Windows 7 Release Party!
I wanted to write a quick blurb regarding Windows 7 before I attend a vendor sponsored release party tonight.
I've been running Windows 7 on two machines for a month or so already. So far my experience has been underwhelming...or nonwhelming... basically... it's Vista with a few improvements.
I haven't REALLY explored all the bits and pieces of 7 or Vista for that matter. I really haven't been able to get past the annoying and ridiculously inefficient interface. I don't have a lot of love for Vista so you can expect this surface review to be pretty negative however, there have been some noticeable improvements in 7 that I would like to point out.
First, lets start with the bad:
The interface (desktop, start menu, folder layout, network interface configuration etc...) is still just as miserable, clumsy and non-intuitive as Vista. No improvements there.
Why do the desktop icons need to be SO BIG? Why can't I change them? Even at the highest resolution my icons are just crazy big. Something I hated in Vista and has not been improved in 7. The start menu is a reasonable size, why not the desktop icons?
Getting to the network settings has a few more hoops to jump through. If you are savvy it adds one click if you are using the control panel to get to it, you looking a 3-4 additional steps just to get to those settings.
The scrolling start menu is kind of annoying in my opinion, the pop-out menu's of XP seem much more efficient. I even got used to the adaptive menu thing. It's going to be a while before I start to like the scrolling deal.
The login prompt is unchanged as well. if you are joined to a domain there are few hoops that you need to jump through in order to login locally or change domains. XP was just a simple drop down which, again, just seemed more efficient. Drop down click, log in. Now it requires the domain\username format and a few other steps. The average end user isn't going to be able to figure that out (OWA 2007 is proof of that).
Other bad stuff. It seems the hardware world didn't think MS was serious about releasing Windows 7. Both installations of Windows 7 I did (for testing) rendered my computers useless. Unfortunately the incompatible hardware was network related. My "media center" machine's brand new Gigabit-Brand Wireless NIC does not have Windows 7 compatible drivers. My laptop broke when I tried to reinstall my Verizon USB WWAN device. Same thing "Unsupported OS". My laptop I was able to get working after hitting several forums and bypassing the installation process for the card and manually installing the drivers for it.
The last bad thing I'm going mention is another carry over from Visa. No telnet or Hyperterminal (or replacement software) in 7 either. I don't understand this. Clearly most IT nerds when they are setting up thier workstations or notebooks, download and install PuTTY or something like that, but when I'm at an end user's desk, or at someone else's machine, or somewhere other then my regular machines, it's REALLY annoying to not have at least Telnet available.
The good! The improvements over Vista anyway.
This first thing you notice about 7 is that it's pretty. Very pretty. It seems to have built-in themes that Vista didn't have which are pretty cool.
The gadget thing seems to be improved over the Vista version. I liked the idea in Vista (Mac OS has had the same thing for a while and I like it on there as well), but you seemed to be restricted to putting your gadgets in one area of the screen. Each gadget also seemed to suck processor and memory resources to the point where I disabled them. In 7, you can put the gadgets anywhere you want and they seem to utilize resources much more efficiently. I'm got 5 of them on my laptop right now and I don't see any performance hit.
Multimedia seems to be another improvement. My "media center" box I use primarily for watching movies that I've "archived" from my DVR, Hulu and streaming Netflix. With XP/Vista you could always tell you weren't watching TV. With Windows 7, video playback and streaming is MUCH smoother. I'm not sure how or why, but it seems to be better.
I'm sure there are plenty other "improvements" that I haven't uncovered yet or simply don't/wouldn't use, but those are the two that I noticed.
Over all, from what I've seen and used, Windows 7 IS and improvement over Vista, but it's nothing to start dancing in the streets over. I'm going to this release party tonight, I'll try and get some more information and post it in a follow up to this article.
Brian