Windows 7 - the wait is over
The release candidate is out. The launch date is set. Where Windows Vista failed to inspire the market, will Windows 7 succeed?
17 June 2009
Rather unfairly, Windows Vista just hasn’t taken off in the way that it should have. We say unfairly because – well, to be honest, there’s not much wrong with Vista. Yes, the launch was a bit bumpy with some poor application support and patchy driver availability, but a few months after the launch things had settled down.
But perhaps it’s a testament to how good Windows XP is that Vista didn’t supplant it – XP is still the world’s most adopted operating system (Windows XP currently has a 61.54% market share with Vista coming second at 24.35%). That said, there are still 200 million users of Vista, and that’s certainly not a shabby number.
Where Microsoft hyped Vista (remember ‘the wow is now’ campaign?) it’s certainly being much more circumspect with Windows 7. Even the name is restrained compared to ‘Vista’.
We’ve been tracking Windows 7 all through development, working with beta and finally the release candidate – and we really like what we see. What impresses most is that Microsoft has stuck to its guns on the changes made between XP and Vista. It would have been all too easy to have a knee-jerk reaction and take a backwards step, but what we see with Windows 7 is a series of refinements that nail into place the changes first seen in Vista.
With Mac OS X Leopard due out at around same time (Windows 7 launches on 22 October), it’s hard not to draw comparisons between the two companies’ approaches. For both operating systems, this is really a consolidation release – yes, there are new features, but most of the changes are under the bonnet. It would be unfair to call either a service pack, but neither feels like a full release either. Of course Apple has realised that and pitched the cost of Leopard very low - $29. Microsoft pricing is not yet confirmed, but rumours of options as low as $49 have been circulating – which would be welcome.
To get Windows 7 to market quickly (the delayed launch date of Vista becoming something of a running gag) several interesting technologies have been dropped: the WinFS storage system, for instance. And that’s not the only thing that’s gone. The classic start menu has bitten the dust, as have Windows Ultimate Extras (which weren’t very ultimate anyway) and Windows Calendar.
In Europe, it’s been announced that Windows won’t come with a Web browser – people will have to download their own or OEMs will install one (or more). This is to get around the anti-trust investigation by the EU – although it would probably have been better to install packages for the leading browsers and let people choose. Windows Photo Gallery, Movie Maker and Mail are also removed, but these can be downloaded as a separate package. Again, this is unnecessary inconvenience for the user, really.
The biggest visual change is the taskbar, which has been enlarged and looks similar to the OS X dock – but the similarities are only visual, since the taskbar still works in a similar way, although applications can now be pinned to it. Hovering over an icon shows a preview of the document being edited. If you right-click on an icon you see a ‘jump list’ – a list of common tasks related to that application, plus you can also pin frequently used documents to an application’s jump list.
Windows Explorer is streamlined, with the biggest change being the left-hand pane, where ‘Libraries’ can now be found. Libraries are similar to stored searches – they provide a tailored view of the file system, to show you things that you choose – such as all your images – regardless of where they are. The big difference is that you can’t run a stored search and then drop files onto it, which you can with a Library, making them more useful.
Security gets an overhaul – immediately apparent when you launch Windows Defender or Windows Firewall, the latter in particular now having a far greater number of configuration options.
Device management has had a big rethink – with all of your devices available for management and configuration in one place.
Once you start digging into Windows 7, you notice that there are lots of little – but useful – improvements. For example, in ‘folder options’ you can now hide drives that are empty and try to search within the content of unknown file types.
Installation is very similar to Vista – which is to say that it’s excellent. It takes around half an hour and only a few questions are asked (things such as time zone).
Performance is excellent – very good indeed, we found it noticeably better than Vista. Stability is really good – we haven’t experienced any kind of crash or snarl-up throughout use – even when running some older applications that Vista didn’t get along with terribly well.
There are some niggles – like Vista, we have, incomprehensibly, still got more versions of Windows than we need: six in fact (Starter Edition, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate). This really does need sorting: one version should be enough, it’s in stark contrast to most other operating systems, where there is a desktop and server version – Windows comes in multiple versions for each.
Our balanced view is that Windows 7 is far more than ‘Vista fixed’. There’s some truth in that, if you think that it was ‘broken’ in the first place – but really it’s a new, significantly improved version of Vista. True, new features are thin on the ground, but improvements are at every turn, and it boots faster, runs faster and is more stable. It deserves to unseat XP as the world’s leading OS – we think it’s certainly the best Windows so far.
