Microsoft knows they screwed up with Vista. The Mojave fraud (does anyone except me remember that?) did nothing to help, so they are rushing Windows 7 out the door. Microsoft's only hope is to make Vista a fading memory. Of course, Windows 7 has one huge advantage over Vista: it will not allow upgrading from XP systems. That alone will eliminate a major source of pain and bad publicity.
This week I went to an SDForum talk on Windows 7. William Leong, Microsoft's Silicon Valley Evangelist, presented these as the benefits of Windows 7:
- Faster startup.
- Faster at other things.
- Uses less memory.
- Improves laptop battery life.
- Virtual hard disk capability built into the operating system.
- Bitlocker improvements, including the ability to encrypt USB data keys.
- User interface improvements, especially in the Taskbar.
- User Account Control improved to limit interruptions
- Cruft like Windows Messenger and Photo Gallery are not bundled, but available separately (some don't consider this a benefit. I do.)
On paper, these don't amount to much. But I've installed Windows 7 on two machines, and it feels like a totally different and vastly improved operating system, compared to Vista.
The speedups are real and contribute to a much better overall experience. I installed Windows 7 on an old Dell with a 2.26 GHz P4 and only 512MB of RAM. It is actually usable on that very limited platform, though I haven't yet tried to challenge it by running multiple applications with many open windows.
UAC is vastly improved. It still interrupts you occasionally, but not when you are making system changes directly. This alone make Windows 7 vastly more usable than Vista. Security notifications now flow through an "Action Center", with a single icon in the Notification Area (aka System Tray). Cutting down on nagging helps restore the notion that it actually is my computer, after all.
The taskbar is much improved. Many people are comparing it to Apple's Dock, but the Dock and the Taskbar are fundamentally different. Peter Bright at Ars Technica has looked at this in great detail. The key difference between the Vista taskbar and the Windows 7 version is the amount of information available. When you hover over an application's taskbar icon, you see a thumbnail window with a complete title for every open window in that application. This is far better than Vista or XP.
There have been some glitches. Sun's Java plugin seems to require a UAC prompt every time I open a new tab in IE8 (I disabled the plugin to fix that). Bitlocker pays no attention to my local security policy, enforcing an eight-character minimum for passwords (but stubbornly refusing to reveal that length, except through experimentation).
I could, if I wanted, come up with a host of complaints about Windows 7: options I liked that are gone,changes that serve no useful purpose and disrupt my familiar workflows. But on the whole, this is an operating system I can see myself using. That faint praise is a big step up from Vista.
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