Why am I currently giddy like a freshmen in college surrounded by lots of hot women? I am not sure why, but I know it has to do with Windows 7. Windows 7 has to be the biggest improvement in the last few releases of Windows, much like going from Windows 98 to Windows XP, and is what Windows Vista should have been.
Windows Vista was extremely slow and sluggish on the machine I tested it on, now I will agree that the hardware is not that great however the machine still works and I am pretty sure that I am not the only one with older hardware lying around. Not only that, but the average user does not have the latest and greatest machine either. The hardware is as follows:
Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz, no HT
1 GB of ram
60 GB IDE hard drive
Atheros Wireless 802.11g network card
GeForce 4 Ti 4600 128 MB ram (22" wide screen monitor at 1680 x 1050)
Windows Vista had major issues running software, it would lock itself up when it did not have the resources it required, and when running multiple pieces of software on the same machine it would stop responding or not re-draw certain portions of the screen. The situation did not improve much with Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista. Vista may have had some cool features but they were not good enough for me to keep playing with it and it got in the way more than it got out of the way. From my viewpoint it was a hopeless mess, and not worth my time.
Windows 7 however is an absolute blast, it is like night and day. Running the CPU at a 100% the OS stays very fluid, I am able to switch applications, switch to new applications and keep doing what I was doing no matter what is going on in the background. The scheduler has been improved dramatically, and it is noticeable. I have yet to really enjoy working with any Windows OS that Microsoft has released, however I currently feel like I did when I bought my first Apple Mac, the iBook. Here is an OS that will let me do what I need to get done and move out of my way to let me complete the task at hand.
Resource usage is also much lower. In Vista it would spend a lot of time paging, and the memory usage was around 80% all the time in Windows 7 with more software running it is still under the 60%. The fact that when it is booted up it uses less resources also helps with the experience as a whole. New applications open faster and since there is less paging going on the whole system responds faster.
The new "task bar" and way it shows what applications are running is neat, and while people can claim it was taken from the Dock in Mac OS X, I believe Apple could learn something from Microsoft in this case. The whole mousing over the icon to see all of the windows that are active is absolutely fantastic. With my current graphics card I do not get to see the full previews, nor the glass interface, even even so I prefer the method Microsoft used. Mouse over and you get to see the windows, then click to activate. With the Mac OS X Dock you get the same effect, except you have to right click, which is more of a hassle and slows me down, and as such it is never used. You are also able to pin applications to the start bar much like the quick start functionality that Windows XP had, and this is absolutely awesome. Once again people say it is taken from Mac OS X's Dock, and here I would say they are right. However the functionality is practically the same, and I believe that both OS's can learn from each other.
Cleanliness. Windows 7 is very clean and polished. The task bar being different certainly helps with this, even now with almost 25 windows open my task bar is not a mess of small little bars with some text on it. It is a bar with a bunch of different application icons. I may not have noticed the same thing with Vista because of battling with it, Windows 7 just seems to have been taken better care of. The control panel has been organised in an sensible way, and yet there is still a way to go back to the previous versions if you are used to it. The theme is not childish anymore like XP, and is not as intrusive colour wise as the one in Vista. Just good enough. I never liked the whole sidebar dealie, however the Gadgets are absolutely awesome. I wish Mac OS X had something like that built in, the whole hitting a button to see Dashboard is cool, but having them right there on my desktop absolutely rules.
Security. UAC was always a thorn in my side, it would cause too many popups, especially there where I did not want them, and it just annoyed me. Sure, people compared it to Mac OS X again, but 3 pop-ups for moving something to the trash? The UAC still pops up here and there, however most of the time it stays hidden. One could argue that this is a bad thing, however I am running as Administrator. Any normal user account would probably see it more often when installing software. The Firewall is also a pleasure to use, a few of the applications I use wanted to create a listening socket, and the Firewall asked me if I wanted to allow this, and whether I wanted to allow this just for my local network, or also for public networks. Being able to set profiles and have various different Firewall configurations is absolutely fantastic. This should make it much easier to secure road warriors that are on the road, yet need a certain service running while at work that allows them to sync something, or create automatic backups, or update their local software.
Since installing Windows 7 I have had some issues, this is related to the fact that I am using a Windows XP driver to run my graphics card, without it Windows 7 would not let me use the full 1680 x 1050 my screen supports. 3D mode is also broken, so any games I want to run cause a blue screen of death. Even in Vista these games would not work correctly, so I am not entirely surprised, however in Vista everything would just be jittery and not update fast enough, and I'd have lines coming down the screen like a camera that is pointed at a CRT monitor. Very annoying.
After playing with Windows 7 I have to say I am pleasantly surprised. I enjoy using it more than I have enjoyed using previous Microsoft OS's, and I grew up in 3.1 -> 95 -> 98 -> 98SE -> ME -> 2000 -> XP -> Vista/2008 Server -> 7. Microsoft has finally done something right, and I look forward to seeing the final release of Windows 7, it is already looking better than Vista ever did, and if my experience says anything, corporations will be able to roll this out on their older machines without having to worry much about performance loss.
Full disclosure: Bert owns both Apple and Microsoft stock, thus he has a vested interest in both companies. Bert is a full-time university student (Software Engineering) that primarily uses Mac OS X for all of his work. Bert enjoys tinkering with software and currently has the following Operating Systems running in various different ways: Mac OS X, Windows XP, Windows 7, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris 10, and Haiku.
