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I found Windows 7, officially released Thursday, to be confusing and disorienting from the very start. I felt lost: where was the familiar sensation of pain, frustration and rage that has acted as the compass guiding me through every Windows experience I’ve had since my school days?
AP
Yes, indeed, dear reader: I’m kicking off my review with yet another snotty and unbearable swipe against every edition of Windows that came before it. Think of it as that last long, luscious drag that a smoker takes of his final cigarette before he stubs it out and breaks open his first box of Nicorette gum. I have to get in my last licks. Soon, snarky dismissal of Windows will seem as out-of-touch as Rich Little’s Ronald Reagan impersonation.
Windows 7 is a tremendous upgrade. Several months of using the public betas followed by two weeks with the final, shipping edition have left me hugely impressed, bordering on elated.
If you’re upgrading from Windows Vista, the move to W7 is more or less carefree. It was a straightforward metamorphosis: after well under an hour of DVD-spinning, my three-year-old Vista laptop shut down and restarted as my new Windows 7 machine, with all of my settings and software intact.
Woe be unto the poor XP users. Upgrading from Windows XP is a complete teardown and rebuild; step one is to perform a complete backup of all of your data so that all of your apps and data can be reconstructed after the installer levels your old system.
It’s almost as if Microsoft is punishing you for having refused to buy Vista. Of course, it’s only fair. They’ve already been punishing Vista users for years. (I’m sorry. Look, there’s no special gum or patch to help me curb my Windows Snark addiction so the occasional backslide must be expected.)
W7 ran every XP app I tested. If you encounter an incompatibility, the Professional and Ultimate editions of the OS can run an old app inside a “virtual” XP PC alongside modern apps that are aware that we’ve had a couple of new Presidents since Clinton left office.
Many of the apps that you’d expect to get automatically are left off of the DVD entirely, and are only available via a separate (free) download. At least W7 makes it easy to discover and acquire these freebies. It’s somewhat cloudlike: via “Extras And Upgrades,” the available extras waiting for you on Microsoft’s servers feel vaguely as though they’re an extension of your desktop.
It’s a big improvement over Vista and XP. Many of those users were born, led productive lives, raised children, and died without ever knowing that they didn’t necessarily need to buy a photo library app.
It doesn’t take long to put any installation complaints behind you. Windows 7 is noticeably faster than Vista. Startups on my HP were at least 20 seconds faster, as were shutdown times and waking from sleep.
The whole OS feels snappier as well, particularly on a netbook. Windows 7 has multiple enhancements to make it a swift, practical OS for cheap CPUs, such as a resource manager that doesn’t load system components that aren’t immediately needed. Vista is all but unusable on an N270 processor.
As a lifelong Mac OS user, my first pang of envy came when I checked out the new version of the Windows taskbar. It’s been completely reinvented for Windows 7 ... chiefly by stealing many of the Mac OS Dock’s best features.
(That’s not a snark. If every company stole the best features of their competitors’ products, users would be far, far happier.)
The taskbar is no longer just a horizontal list of active windows. It’s now a full-blown application launcher where your most important apps are always a click away (theft 1). And it’s a notification system (theft 2): a shimmering icon indicates an app that wants your attention; a progress bar allows you to keep an eye on big file download without having to actively tab over to the window in question. A W7-studly app can even incorporate features into “Jump Lists” integrated into Taskbar icon, such as creating empty document windows or switching to the next track in a playlist (theft 3).
And when the user performs their first alt-tab to switch between application windows, they’ll be very, very pleased and very, very envious if they’re also a Mac user.
Vista’s old, distracting 3-D window parade is gone. In its place is a very pretty and hugely useful transition in which each active window warps into and out of invisibility as you tab across your workspace.
And they’re all live windows. This new switcher makes it easier to spin straight to the specific window you want but it’s also handy for simply grabbing a quick uncluttered glance at (say) a Twitter window and then dropping back to your original Word document after you’ve determined that nobody you’re Following has anything interesting to say about their individual breakfasts.
Many reviews insist that the new taskbar is superior to the Mac OS X Dock. I can’t agree. Taskbar icons are still little more than pushbuttons, popup menus, and previews. In Mac OS 10.6, the Dock acts as a wormhole that allows me to move data throughout my whole system. I can drag a file attachment out of my Inbox, hover it over the Documents folder in my Dock, and then “fly” through my subfolders until I’ve arrived at my Documents > Books > iPhone Fully Loaded 3rd Edition > Edited Chapters directory, where I finally drop the file. To name but one example.
Windows 7 is clearly superior in the important category of window layout tricks. Drag a window to the very top margin of your screen and it maximizes to fullscreen dimensions. Need to compare two documents side by side? Drag one to the right edge and the other to the left edge: they’ll tile automatically. “Shake” a window and all other windows will minimize themselves into the taskbar. Shake it again, and your desktop is back to its original state. Every Mac OS app has a “Hide Others” command but frankly, it’s more fun to shake the window than navigate to an application menu. I find that I miss it every time I switch back to my Mac.
Networking has been improved, from “hit or miss” to “it (mostly) just works.” I have a zoo-like menagerie of devices and services on my home network and Windows 7 duly located and connected to nearly all of them without prodding. It not only found all of my shared machines, but it also recognized that two of them had been set up as music servers. Bravo ... and this praise skips over a new “View Available Networks” feature that makes multiple networks a snap to discover and manage.
Device management
Which brings up Windows 7’s management of devices in general. Instead of taking a schizophrenic approach, Windows 7 sees your peripherals as independent entities which can serve multiple functions.
W7 sees that I have a fax machine, and a scanner, and a color printer. But through the Device Stage, Windows also sees it as an HP multifunction document center with its own unique collection of services. It’s a far more natural way of managing peripherals. And a new “Devices And Printers” folder brings you just one location to visit when you want to know “What devices are currently attached, and why is this one flash drive not mounting properly?”
Vista’s notorious nagging permission requests (“You have moved your mouse in the vague direction of the Windows Explorer icon. Many PCs become infected by viruses downloaded via browsers. Should I allow the pointer to continue to move? [Allow]/[Deny]”) have been eliminated. W7 is more selective with its warnings.
The whole system-wide notification system has been enhanced with the addition of the new Action Center. Every single warning, caution and advisement that flashes by your screen is collated into a single window ... often accompanied by specific advice on how to correct problems.
And this being Windows, things will go wrong. That’s not a snark, either; it’s a simple fact of life first noted in the Book of Job.
W7 brings new tools for dealing with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Via either the Control Panel or the Action Center, Windows Troubleshooting fixes existing problems and heads off future ones via automated diagnostics and maintenance. We’ve seen this sort of thing before and it usually under-delivers. Although its true sophistication is unproven but I’m relieved to find an open admission that maintenance and troubleshooting are by far the worst parts of the Windows experience.
The new Reliability Monitor is another part of this new awareness that mankind is born unto trouble. At any time, you can pull up a graph of your machine’s overall reliability and stability. A click will reveal any system changes that occurred at around that any point in the graph, so that you can identify an event (like the installation of a new piece of software) that might have caused the graph, and your system stability, to dive for the canvas.
Them’s the highlights.
The lowdown
Like Mac OS X 10.6, Windows 7 is largely a collection of little touches that taken together, hugely improve your life, starting today. Onward to the future. New APIs bring aggressive support for multitouch input and hardware sensors. With Vista, a developer of a multitouch-aware media player needed to know what kind of touch sensor the PC had, and how, specifically, to read its inputs. Windows 7 handles all of that on the OS level, which hopefully will encourage a new wave of touch- and sensor-aware devices and software.
So is Windows 7 the new leader in multitouch computing? Hardly. OS support for multitouch is an important and laudable feature. But it’s not reflected in the user interface in any way. Even on a notebook or a tablet that supports touch, you’ll be squinting and aiming carefully and Undoing a lot of things. Windows 7’s buttons and controls are still designed to be tapped by a mouse pointer. My fingertips are substantially larger than a single pixel. I have to conclude that Windows 7’s multitouch is a technology that will hopefully empower a future OS or app or user interface. For today, it’s nothing but potential, intriguing though it might be.
Ditto for Windows 7’s sensor support, which I found even more interesting than multitouch. I played with some sensor apparatus at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center (yes, the NERD Center). A light sensor was interfaced to a standard laptop via an Arduino-like interface board, where it could communicate with a custom-made RSS newsreader app. If you took the notebook outside on a sunny day, the window would gradually shift to larger type and thicker fonts as the ambient light levels increased, to ensure that the screen remained readable despite competition from the Giant Day-Ball.
I love ideas like that. As with mulitouch support, Windows 7 abstracts the sensor hardware, acting as the middleman to light sensors, accelerometers, tilt sensors, GPS devices ... it’s a long list.
The sensory and multitouch support in Windows 7 are examples of both the strength and the weakness of the PC platform. Apple controls the operating system and the hardware. If Steve Jobs doesn’t think that an ambient light sensor has any place in a MacBook, then it simply doesn’t exist.
The PC hardware space has no such restrictions and thus is open to wild innovation. Fantastic new design concepts and features can be brought to market at the slightest whim of the smallest notebook manufacturer. It’s easy to imagine a multitouch Windows 7 notebook that adapts its entire UI based on its current environment and which also warns you to take an umbrella when it senses a drop in barometric pressure.
Ah, but there’s a flipside: Microsoft has absolutely no power or authority to lead manufacturers into adopting any new idea, no matter how interesting. Until a manufacturer decides to step away from the easy money of cheap hardware and design something special, Windows 7’s multitouch and sensor support will remain mere potential.
Still, it’s cause for excitement. NERD really did give me a hell of a nice demo and I’m keen to imagine. My MacBook has been annoying me by “waking up” from system sleep while it’s in my bag. A suitably-thoughtful PC laptop maker could integrate a tilt sensor into the hardware, and add a simple OS extension that enforces a mandate: “For &@^*’s sake, DO NOT WAKE under ANY circumstances if the logic board is perpendicular to the ground!!!”
To upgrade or not?
Is Windows 7 worth the upgrade? Absolutely. The Home Premium upgrade package costs $119 and whether you’re switching from XP or Vista, it comes with a profound sense of liberation.
I’m sorry to report that Microsoft has stuck to their nutsy system of multi-level uprade packages. Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate will cost you $199 and $219 as upgrades. Mostly they include features that are beyond the needs of the average user. The extra cash gives you the ability to run a virtual Windows XP machine, enhanced backup features, support for languages that you don’t understand, and the ability to connect to extended office networks.
I’ve consistently proclaimed that a modern Mac and a modern PC are both excellent machines and the average user can be very happy with either one. If you want an affordable machine and a wide selection of hardware, go for Windows. If you’re willing to sacrifice those things for greater simplicity, elegance, stability, and a usually-shrewd eye for the future direction of computing, go for a Mac.
So noted. But there’s no denying the fact that Windows 7 is a proud, proud moment for Microsoft. The gap between Macs and PCs is still there. The difference is that today it’s merely palpable; a year ago, it was utterly soul-crushing.
As a guy who uses PCs alongside Macs and who only wants good things for his readers, I couldn’t be happier. For the first time in this millennium, Windows is a slick, modern OS that’s built with the understanding that an 88 percent market share is something that needs to be earned, not simply inherited.