Furthermore, Windows 7 is identified as Windows 6.1 internally.

This means that we will probably have a Windows 7.0 in the future, that is actually called something else! 

But, whatever.  Windows 7 is what we have and that’s the name everyone will know.  And, all-in-all, it is an improvement over the previous version, so I suppose I should be happy. 

Tags: Windows 7

This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 9:58 AM and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.