Microsoft have finally allowed the general public to beta test Windows 7, so hoping for an improvement on Vista, I downloaded it and checked it out.
I didn’t really get to play around with the operating system too much, since Windows 7 requires a hefty 1 GB of RAM. I was only able to dedicate half of that amount to my virtual machine, so things were extremely slow. This is not an upgrade for people with older machines.
First of all, the install. Microsoft seemed to have finally learnt lessons from Apple and make the install simple; all I had to do is boot up, tell it I wanted a regular install thank-you-very-much, and leave it going. After about an hour (keeping in mind I had half the recommended RAM) and a few configuration questions, I was all set to go. I’ve also been told that installing hardware is a lot less painful than in Vista, with no issues with drivers.
First of all, the things I like. The new taskbar and behaviour of the windows is much nicer: the taskbar now acts more like Mac OS’s dock, showing application icons rather than a tab for each open window. Commonly used programs also now look no different to active programs (again, just like the Mac OS dock), which looks a lot better than previous versions. Windows can now be more intuitively maximised and minimised, presumably a side-effect of introducing touch-screen support.
Gadgets are no longer confined to a sidebar, and instead can be placed anywhere on the desktop. This is a good step in my opinion, since I was never the biggest fan of the sidebar. I’m undecided if I prefer this to the Mac’s Dashboard; I guess they’re both good ways of showing small applications.
I’m unsure on the new window chrome, although I think this is a personal thing because other people have mentioned how they like it. It’s certainly clean, but it’s a bit too clean and rounded for me. It’s certainly not bad (it works), I just think they could’ve done a better job.
One thing I don’t like at all is the new Start Menu. Just as with the new menu system, the whole Start Menu now changes when you press buttons such as “All Programs”, rather than using the classic drop-down method. To me, it seems to require more clicks, which is a bad thing.
Windows 7 is certainly an improvement on Windows Vista, and certainly looks and behaves a lot better than Windows XP. However, I’ll be sticking to XP for now, primarily because of the large amount of memory required to run the operating system. I would recommend people upgrade if given the choice, since it does appear to be a better and more stable OS than Vista.