May 5th, 2009
What to expect from Windows 7
It feels odd to be writing a review of Windows 7 this early. Normally, software reviews don’t make sense until the code is officially released and you have to make a buying decision: upgrade, pass, or buy a new PC with the new OS. The Windows 7 Release Candidate, available for download now, is still technically a pre-release product, and it’s free for your unlimited evaluation (at least until it starts shutting down every two hours beginning on March 1, 2010 and stops working completely on June 1, 2010).
From a features and capabilities point of view, Windows 7 is essentially done. It’s all over but the process of hunting down bugs, many of them associated with OEM hardware and drivers. In a bygone era, code this stable and well tested might have been released as a 1.0 product, followed six months later by a service pack. Not this year. Microsoft is treating Windows 7 as the world’s most ambitious shareware release ever. Try it. Use it for a few months, or even a whole year. If you like it, buy it. If you don’t like it, go back to your old Windows version or switch to a completely different OS.
In short, if you’ve got a spare PC and enough bandwidth to download two or three gigabytes worth of code from Microsoft’s servers, you have everything you need to do your own review. If you’re the least bit interested in Windows, from a personal or professional point of view, then I recommend you do exactly that.
In that spirit, this post is not going to be a traditional review at all. I’m not going to deliver a verdict or fill in a report card or offer a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. I’m not going to tell you how wonderful or awful it is overall or which specific features rock and which ones suck.
Instead of that conventional review approach, I want to share my experiences after six months of using Windows 7 full time. My attitude over that six months has been to keep an open mind, learn how the operating system works, and incorporate its features into my work style. If you’re planning to evaluate Windows 7, I urge you to try the same approach: Keep an open mind, try to figure out how it works, and see if maybe some small changes in old work habits can pay big dividends in productivity. Throughout this post and the accompanying image gallery, I’ve included instructions on how to customize important elements if you really can’t stand the new approach. Armed with that information, you can form your own opinion.
A few preliminary notes: Conventional wisdom says you should do a clean install. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, but I’ve also had good luck upgrading systems from Windows Vista. The upgrade takes longer than a clean install, but at the end of the process you don’t have to reinstall all your software (and deal with activation hassles) and you don’t have to transfer files and settings from your backup.
Overall, I’m impressed with how reliable this Windows release has been. It also seems more than adequate in terms of performance. I haven’t taken a stopwatch to measure speeds and feeds, but overall, every common operation in Windows 7 feels snappy and responsive, even on old hardware. I haven’t seen significant changes in startup and shutdown times over Windows Vista on the same hardware.
In the remainder of this post, I look at Windows 7 from a variety of viewpoints, with opinions and advice on what you can expect in your review. I look forward to reading your comments and mini-reviews in the Talkback section.
Page 3: The desktop, Start menu, and taskbar
Page 4: Windows Explorer and search
Page 6: Windows Virtual PC and XP Mode
One topic I don’t cover here is the new Windows Media Center and some slick new media-sharing features in Windows Media Player. I’ll tackle that topic in detail next week.
In the gallery: A bumped-up Windows Experience Index, data-rich Resource Monitor, and crisply organized Action Center
Next page: Hardware and drivers –>
Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 05/05/09
