Windows 7 – My Personal Sneak Peak

Yesterday I finally had a chance to personally take a look at the final release of Windows 7…. you know, that new fangled operating system that Microsoft is making such a big deal about.  The tech company that does a lot of our networking here at the Florence Home, InfiNet, had a special Windows 7 seminar to show their clients what to expect with the new system.

First of all, you should all know that I’m a Certified Microsoft Skeptic.  Having been around PC’s since before the times of DOS (3.11 was the version I never wanted to give up), I’ve been burned too many times by Microsoft touting some great new version of something, and then having it be a piece of junk.

This isn’t to say they haven’t produced some good things, even good versions of Windows… it just means that I tend NOT to believe all the hype until I have a chance to see the new produce in action for myself.

Over the past few months, as we’ve gotten closer and closer to the official release date (October 22nd, although you can already get it on some new machines), I’ve kept an eye on my favorite tech review sites and blogs, watching to see what they have to say. Most have been very positive.

But again, my philosophy is “I’ll believe it when I see it“.

Yesterday I saw it, and guess what?  “I believe it“.

I won’t have my own final-release copy to play with until next week, and when I get it, I’ll put together a review article and probably even a short video overview…  but for now, I just wanted to pass along a few impressions and a couple of the features I thought were pretty cool.

First of all, and don’t let this shock you… at first glance Windows 7 looks a lot like Windows Vista. (GROAN!)  In fact, Microsoft hasn’t changed a lot of the basic way Windows works. You still have a desktop, windows with title bars and control buttons, a taskbar, a start button, etc. But what you now have is an operating system that seems much quicker and is streamlined to let you do a lot of things with less effort (i.e. mouse clicks). In fact, one of the guys presenting mentioned that Windows 7 seems to be taking us away from  having to even use our mouse.

But anyway, once you get past the fact that it “looks” like Vista, you start noticing that it really isn’t Vista retooled… it’s ITS own thing.

Here are a few facts and observations:

• That taskbar is now very cool. When you mouse-over a window button on the taskbar, a preview thumbnail is displayed above the taskbar. But what is really cool, is if you have multiple tabs open inside of a window, or multiple windows of the same thing open (like 2 or 3 copies of Word), those thumbnails are shown as a group and you can just click the one you want to jump to.
• When you have two or more open windows, and you drag one of them off the edge of the screen, it automatically resizes itself so that the title bar and control buttons remain on the screen and are not hidden off the edge.
• Post-it notes are now included
• A screen-capture utility is included that also gives you the ability to select the area of the screen to capture.
• A screen-recording/annotating troubleshooting record is included. If you need to show tech support (or anyone else) what you are doing and what you see, you turn on the recorder and it records what you are doing and saves it as a file you can email to someone else. In the file, the recipient sees shots of the screens you had an a disteration on what you did.
• At the lower right corner of the screen, there is a small button that makes all the currently opened windows transparent except for the last one, so that you can see what’s behind everything. All you have to do is hoover your mouse over the button to activate it.
• The Start/Search option is even more powerful… letting you type in a partial name for a program, and then have that program, along with the most recently opened documents of that program, display as a shortcut at the top of the start menu.
• Windows 7 works great on a machine with just 1GB of RAM. I saw this for myself, since the guys doing the presentation had a 3 year old notebook running a Celeron processor and 1GB of RAM. Windows 7 worked like a charm on it.
• You can now build “libraries” which are collections of files from different folders that appears “virtually” together in a library folder. You have the choice of what files/folders appear in a library, and can create as many libraries as you want. They appear in the folder-tree pane (left pane) of your folder window.
• Generally runs faster.

I could go on, but until I have the full copy in my hands and can give you screen shots and video, I think I’ll wait.

For more direct information from Microsoft, here are a couple links you can try:

Windows 7 Home Page – has everything you’d ever want to know (at least from a marketing perspective) about Windows 7

Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor – checks your computer to see if it will handle Windows 7

A note on upgrading…. (at least what I know at this point)

• From Vista - the upgrade is very easy and streamlined. You insert the disc, and follow the sparse screen directions.
• From XP - a bit more complicated. Windows 7 wants to reformat your hard drive, which means you’ll need to have all your documents/pictures/data backed up, and also have your software discs available.
• Generally, I would wait a few months before taking the upgrade plunge. It’s never good to be on the bleeding edge of upgrading Windows versions, since the first few months typically are the shakedown period, where they find the real-lilfe bugs and fix them.

Tagged as: Microsoft, Windows, Windows 7, Windows update, Windows Updates, Windows Vista