Microsoft Windows 7 is one of those rare beasts: an upgrade that is actually worth the aggravation. I’ve been working with it since its pre-beta days, and have found it, even in the early days, more stable than Windows Vista was when it shipped. One crash and one lockup in pre-release software over nine months of testing is not bad at all!
Visually, Windows 7 owes a lot to Vista. You have the same Aero interface, albeit with a few funky additions, and the same circular Windows logo replacing the old Start button. However, Microsoft has dispensed with that pesky space-consuming Sidebar and allows Gadgets to be placed anywhere on the desktop.The Taskbar has been renovated as well. Quick Launch toolbar is gone.
Now the entire Taskbar is a defacto Quick Launch toolbar. You can pin program icons (or files, for that matter) to the Taskbar with a simple drag and drop. When a program is running, the icon is highlighted, and if it needs your attention, it undulates. You can even rearrange the Taskbar icons by dragging them where you want them to be.
Right click on an icon, and a new type of context menu called a Jump List appears. Jump lists offer the expected context menu options, plus additional items such as a list of recently opened files (or URLs). You can pin a file to a program’s Jump List to force it to be opened with that program, regardless of whether it’s the default application for that file type.
The System Tray has been tweaked too. A little flag reveals the presence of the Action Center, a central repository for all of those application and system messages that pop up at inconvenient times. If there’s a message, the flag will change to alert you, but the pop-ups are a thing of the past. You can also open Action Center to adjust security settings, run backups, update your system, or perform many other maintenance tasks, rather than having to go to multiple locations.
It’s a real time-saver, and eliminates those moments of indecision as you contemplate which utility to run to perform a given task.
To the right of the System Tray, there’s a blank spot with a secret: if you hover the mouse cursor over it, all windows become transparent so you can see the underlying desktop. Click on the spot, and everything minimizes, click again, and they return to their previous state.
The clutter of icons (both wanted and unwanted) in the System Tray has been alleviated too; there’s now an overflow area accessed by clicking the arrowhead to the left of the tray. You can configure what shows up to a certain extent.
Good old Alt-tab application switching still lives, of course (it’s now called Flip), but if you want to see what running programs have open, there’s an easier way: Aero Peek (the name also encompasses the minimize/maximize trick mentioned above). Hover the cursor over the icon and you’ll get live thumbnails of each open document (in IE, you’ll even see each open tab); hover over a thumbnail to get a full-sized preview, and click on the thumbnail to activate the document.
There are a number of other UI tricks as well. Drag the title bar of a window to the top of the screen, and it maximizes, drag it away and it returns to previous state. To view two documents side by side, drag one to each edge and they’ll snap into place, half a screen each.
Once you get beyond the user interface, there are some other seriously useful features. I love location-aware printing, for example. It allows you to set a default printer for each network you’re on, so print jobs won’t end up on the company printer back at the office when you’re working remotely. You can even specify the default for when you’re not on a network at all (perhaps a PDF writer). VPN Reconnect takes care of the times when comm hiccups temporarily disconnect you – when the Internet connection comes back, Windows 7 restores your VPN connection too.
Device Stage is another one of those useful portmanteau features. It gathers all of the functional and management capabilities of a device on one screen, complete with a photo-realistic image (if supplied by the manufacturer). For example, a camera might provide links to its download and photo management, photo editing, customer support, and perhaps a link for accessories shopping. A laptop could have vendor utilities, links to Windows updates, and tech support links. A multi-function device might have its print spool, printer utilities, scanning software, supplies purchase, support, and anything else the vendor thought would be useful. Vendors are encouraged to go wild.
Windows Explorer has had a facelift, introducing the concept of Libraries. Thanks to a much-improved Windows Search, Windows 7 can gather links to related files into these logical folders for Music, Documents, Photos and Videos, not only from your local machine, but anywhere on the network that has been indexed. Users don’t need to know or care where the file is physically stored.
Security-wise, User account control is much friendlier, and more acceptable to users. The default now alerts users if a program is trying to make a change to Windows, and doesn’t pester them if they are. Experts complain that the gentling-down of the default is a security risk, but I think that it’s a necessary compromise –the constant pop-ups and nags were making users shut off UAC in Vista, and that’s even more insecure. One issue Microsoft didn’t address that is a security threat is the default setting “Don’t display file extensions for known file types”. Bad guys have sneaked malware onto machines by putting double extensions on files (such as filename.txt.exe) that have unpleasant results when clicked; users really do need to be aware of what a file actually is.
Support, be it for your mom or an enterprise user, becomes easier with Problem Steps Recorder, which lets a user record, step by step, what led up to a problem, annotate as they go along, and e-mail the whole works to their support person. The program even outputs a zip file to keep itself a frugal consumer of bandwidth. This is one program whose shortcut needs to be on every desktop!
In the Enterprise or Ultimate version of Windows 7, you’ll see nice new enterprise-friendly features such as BitLocker-to-Go, an extension of the BitLocker full-disk encryption that works on mobile devices such as USB keys, and AppLocker, which lets administrators define which applications are allowed to run on a given machine.
And with the addition of Windows Server 2008 R2, bandwidth-friendly BranchCache, which stashes copies of files from a remote server locally to speed access, and DirectAccess, VPN-free remote access whenever the user is on the Internet, join the party.
Consumers, of course, get a ton of goodies too. Media Center, home media streaming, and Homegroup are but three. Homegroup is particularly interesting. It provides a secure, transparent network among a group of Windows 7 PCs. For mixed networks, user still have the old standard methods such as mapping drives and browsing the network for machines and files; Homegroup just makes it a more friendly experience.
Device support and application compatibility are way ahead of where Vista was at launch. Windows 7 profits from the fact that much of its plumbing is Vista-based, so most Vista software runs, and some Vista device drivers can fill the breach when a Windows 7 driver isn’t available for a device (for example, I used the Vista driver for the wireless NIC in the netbook I tested). I’ve tried Windows 7 on two netbooks and both, although not speed demons (let’s face it, netbooks weren’t designed to be speed demons under any circumstances), were much more usable than they would have been under Vista, and battery life was similar to that under XP.
Networking, on the whole, is solid, although, as in Vista, there is no native Cisco LEAP support. Intel’s ProSet tools can compensate for this deficiency for supported Intel chipsets, but with other NICs, your mileage may vary.
For older software that won’t run under Windows 7, but did run under XP, Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate or Enterprise editions introduce XP Mode (available as a free download), an integrated virtualization of XP (complete with XP license) that runs from within Windows 7. One wrinkle, however: it requires hardware virtualization support in the chipset to be enabled, so older or weaker processors need not apply. RAM also needs to be beefed up.Bottom line: Windows 7, despite its name, may not be the seventh desktop operating system from Microsoft, but it’s definitely Lucky Seven.