Windows 7: the first taste of it (Updated)

Thursday 26 February 2009 - Filed under Tech Notes

I had been waiting months for this:

I finally made time to try out the public beta (build 7000) of Windows 7 that I obtained through a source at work a few weeks back. It’s good till the end of July 2009. But indications are that this will be a short-lived test-drive; the Release Candidate of Windows 7 could come out as early as 10 April, which is just over a month away.

So, what’s the verdict? Is it really a Vista killer for all the right reasons? Before that, a brief on my brief experience: As with many other curious yet risk-averse people, I chose to load Windows 7 onto a virtual machine instead of a physical machine. I fired up my VMware Fusion (there is even a practical guide) and went through the install process. It was a bit of a surprise to see that complete in just over 30 minutes and that was while I was unintentionally encoding a backup of an entire video DVD in the background, i.e. unrelated multi-tasking, which must have choked the poor little MacBook to death. The overall install process was similar to that of Vista, only quicker and with less questions to answer. No complaint there at all.

One thing I didn’t know: Windows 7 is in fact Windows 6.1
The internal version backs the speculation that Windows 7 is closer to Windows Vista “Release 2″ than a new Windows… (Update: The more I thought about the version number, the more it bugged me. If Microsoft is superstitious enough to skip version 13 for Office and take a quantum leap from version 12 to 14, why be so stingy with the progression of Windows version numbers? After all, 7 is not only the smallest integer greater than 6, but it is also supposed to be a lucky number. Then came an epiphany: Windows 7 is a new name for new marketing. Internally, however, it’s an incremental update to Windows Vista, more like version 6+1… except, since the plus sign isn’t normally associated with version numbers, a dot is used instead: 6.1 = 6+1 = 7. Brilliant.)

The visuals
Once it was up and running, I started playing with visual settings as I would with any fresh install of Windows. The VM had 1GB of RAM and was running on top of an Intel Core2Duo 2.2GHz hypervisor, and I was a bit disappointed to see Windows 7 fall back on the “Basic” theme and not the pretty “Aero” theme in the numerous Windows 7 screenshots I had seen. But that’s no biggie, I was going to strip it down to the performance-optimised configuration anyway. Looking at Windows 7 dressed in the Classic theme felt weird, to say the least. Put another way, as long as my machine has enough grunt, I wouldn’t want to have anything other than the glassy Aero theme. In my 2-minute attempt, I couldn’t figure out a way of force-enabling Aero, by the way. Given the proliferation of virtual machines these days, Microsoft will need to ensure that Windows 7 is able to sport the prettiest possible look not only in brand spanking new PC’s but also in VM’s.

Thinking clearly
One thing I particularly liked was that I could see the ClearType tuner included in Control Panel; no need for a separate download to be able to fine-tune the readability and crispness of text. Not only that, the tuner itself is much more enhanced than its Windows XP counterpart, allowing for higher accuracy in calibration. Great job, Microsoft. It would have been even better if Windows 7 made the user go through this tuner upon every fresh installation as opposed to a less known feature quietly tucked away.

Information organised in “Libraries”
I found Windows 7′s Windows Explorer to be very similar to that of Windows Vista, but I could see that Windows 7 encourages the user to organise information in the various “Libraries” (of pictures, documents, etc) rather than the “Computer.” I did not have enough time to test out the file management side of things, but I figured it would take a substantial amount of customisation in order to have everything displayed in the “detail” view everywhere (which is my favourite) rather than those ginormous icons that don’t do much other than take up unnecessary real estate. but I was pleased to see files and documents organised in the “detail” view by default.

Internet Explorer 8, at last…
I then moved on to see the Release Candidate of the new Internet Explorer 8 browser. I saw the splash screen telling me that it was indeed IE8, and then this happened:

I rebooted the machine and tried the “Start Windows normally” option, but it just would’t go past the “Starting Windows” screen. That’s where my first encounter with Windows 7 ended, sadly, for now.

First impressions last?
To be fair, I will definitely give it another shot another time for a more in-depth analysis than this. I know there’s a lot of (relatively) positive things about Windows 7 that I have not yet experienced first-hand. But I must say I was underwhelmed by what Windows 7 could show me in 10 minutes. I have a feeling people will be seeing the 8 year-old Windows XP and the 6 year-old Windows Server 2003 thrive through their teenage years.

Update: In the spirit of giving a fair crack of the whip, I have built Windows 7 VM Take Two from scratch. After a few initial hiccups to do with installing VMware Tools, it is running fine (including IE8) and my experience with the new OS is now amounting to hours rather than minutes. It is true that Windows 7 feels considerably swifter than Windows Vista, so that’s a big plus and something to look forward to performance-wise. At first sight, however, I still can’t tell the two operating systems apart – one is version 6 and the other is 6.1, after all – except for that new icon-centric taskbar of Windows 7.

2009-02-26  »  JK