Is this the new Windows XP? So far, so good.... (MS Windows 7 Home Premium)

Member Name: Lucius86

Product:	MS Windows 7 Home Premium
Date:	15/05/09 (33 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: New taskbar works a charm, feels nippier to Vista, less intrusive, libraries are a great idea

Disadvantages: Too early to tell, but I do wonder about some of the security issues with the new UAC

Microsoft has been pulling out a lot of commercials lately to try and make Windows look 'cool'. There is no doubt that they are trying to directly compete with Apple, who have started to slowly eat away at the percentage of computer users who use Windows. Microsoft hoped that Vista was going to be the next best thing, but alas people were not ready for such a big change, and it appears Apple have profited. There were a lot of things Vista did right, but what the team at Redmond did wrong has given Vista a quite unfair reputation. But at the same time, I think people's expectations were unfair. Who realistically expected a faster operating system from one designed for computers 8 years ago? Why make an operating system supporting 10 year old technology when it should really be concentrating on the future? True enough, Vista SP1 has garnered some of that reputation back, as it fixed some of its earlier flaws, but the damage is done - they need a new name, not a SP2.

Enter Windows 7. Microsoft have recently made available a Release Candidate of the new OS, so I went ahead and downloaded the 64-bit version, weighing in at an acceptable 3.05Gb. If you want to download it for yourself, go to this web site:

http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/Windows-7/downlo ad.aspx

o The min specs are: 1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
o 1 GB RAM (32-bit) / 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
o 16 GB available disk space (32-bit) / 20 GB (64-bit)
o DirectX 9 graphics processor with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

A word of warning before you try it out: this is still not quite release quality - the clue is in the title "release candidate"! Also, this copy will last until March 2010, when it will carry on functioning until June, but it will shut itself down every 2 hours of continual use. There, you have been warned!

Installation took me around 45 minutes, and was very similar to the Vista installation procedure. Indeed, Windows 7 is actually Vista with a makeover, with a few new features and some other annoying ones tweaked to be less intrusive. Once installed, it recognised all of my drivers from the off, and I could connect to my wireless network immediately.

The biggest cosmetic change is the task bar at the bottom. It has fundamentally not changed since Windows 95, but now Microsoft has decided to go with a new flavour. Multiple instances of the same application have now been collapsed into a single icon, so when you click over the icon up will pop a quick mini display of all the different instances of your program. You can also right click on the icon, and you get a 'jump list' of common actions with the application. It's a clever idea, it looks great and it really is an improvement over the older task bar.

Windows can also snap to the edge of the screen if you drag it there, which in effect allows you to make use of a widescreen monitor as you can quickly set up your desktop to view to open documents, for example. If you drag a window to the top, it maximises it, whilst shaking the window will minimise all other windows on the desktop, whilst keeping the selected window on top. These are minor enhancements, but these changes do impact how you work, and they are for the better.

You can also have themes for your windows environment. You can set up a slideshow for your desktop wallpaper, but the window frames are similar to that of Vista. The Vista gadgets are now moveable across the entire desktop, not just the right side of the monitor, but they are turned off by default. I see this as a good thing, because they do eat up resources - those who really want them can just turn them on. Paint and WordPad now get the ribbon treatment for their interfaces, like that seen in MS Office 2007.

Probably one of the most annoying quirks in Vista was the UAC. This was a feature in Vista that asked you each time you wanted to change something in the system to make sure it was a desired change. Although, from a security perspective, it was a good thing, the user could get frustrated very quickly have to click 'ok' all the time. You can now adjusts its frequency so it pops up less often. I don't know what the security implications are for this, but this will no doubt be great news for the majority of users out there!

One last big feature change I will go into are the Libraries. Before, you had a separate folder to share your documents in a network, for example, you had 'My Music' and 'My Shared Music'. You needed to duplicate the files to allow other computers to access your files. No longer; Libraries can now be shared between machines, and a library can contain multiple folders from different locations on your PC. This makes setting up a home network and sharing files so much easier for users, and I can see this being a real big hit.

I found Windows 7 a bit nippier in its responsiveness too. All in all it looks like Microsoft are onto a winner here. The improvements are actually worthwhile; the OS was 100% stable for me and almost all Vista drivers will work for Windows 7, so we should not see the mass compatibility issues we saw on Vista's release. I will definitely be purchasing Windows 7 within the first couple of months of its release.

Summary: A promising outlook for Windows 7. If you have the time, try out the RC and see for yourself.

Variety of features:
Reliability:
User friendly: