First Impressions: Windows 7 Beta

Let me get this out of the way first. I am not a Microsoft fanboy, I am a fanboy of a cohesive user experience that emphasizes form over function, but not at the expense of the function. I have been using Vista Ultimate for almost two years and eagerly look forward to Windows 7. And when it was finally available I downloaded the Beta, and did a fresh install on my Dell Latitude D630 which has a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB Ram, 80 GB 7200 RPM HD, and a Quadro NVS 135M GPU. Now that you know a little about my history and what machine I am testing on, let’s jump into the Beta preview.

First Impressions

I decided to take the plunge and install the 64-bit version of Windows 7 because I was in an adventurous mood and figured this would allow me to better evaluate how far Microsoft has come with their 64-bit OS. Installation was quick and painless and the initial configuration of the OS was simple. It has been said that first impressions are key when experiencing anything new. And my first impressions with the new Windows OS are quite favorable. In my first impressions, I have only one issue with Windows 7 and Microsoft has already released a patch that addresses it. Any MP3 that contained a large header would lose several seconds of the song when first played in Windows Media Player.

The first thing that I noticed was the speed. Windows 7 boots incredibly fast when compared to the Vista SP1 boot times. I never timed my laptop on booting Vista, but I would kick it off and then run and grab something to eat or drink. The second thing I noticed was how simple the interface has become. The new taskbar is exactly what I was looking for. The system tray icons are easily hidden away. I prefer no displayed text on my taskbar and on Vista hacked the registry to remove this text from the icons. The shutdown button has also been moved from a menu to its own dedicated button.

The Good

One of the biggest issues people had with Vista is its lack of stability at times. While Windows 7 is not the most stable OS ever, I have only heard of one BSoD (http://gizmodo.com/5129919/what-a-windows-7-bsod-looks-like) and have yet to experience it myself. I have had the OS freeze on me once which was only cleared when I hard-booted my laptop. In Microsoft’s defense however this was when I was intentionally trying to BSoD my computer. Related to stability is the resource usage. Vista was almost legendary in its mismanagement of memory. The worst offender in my experience was the Desktop Window Manager, dwm.exe. For those of you on Vista you might know what I am talking about. I have seen this little bugger hit an astounding 200MB usage with only eight windows open. Windows 7 however fixed a large portion of that. In my non-authoritative test of the memory management, I launched approximately nine applications and ran an additional five in the system tray, for a grand total of seventy-six processes. Amazingly I only saw 55% RAM usage and 5% CPU Usage idling.

Straight out of the box Windows 7 looks to be one of the most user friendly offerings out of Redmond in a while. This feeling in part is due to my familiarity with computers in general. But there were several applications most people would use pinned to the taskbar by default (Internet Explorer, Media Player, and Explorer). The processing of pinning an application to the taskbar is as simple as dragging the icon to the taskbar. Conversely unpinning an icon is as simple as right clicking it and selecting unpin. This brings us to the first of several new features in Windows 7, Jumplists.

Jump Lists are right-click contextual menus that offer much more than the standard choices. For example the jumplist for Microsoft Word provides a list of recently accessed documents while the Internet Explorer jumplist shows the previous eleven sites visited. The only downside of this is the jumplist is a new API that must be addressed to be useful. The screen grab above shows the default jumplist for an application.

Another new feature worth noting is the upgrades to window management and Aero. A task that I repeatedly engaged in while at college was positioning windows so I could type in one while reading from the other. More often than not I spent an inordinate amount of time moving and resizing these windows for maximum usability. In a brilliant move Microsoft has fixed this. By clicking and dragging a window to the side of the screen, the window is resized to cover that half of the monitor. In addition dragging the window to the top will maximize it. Another choice built into Aero is Peek. Peek is activated by placing your mouse over the taskbar preview. This incredibly useful feature “glasses” out all other open windows showing only the window that is being highlighted in the taskbar. This feature is also on the Show Desktop button on the far right of the keyboard. However when you mouse over this button it glasses out all of the windows giving you a clear view of whatever gadgets are on the desktop.

The final new feature that I will cover in this post is the plethora of upgrades for power users. Microsoft has added so many new keyboard shortcuts its getting hard to keep track of all of them. There are keyboard shortcuts for:
•    Maximizing, minimizing and restoring a window
•    Docking the window to the side of the screen.
•    Moving windows between monitors.
•    Launching the first five applications in the taskbar
•    Peeking the Desktop
•    Moving focus to the taskbar

They also added the “Open Command Prompt Here” Power Toy directly into the OS, and there is a Problem Steps Recorder that can be used for recreating issues and recording what was happening. But perhaps one of the biggest new added power user toys is the ability to burn an ISO without a third party application. These are not all of the power user upgrades by any means, for more see http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx.

The Bad

While Microsoft has done an admirable job cleaning up some of the extra bulk that found its way into Vista, Windows 7 is still a little on the hefty side. A fresh install gobbled up almost 12 GB’s of HD space and a fresh boot still uses around 700 MB’s of RAM. And along these lines there is the occasional application that runs like molasses even though CPU and RAM usage is nowhere near pegged.

I did run across one major glitch, though I think this was more to do with me abusing the crap out of my laptop. Somehow running Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 trial edition capturing video while stress testing a Beta OS doesn’t seem that smart of an idea in retrospect. While my machine did not lock up or blue screen, I did gain some awesome graphical artifacts on my desktop and some low-level corruption of the Aero effects. Clearing these glitches was as easy as changing the Theme to an Aero basic theme and a back again. Since that occurred two days ago, I have only seen this one other time and it again occurred while running Premier Pro CS4. I’m still not sure if this is an actual bug or just Premiere and Aero not playing nice with each other.

The Ugly

Nothing! No Fatal Crashes, No Data Lost, and No BSoD’s. Windows 7 Beta is as stable as Vista if not more so.

Final Thoughts

Windows 7 is what Vista should have been and is, in my opinion, the best operating system that Microsoft has put out in a while. And in a surprise move, they didn’t break anything with this release. Every peripheral and almost every application installed without any issues. There are a couple applications that I was unable to install, but that was not Microsoft’s fault. The installers for the application would fail because they specifically checked for Vista. On top of that, my laptop has run more stable and cooler than it did with Vista. My laptop cooling fans do not kick on near as much and the laptop feels cooler to the touch. In closing, Windows 7 is a quality product and one that I will happily purchase when it is finally released.

Spread the Word: