Hardware
- Intel Pentium 4 2.8Ghz with HyperThreading
- 2GB DDR RAM
- NVIDIA GeForce 6200 128MB RAM
- IDE 125GB HDD
- CMI-8738 sound chip
Introduction
Two years ago, Microsoft released Windows Vista, as the successor to Windows XP, the much-maligned, but in the end quite popular operating system. Windows Vista wasn't a very pleasant operating system to use early on its lifetime. It was slow, full of bugs, and had various software and hardware compatibility issues. To make matters worse, Microsoft decided to offer 239472398 different versions, with ever such descriptive names. The cheaper versions had features removed on a seemingly arbitrary basis, and the full monty version was far too expensive for most people.
Under the landslide of problems, it was easy to miss the immense changes Microsoft had made to Windows' inner workings. Vista delivered a completely new network stack, a shiny new audio stack, a new graphics subsystem, system-wide search, a vast list of security features, and many, many other improvements. So many, in fact, that it became painfully obvious that Microsoft had bitten off more than it could chew.
However, as time went on, Microsoft worked hard to improve Vista. The Redmond software giant delivered performance improvements, bug fixes, and fixed all sorts of little niggles. In addition, they tweaked the hated (but very successful) User Account Control to show less prompts, which made the first few days after a new Vista installation a little less clickety-clickety. Many people concluded that Vista was an infrastructure release, on which Microsoft would build future versions of Windows. Vista was the cut-off point, the sour apple they had to bite through in order to modernise the Windows platform.
Details regarding Vista's successor soon emerged, but they were few and far in between. The new Windows chief, Sinofsky, kept a very tight lid on what information came out of Redmond regarding the next Windows release, having learned from the Vista debacle where the company promised more than it could deliver. No more promises, no more disappointments. The few details that did make it out made it clear that Microsoft wasn't planning yet another massive restructuring of Windows: Windows 7, as it would be called, would build on top of Vista, and offer various refinements all across the board.
Since then, the Engineering 7 weblog has kept us up to date on Windows 7's development, and offered various insights into why certain decisions were made during its development. The first public demonstrations of Windows 7 were met with fairly positive reviews all over the technology media, and the enthusiast crowd was eager to get their hands on the first Windows beta.
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Setup
Installing the Windows 7 beta isn't exactly very spectacular. If it weren't for the new fancy boot screen, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were installing Windows Vista. This isn't a bad thing; the Windows Vista installation routine is efficient, easy, yet still powerful enough to allow for partition editing and the likes. Obviously, various repair and recovery tools are also available from the disc, much like Windows Vista. Basically the only difference is the inclusion of the HomeGroup setup dialog - more on that later.
It's probably pointless to note, but I will continue to mention it in Windows reviews until someone in Redmond takes notice: Windows 7 still acts like a big bully when it comes to the master boot record, the hopelessly outdated and incomprehensibly vulnerable section of your hard drive where the boot loader (or at least, part of it) is stored. Windows 7 continues the behaviour of the releases that came before it by bluntly, without asking, overwriting your MBR and destroying everything in it. Most OS enthusiasts will curse Microsoft along with me for this.
Microsoft, fix this. This is a bug. Bugs need to be fixed.
One of the most pleasant surprises with modern Windows releases is how good the system has become at finding the right drivers. Windows Vista already fully supported my computer, using Windows Update to install the two drivers that weren't included on the disk. Windows 7 continues this trend, and my machine was again fully supported. This is a joy compared to Windows XP, where you have to spend quite some time and clicks looking for and installing drivers.
Microsoft has taken this a step further by including a new tool called Devices & Printers. This is a central location to manage all your devices and drivers, similar to the Device Manager, but much easier to use and more pleasant to look at. If a device isn't working, there's a new troubleshooting framework in place that can fix many common issues with devices, such as reinstalling drivers, finding new ones, and so on. You can still use the device manager if you wish, but Devices & Printers is a lot less intimidating to use, and according to Paul Thurrot, more advanced as well; apparently, Devices & Printers can fix issues device manager cannot.
As always, this is a mileage-may-vary case, but on my hardware, looking for and installing drivers is a thing of the past when it comes to Windows (welcome to the Modern World, Windows, I hope you enjoy your stay). It will be interesting to see if my slightly more exotic Aspire One is supported in a similar manner.
Applications
One of the first things I do when I install Windows, or any other operating system for that matter, is set up my email account, configure my browser of choice for the platform in question, and install my favourite instant messaging client. In the case of Windows, this would be, respectively, Windows Mail, Google's Chrome, and the humble but extremely versatile and powerful Miranda IM. And at this point you run into what is possibly Windows 7's biggest shortcoming: it doesn't come with an email client.
While it has long been known that Windows 7 would do away with bundled applications like Messenger, Windows Mail, a photo manager, and so on, it only becomes painfully obvious once you are setting up Windows 7. Windows Mail, while limited, was a perfectly capable email client; it was fast, easy to use, and anything but pretentious, and didn't come with useless features I didn't need. Users who needed more out of their email clients could always move to something like Thunderbird or Outlook - everybody was happy.
Now, you have little choice. I don't like Thunderbird or Outlook, exactly because they offer me too much functionality, and they're not exactly speed demons either. With Windows Mail removed from Windows 7, you look for alternatives, and even though Microsoft doesn't throw it in your face (it's not even in the welcome-first-tasks-screen-thing), the obvious choice is Windows Live Mail, which just so happens to be a rather... Odd email client. It's slower than Windows Mail, and it somehow looks out of place compared to the rest of Windows 7, like it was designed without knowledge of the new Windows version's features.
Even though I'm using the newest beta release of Live Mail, it doesn't support the new Jumplist feature, which was something I was looking forward to; I loved the idea of interacting with my mail client, straight from the taskbar, without having to switch to the client itself. Sadly, this is not possible. The other Live applications suffer from the same deficiencies.
All this creates the odd situation where you have an operating system that comes with a DVD maker tool for burning videos and pictures to DVDs - but doesn't come with a movie editor or photo organiser. I don't know what possessed Microsoft to make this decision, but the idea of buying an operating system without an email client is just plain silly to me. Seeing Microsoft's lacklustre history of not eating its own dog food, I wonder how long it will take for the Live applications to be updated to take full advantage of Windows 7's new features, and feel like first-class citizens (may I remind you that to this very day, Windows Mobile devices cannot synchronise with Vista's mail, calendar, and contacts tools).
I'm sure that people concerned with the whole monopoly-anti-competitive-bundling thing will be happy, but as a normal user who really doesn't give a rat's bum about that, it's just plain annoying.
Installing Chrome and Miranda poses no problems, luckily. Both applications install and run just fine on Windows 7, but they obviously haven't been updated yet to take advantage of Windows 7's new features. Chrome, nor Miranda, have support for jump lists yet, but I'm sure that once Windows 7 hits the streets, applications like these will be updated quickly. There is a weird little bug, though, with Miranda and the new taskbar, but I will get to that in a minute.
Moving on on the application front, Windows 7 obviously comes with the latest Internet Explorer 8 beta, but I've got nothing to say about it. I'm sure IE8 makes numerous improvements when it comes to support for web standards, but all I see is a browser with the world's most cluttered and unintuitive browser interface, which bugged me with all sorts of dialogs at first launch asking me to enable/disable this and that feature, features that sound completely ridiculous to someone who wants his browser to display web pages. You'll have to find someone else if you want more information on IE8, I'm not going there, I don't want to, I hate it.
One of the pleasant surprises in Windows 7 is the new user interface to Windows Media Player, which has been simplified a great deal - a tremendous trend breaker in a world where media players have become ever more complicated, more bloated, and in general far slower (I'm looking at you, iTunes). When you load a movie file, all you get is a window frame, and the movie content. That's it. No playlists, no visualisations, no rating system, no nothing - except for the on screen display which pops up on mouseover. This is the new simplified WMP window.
You can move to the more advanced library view, which is more like the Vista WMP version, but still far less complicated and much easier to use. It actually uses the Windows Explorer interface for managing your media files, drawing its data from your Libraries. Media files in Windows 7 are stored in one, single method (Libraries) and this method is used in Windows Media Player, Explorer, and the new Media Center; make a change in WMP, and it's seen all throughout the operating system. Whether you approach your media files from Explorer, Media Center, or WMP, it all looks and handles the same.
This is a tremendous leap forward in manageability, and it's a direction I hope that other operating systems will follow.
Windows also has improved its codec support, adding support for MP4, MOV, 3GP, AVCHD, ADTS, M4A, and WTV multimedia containers, including native codecs for H.264, MPEG4-SP, ASP/DivX/Xvid, MJPEG, DV, AAC-LC, LPCM, AAC-HE
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Libraries & Explorer
Let's move on to an actual new feature in Windows 7: Libraries. Libraries seem a little odd and useless at first, but once you dive a little deeper into what they can do, where they are used, and how you can use them, it becomes obvious that Microsoft has put a lot of thought into these little things.
Historically, we've been organising files using directories, and if you go back far enough, you'll encounter a time when you could only have top-level directories - so no subdirectories. These days, we manage our files by creating, naming, and moving directories and files around, but ever since the number of files on our hard drives started to increase beyond an amount we can wrap our brains around, people have been looking for ways to make it easier to manage, organise, and retrieve files.
First, we came up with very basic search functionality, which matched search queries with file and directory names. However, you could not search the contents of files using this method, and as such, you were required to remember the names of your files. Seeing some operating systems imposed restrictions on the number of characters you could use in a file name (Hi DOS/Windows!), this soon became problematic.
We needed more advanced methods of searching for files, and out of this need came file systems with metadata support. Little bits and pieces of information about a file - composer, title, date, whatever - could be stored in inodes (for instance), and then be scanned using the search tool. The most impressive example of this was BeOS and its BFS and live queries, which allowed for some very impressive and versatile search and filter operations at instant speeds. You could also save live queries, and approach them like you would a directory.
However, each file system used its own method of metadata, meaning transferring files between different platforms meant losing your metadata. In addition, populating the metadata fields could be a thankless chore. The biggest issue, however, is that metadata search still doesn't allow for searching the content of files. This is where modern solutions using index databases come into play, like Apple's Spotlight or Windows' Instant Search.
A more ambitious approach to the problem is using a relational database to aid in managing, organising, and retrieving files. Microsoft boldly claimed that such technology - WinFS - would be part of Longhorn, but the difficulties in realising this ambitious technology proved to be too great, and the company had to abandon the project, chopping it up into parts which are now scattered across a wide variety of Microsoft products.
Libraries are yet another attempt at easing the burden when it comes to managing, organising, and retrieving files. A Library in Windows 7 looks like a directory, but in fact it's a sort of virtual folder that combines the contents of various locations into one, handy folder. For instance, the Video library on my machine points to the video folder on my local hard drive, the video folder on my external USB drive, and the shared video folder on my netbook. No longer is it necessary to navigate to each of these locations through Network or Explorer - you can just click on the Library, and all the content is there.
This may seem like a small feature, but in a household with multiple machines, it makes things a lot easier. I often use my netbook to watch television series before I go to bed, and finding an episode using Explorer and the network consisted of lots of clicks. As soon as my netbook is upgraded to Windows 7, I'll configure its local Video library to include the locations on my network, giving me much easier and faster access to my video files.
In a rare moment of clarity, Microsoft decided that the new Library feature could also be used as the base for managing files from within other applications - like WMP and Media Center (as I already mentioned). This means that in my netbook scenario, I don't even have to use Explorer at all: I just load up WMP, and play all the video files on my network straight from there. Since applications do not have to be made aware of Libraries, VLC picks them up just fine as well.
Libraries are an excellent addition to the various methods of managing files, and I get the feeling that Microsoft has more in store for libraries in the future. Time will tell.
Windows Explorer itself has also received a much-needed visual overhaul. Explorer in Vista was cluttered and unintuitive, much like Windows Media Player in Vista. The barrage of colours has now been toned down to nothing but shades of white, which makes for a much more pleasant file managing experience. The sidepane is also a lot less overwhelming, and shows shortcuts to logical locations like your libraries, disks, network, and HomeGroup.
Taskbar
If there is one major new feature in Windows 7 that has been debated to death, revived again, and then debated to death some more, it's the new taskbar. Instead of regurgitating what we already know, I decided to fill you in on some less obvious details of the new taskbar, as well as some areas of improvement - and concern - that I hope Microsoft takes a peek at. I suggest you read the linked article above first, or else the following might not make an awful lot of sense.
One of the first oddities that I noticed was that sometimes, there would be what looked like visual remnants on the taskbar; it appeared as if some entries had multiple borders on the right side. After a bit of researching, I found out I was being an idiot: it's not a bug, it's a feature. If multiple windows are open for a single application, the icons turns into some sort of stack, which I mistakenly assumed were remnants. The problem with this is that the stack never grows larger than three - if you have 4, 6, or 98 windows open, the stack will max out at 3. I guess it's meant as an indicator, not a precise measurement.
Another thing I noticed has to do with Miranda, my favourite instant messaging client. Miranda uses a toolbox window as its main contact list window, meaning it doesn't get an entry in the taskbar. The new taskbar is confused by this, as it sometimes designates Miranda as a running application, while sometimes, it does not. It appears as if the new taskbar cannot handle applications that use nothing but a toolbox-type window. Whether this is a bug in Miranda or in Windows 7 itself remains to be seen.
I'm not particularly liking the new Start menu. It may look the same as the one in Vista, but that's exactly the problem: I use the old-fashioned Start menu because it isn't as cluttered as the fancy all-in-one variant introduced in Windows XP - sadly, this old-fashioned start menu is no longer available in Windows 7. The problem is worsened because the main area of the taskbar can be filled with three possible things: most often used items, recently used items, or white space/pinned items. I had hoped I could tell it to display the start menu structure as a whole, but this is sadly not possible.
I always had a clear distinction: quicklaunch for my most often used applications, and the Start menu as a way to gain access to everything. The All Programs link is cumbersome because it uses a tree-style view, which creates scrollbars inside the start menu (BAD UI DESIGN! BAD UI DESIGN!), and is generally uncomfortable. I guess this is just my thing I have to give up in the name of progress (similarly to other people who are throwing fits all over the web because their taskbar can't be reverted to old-style). It's not a deal-breaker; it's just annoying.
There are other areas of improvement, most notably the delay between mouseover and the appearance of the previews. This delay should be set a little lower, as the the pause between moving your mouse to an application's entry and the appearance of its window list is just a little too long for comfort - it interrupts your workflow. The previews have some minor bugs too, such as an unwillingness to disappear every now and then.
Jumplists are a very good idea, as they allow you to interact with applications without actually switching to them, saving time and clicks. Obviously, there are very few applications that actually make use of Jumplists, making them a bit useless in Windows 7's current beta form. I'm sure that as the final release nears, more and more applications will make proper use of Jumplists.
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HomeGroup
One of the features I personally looked forward to the most was HomeGroup. Setting up a home network in Windows, including printer sharing, file sharing, streaming media, and so on, was always a major pain in the butt. It's a lot of work, and you really need to know a thing or two about all the underlying subsystems in order to get everything to work seamlessly. The worst part, however, is that in previous Windows release there wasn't really a central place to take care of all these related, but individual things.
In Windows 7, this has changed with the introduction of HomeGroup. HomeGroup is not a new technology, nor is it a new protocol or method of organising your network (alongside domains and workgroups). All HomeGroup does is take care of all the backend, low-level stuff so you don't have to fiddle with endless streams of dialogs and settings panels.
After completing the Windows 7 installation, you are asked if you want to create a new HomeGroup, or join an existing one. If you decide to create one, a random password is generated which will allow other Windows 7 computers to join the HomeGroup. Microsoft actually researched if it made sense for people to select their own password, but they came to the conclusion that it was better to generate a random one:
So, what does HomeGroup do? It automatically shares the music, video and picture libraries and printers across the network, allowing every member of the HomeGroup to gain access to them. Documents are by default not shared, but you can enable that too if you wish. Thanks to the top-to-bottom nature of Libraries, you can browse the Libraries on other computers in your HomeGroup from any computer on the HomeGroup (get it?). In addition, there's a new "Share with" drop-down menu in Explorer that allows you to share any file with one click, in either R or RW mode. You can also choose to share with specific people, or select "Nobody", with obvious results. Network Location Awareness is employed to make sure you only share your stuff when you're actually at home.
HomeGroup really takes the pain out of setting up a network, and makes it all a much more pleasant experience. However, HomeGroup has one major issue, and we're not sure if Microsoft will address it: so far, it seems as if HomeGroup will be a Windows 7-specific feature; it does not appear Microsoft will backport HomeGroup to Vista and XP. In other words, you will need to upgrade at least two machines if you want to reap the benefits of HomeGroup.
This naturally leads to another inevitable conclusion: no support for Macintosh, no support for Linux. If it really turns out to be the case that HomeGroup will not be a cross-version, cross-platform effort, I'm afraid that HomeGroup will see little use. I urge Microsoft to think about this one - it is one of the most common heard complaints about HomeGroup on the E7 weblog.
Misc
You are not going to believe it, but Windows' most awful dialog - the "Safely remove hardware" one - is no longer present in Windows 7. Instead, clicking the USB icon in the system tray triggers a nice, usable pop-up menu where you can select which device to eject. It's mindblowing that it took Microsoft so long to fix this one.
Wordpad now supports Open Office XML and ODF.
You can mount Virtual PC's VHD files natively in Windows 7.
Windows 7 comes with various improvements when it comes to using solid state drives, without a doubt a result from the popularity of netbooks with SSDs. Partitions on SSDs will be formatted differently; the alignment of the start of an SSD partition used to be located in the middle of a single page, which could negatively affect performance by 50%. In addition, the delete policy on SSDs is more strict and rigorous. Disk defragmenter will be turned off on SSDs.
A note on performance
I'm not burning my fingers on any serious performance testing, but the overall impression is good, except for one annoyance: there seems to be an issue with dragging windows around in Windows 7. Even though the responsiveness is good, the actual motion of the window feels as if the window is stuck to the desktop with molten sugar. During a drag operation, the window kind of chugs along the mousecursor, with a little bit of lag. It's definitely noticeable, and can get quite annoying at times. Similar problems seem to appear sometimes with the Aero peek functionality.
Microsoft made a number of changes to the compositing engine, and my hope is that this is merely a driver issue, fixed in later iterations of the various video drivers. If not, Microsoft needs to take a good look at DWM before declaring Windows 7 gold, because if this molten sugary motion can be found on other machines as well post-launch, they'll be in trouble - as DWM in Vista has no such problems.
Conclusion
There are various new features in Windows 7 that I didn't cover in this review (touch, most notably), but overall I find it relatively easy to draw a comprehensive conclusion about Windows 7, and what it stands for.
Windows 7 is not a revolutionary release. It doesn't constitute a major overhaul of Windows, nor does it introduce new features that will really blow you away. Windows 7 is more like evolution with a bit of pepper in its butt: a lot of UI problems from Vista have been fixed, the taskbar has been modernised and made easier to use, there are all sorts of small performance fixes that do add up, Explorer is much more usable, and so on.
Still, there are a number of features I would call a pretty big deal. HomeGroup, and the top-to-bottom implementation of Libraries are things that alone will make Windows 7 a worthwhile upgrade to Windows Vista - provided Microsoft does something about HomeGroup's isolationist attitude. I haven't even touched the new multitouch framework yet (ha. ha.), because I don't have the hardware for it, but I'm sure that will be a major selling point for some as well.
As it currently stands, Windows 7 feels like a very solid release, with the first beta being better than the final release of Windows Vista. Assuming the DWM performance issue I mentioned gets fixed real soon, I see little reason why you shouldn't give the beta a go.
Source: http://www.osnews.com/story/20722/Review_Windows_7_Beta/
1 comment:
thank for share
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