After the generally considered failure of Windows Vista, Microsoft is depending on Windows 7 to be favourable in the eyes of those who shunned their last offering in favour of sticking with XP. The question though is what changes have they made, and is it really a better experience than the last upgrade.
Windows 7 is a strange beast really - it is quite obviously Windows, and a Microsoft product, but it has the feeling that it is trying to be Linux; or at least more like it. One of the very first things I noticed and tried was the new Windows PowerShell which doesn't replace cmd, but supplements it by giving the user a very Linux-like prompt. As a quick test I tried various Linux commands such as ls and pwd and to my delight they worked!
Installation
Those of you who follow me on Twitter (@jedi58) may have noticed my spam-a-thon when I was tweeting about the install process as it went along, so you may already have a good idea of what it was like. For the benefit of those who did not see that I'll give a brief summary of what I encountered. After making sure I'd backed everything up (well at least I thought I had anyway) I restarted and booted from one of the two DVDs that came in the Windows 7 Professional pack (one being 32-bit, the other being 64-bit) opting for a 64-bit install as I had previously with Windows Vista. The first time it booted I thought the installer had hung as after a few minutes hadn't done anything and there was no activity from either the DVD drive or the HDD (though the mouse still moved). Assuming the worst I restarted my machine and tried again, but the same thing happened. Moments after the same period of time had passed as my first attempt a dialog actually appeared. The actual install process once it's started isn't really that painful, but it sure is ugly and at a low resolution.
The first screen you encounter you have to pick your language and keyboard layout so that this will be used by the rest of the process. After a brief wait you will then have the option to pick where you want it to be installed - this is displayed as a list of drives with detailed information on what physical disc, the partition number, the name, the size, available space, and the type of drive (System, etc.). You get various options, one of them being to format the drive (which it does amazingly fast, so I assume it doesn't verify afterwards). From then on it pretty much does the rest itself, copying and extracting the files and then reboots twice before finally you are in Windows 7 for the first time.
The first time you enter Windows 7 you will be asked a few additional installation questions to create a user, set the owner name and the license key. The next screen will then set up your locale and to confirm the date and time, as well as what network your current network can be identified as (Home, Work, etc.). The whole process took me a little over 25 minutes which is far less than the 11 hours reported by BBC News (even from a clean install it took them 50 minutes for some reason).
Post-Install Tasks and using Windows 7
Other than installing my usual collection of applications there is very little I needed to configure or change. When I upgraded to Vista there was no support for my Audigy 2 ZS soundcard and for a few hours it caused some pain whilst searching for a driver compatible with 64-bit Vista but eventually had to use one developed by a 3rd party as Creative Labs at the time refused to support Vista for most of their products. Fortunately for 7 this was totally different and included a driver from the start - I did however choose to replace this with the most up-to-date driver from their site as it comes with an auto-update option to ensure it stays up-to-date and also includes ALchemy for audio effects. For once I'm actually quite happy with the level of Creative support available and the quality of their driver as it has always seemed lacking.
The User Account Control is also something which required my immediate attention as I find it an incredible annoyance. You don't have to turn it fully off any more either - it has varying levels similar to the privacy and security options in Internet Explorer. I did of course set this to the minimum level, which is effectively off as I don't need Windows to tell me what I should and shouldn't install or do.
Surprisingly, despite installing it on the launch day there were 10 updates already waiting to be downloaded, one of which required another restart. Some people do complain about this, but Snow Leopard and other versions of OS X are no different and often require restarts for any updates. After installing Windows XP Mode there were also a further 27 updates to apply to my machine, but it's nice to have some built in virtualisation that is also quite speedy and uses IE6 which is handy for web developers who need to test in IE6. From my Vista install I did backup a n XP Virtual Machine I hoped to use with it, but the Windows Virtual PC it installs does not appear to be compatible with the .vhd file I already had.
The taskbar also features a new flag icon which will alert you to anything that needs your attention such as not having a virus checker installed, or a driver not functioning correctly. You may also receive a notification here initially after disabling UAC. This area is probably the ugliest part of the UX in that hidden icons can be viewed in a little ugly box that pops up - I think it would have looked better had it been styled similar to the contextual menus in Snow Leopard; but I guess that would have been treading on Apple's toes. You may also notice that there is a rectangular block at the side of the time - this is where you now click for showing the desktop (in other words, hiding all the windows). If you hover over it all your windows will become semi-transparent so you can see what's on your desktop.
Whilst talking on treading on Apple's toes it's probably a good point to mention one of the bigger UX changes in Windows 7 - that of the quick launch bar and the active programs area being merged into a single OS X style dock. In the previous image it demonsrtates 3 active programs. The first two of these are pinned to the taskbar and will remain there when closed (as will the ones up to and including Notepad++). The Paint Shop Pro 6 icon you can see is the first application in the taskbar which is not pinned - but there is no way of telling this, all you know is that the program is open. When you close it, the icon will disappear, probably not a problem in itself as OS X does the same, but a way of differentiating between open pinned items and open items would have been nice. If an open application has multipled windows open then this well be displayed like the Windows Explorer icon is, it's got a smaller rectanglular area to the side. Hovering over any of the open program icons will show a little preview of all open windows for that program which helps to identify at a glance which one you want - the same is the case when using Alt+Tab to cycle through your applications.
The start menu hasn't really changed a great deal from Vista so if you've used Vista previously you'll have a good idea what to expect. The main difference to the start menu however is that for certain applications you now get "recent item" menus for them which can be identified by items with an arrow next to them. Hovering over these items will display the recent items list which you can also pin recently opened files too should there be some you use regularly.
I was also pleastly surprised that despite the Windows 7 Upgrade advisor thinking my Canon i865 might not work that it was detected and working. It even detected my monitor as an E-191 using DVI, and my connected TV as an Axium HD-L32 - very impressive I think. The only piece of my hardware to not work has been the Game Port on my soundcard - but that was to be expected as it's an old soundcard, and Gamepads are USB only these days anyway.
I have also tried connecting my Canon Canoscan 8400F to my Windows 7 machine and found that there are not yet any drivers for this - a shame, but I hear Canon are working on drivers. I do find it amazing when major manufacturers don't have drivers ready for a release as there have been developer versions of Windows 7 available for a long time so it's not like Microsoft suddenly said "Surprise! This is Windows 7!". A common argument here is that OS X upgrades don't have these problems, but there are two things to be noted here - the first being that Apple drops support for any old hardware they don't want people using any more, and the second being that Apple manufacturers their own hardware so the majority of drivers are bound to be okay from the start. I'm not having a go at Apple or Apple fans (many of you know I do like Apple!) it's just I can forsee that being a common argument still.
Windows 7 and applications
Of the applications that come with it, it seems Microsoft have been doing a lot of work in overhauling them. Wordpad now looks like a cut down version of Word 2007 and uses the same ribbon style menus. Even the calculator has had an upgrade which includes two new modes (programmer and statistics) and includes additions such as worksheets (for tax, fuel calculations, etc.).
One of the new applications is Windows Journal, an application they're aiming more at Tablet PC users. This applications is pretty much as it sounds, it's an application that is there for writing journals. When you open it for the first time it will also ask if you want to install the special printer driver (Journal Note Writer) for it so you can export your entries for annotation, etc. and it also features some very real looking lined paper.
Outside the realm of Microsoft built applications I've had no problems yet running 3rd party software on this new 64-bit OS - everything has run smoothly without fault. Even Adobe Photoshop CS4 is running well, and actually seems slightly faster than it did on Vista.
It's only been a few days since I installed Windows 7 but I'm already starting to prefer it to Vista. Hopefully as time goes on it will remain problem free and speedy, but only time will tell. I already prefer it over Vista, some would say it's hardly a surprise, but I was one of the ones who got on okay with Vista.
