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Windows 7, A first look...
Website: www.microsoft.com/windows7
Price: Pricing not available at time of review
Reviewed by Clint Crocker on 01/19/2009
It is high time for Microsoft to finally get something right. It’s still a bit early to tell if 7 is their “something right” but it looks promising. As noted by previous rumors Win7 is mainly a rework of Vista, which wasn’t completely unexpected. I will say that the changes do appear to be more than just visual. Seven just seems to “work” much better than its predecessor. The system requirements are actually slightly lower than Vista’s were making it perform faster than Vista did at its release and boot much faster than either XP or Vista.
Windows Explorer
Windows explorer will look very unfamiliar to XP users but it remains basically the same as what was stock in Vista. The few changes in 7 do seem to improve usability. XP’s “My Documents” morphed into simply “Documents” in Vista with separate folders for photos, music and videos. Seven continues this with an extension for “Libraries” that allows you to group other scattered folders into one area for management. Also included is a very useful preview pane that seems to preview nearly any file type I can find.
Windows Taskbar
The taskbar received a well thought out update to improve form and function. In a twist that takes a bit of getting used to, the quick launch menu and the buttons representing open programs have been combined. In a move to tidy up the taskbar, the labels have been removed from the open program buttons leaving only the icons. In the screen shot above you can see that there is a windows explorer windows open, Outlook is closed but still shows the quick launch button, and internet explorer has two windows open. The open programs are denoted by the glossy box around the icon and multiple windows are represented by additional lines beside the box. The combined taskbar buttons also result in a nifty preview of the windows when you hover over. The start menu remains unchanged from Vista except for the notable lack of the option to enable the classic start menu. Rumors have it that it may be added back in later builds.
The Office Ribbon
The relatively few fans of Office 2007 will be excited to know that the Office Ribbon is making its mainstream debut in Win7. Both MS Paint and Wordpad bear the new ribbon interface in place of the traditional “File Edit Format View Help” menu that most users are accustomed to. Interestingly Notepad still retains the older system. The calculator has been beefed up to include modes for programming and statistics. It can also display a digital paper tape that can be saved, copied and pasted.
Final Thoughts
Seven provides a good view of what Vista should have been. It demonstrates that Microsoft still has plenty of capability. It gives hope. Even in its current beta form it is fast and stable. It has good looks, great speed and impressive usability. If development continues the way it has so far I think this might be the first operating system that could truly replace XP on my daily use computer. With the beauty and fancy tricks of Vista, not to mention a few borrowed from OSX and current Linux desktops, paired with the stability and speed of XP this might actually be Microsoft’s “something right”.
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