We’ve always been a multi-operating system studio. In our menagerie of OSes we include XP, Vista, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Win Mobile, Palm OS and the iPhone. About a month ago we were able to add Windows 7 Beta and have become quite impressed.
Microsoft Betas have always been a mixed bag, I remember playing around with the Win 95 beta as early as 93 and experiencing frequent crashes and BSoDs, but that (my techie logic said) is the price of working on the bleeding edge of technology, and at the time there was little doubt of the impressive leap forward that 95 was over 3.11. Since then we’ve tested pretty much every pre-release version of Microsft products just to know what’s coming and this time around we are very impressed.
First Impressions
Our first experience with Windows 7 was late last year when we got our hands on the Alpha. Even though the product was in its earliest stages of development, it felt stable, quick and responsive. Actually it felt considerably faster than Vista on the relatively low-end laptop we were trying it out on. This felt counter-intuitive to our experience with new Microsoft OSes which usually required much more from the computer, confirming that Windows 7 was in fact using less resources was a welcome surprise. The other big difference we didn’t get to until we did a little tweaking with some registry permissions. Currently available with the new Beta version the improved taskbar does a much better job of organizing and quickly showing information on running programs than the old bar ever did.
New and Improved
As mentioned above the new taskbar organizes your open and most used programs in the simplest most intuitive way any OS I’ve seen before ever has. Long named, buttons are gone, and replaced by simple small icon tiles, if various versions of the same program are open you can see the outline of other tiles behind the primary one. Hovering over the tile pops up a scaled down dynamic thumb of what’s happening in the window, hovering over the thumbnail brings up a full screen preview. In the right hand corner of the bar the new desktop button, makes all your open windows transparent letting you see everything that’s going on there, clicking on it minimizes everything.
Everything Slightly Easier
The big changes aren’t really that big. Everything feels terribly familiar, but easier, it’s almost as if Microsoft asked “What’s wrong with Vista?” and set out to change specifically that. The little things are what really shine. One particular feat that was always annoying if not difficult in other versions of Windows, was opening two windows side by side. Sure there were controls for cascading windows horizontally and vertically but it was always a bit of a crapshoot determining which of the 17 open windows were going to end up cascaded. Now all you need to do is drag the window to the left or right corner of the screen and voila it is scaled perfectly to 50% of your screen width, dragging it to the top scales it full screen and dragging it anywhere else gets you the window size you were originally working with. I realize this isn’t anything revolutionary, but it showcases the level of interest that went into tweaking small usability details to create a huge difference in the way the user interacts with the computer.
Verdict
My complaints with this early beta are pretty much the same as always, problems with driver support and higher than usual stability issues, but as I mentioned above this beta feels a lot more like a Release Candidate than a beta, and outshines Vista’s beta on both fronts.
Windows 7 has a lot of ground to cover mostly on public opinion. Vista, although a good operating system, took a serious beating in the media. Exemplified by the Mojave experiment most people who don’t use Vista think Vista stinks. The problem is that if it’s hard to sell your product to someone who already has it, it takes just as much effort to sell it to a bunch of people who thinks it stinks. Windows 7 is Vista fixed, and Microsoft is doing a great effort so far to get it some great press. Although officially they can’t say it on risk of killing off al OS sales until Win 7 comes out, Microsoft is betting on corporate clients skipping Vista altogether and going straight from XP to Windows 7. In my opinion that’s a good bet for almost everybody. For my work computer, that’s exactly what I’m doing.
