Playing With Windows 7
Not too long after PDC 08 (Professional Developers Conference) where they showed Windows 7 for the first time, a pre-beta build of Windows 7 leaked onto the internet. I decided to snap it up to play around with for a bit. I did use a little hack so I could get the fancy new taskbar working in this build as it is disabled and hidden away by default. I am so glad I did get this because it has made me excited for this operating system. There are many reasons why, and below are just a few of them from the 6801 build.
I’ll start off with the most apparent new feature in Windows 7, one that I had mentioned above, the redesigned taskbar. The taskbar is now a bit taller than the previous one, and it shows icons by default instead of names of the windows. It works similar to the dock in Mac OS X with your running programs/windows and quick launch all together in the same area. you are free to pin programs to the taskbar by either dragging or assigning them to the taskbar. To differentiate from a quick launch icons and open windows is a orange glass behind the icon. Multiple windows of the same program are grouped together and can be accessed by hovering or clicking over the icon which brings up a preview bar with showing all the open windows. They have also changed the behaviour of the notification area. By default, there are your 3 or 4 main items such as sound, network, windows defender and battery. When you have programs that use the notification area, by default they are hidden. You can however change the options to show there all the time. I think this is interesting as it make the taskbar less cluttered, especially for those of us with heaps of notifications taking up a reasonable percentage of out taskbars. The whole taskbar is a little weird to start off with. i was a bit worried I wouldn’t like it, but it is something you do eventually become accustomed to.
While explorer stayed pretty much the same, the significant improvement was the the sidebar. In Vista, it use to show favourite locations. While it still has that, they have added so much more, including Libraries, Homeshare, Network and Computer and everything underneath them. This makes accessing specific locations much easier in Windows 7 compared to previous versions. Libraries is a great addition to explorer. A library is a virtual folder which hold the contents of multiple folders including you user folders and network shared folders. There are all put together in a virtual folder, with the same categories we’ve been used to such as documents, music, video and such. You are free to add different locations to the library, for example folders from an external source such as USB hard drives. They have also introduced federated search into Windows 7 which allows you to search from external sources. One good example for this that I have used was a Flickr search. This allowed me to search Flickr for picture from explorer, and all tags and information were viewable from explorer, just as if they were local images. One last thing I did notice in Computer was now external flash drives and media cards show the used space bar, similar to hard drives to there. This is a small thing but I wonder why it wasn’t included in Vista.
They have done a bit with the networking in Windows 7. Seeing and selecting wireless networks is easier now. You only have to click on the notification to get the list of networks and connect to them. Also the network stuff in explorer has added a bit. First off, in the sidebar in explorer, you can launch a Remote Desktop Connection to a computer on your local network just by right clicking on the computer name. Also in 7, you now have the ability to make shared folders from other computers made available to you offline, with synchronization as well. The would be great for sharing media over a network and store it on multiple computers without having to copy every time the host machine adds to it. You can store the files offline for you to access and synchronize any changes to the folder on the machine. The last thing they’ve added in Windows 7 is Homegroup. Unfortunately I don’t have another Windows 7 machine to actually play with this feature but by the sounds of things, it is going to be an interesting part of Windows 7.
Dragging a window up to one of the edges of the screen does something very useful. If you drag a window to the top of the screen, it goes fullscreen. If you drag it to either the left or right sides, the window takes up half the screen space on that side. One way this could be utilized is in a copy and paste or dragging situation. You can have 2 windows on either side of the screen at the same time and move stuff from one window to the other. You could also put 2 programs up and use say a chat client at the same time as browsing the web and be using the maximum amount of screen real estate with no overlap between windows.
One major annoyance in Windows Vista was the User Account Control. This lead to people getting very frustrated when doing tasks such as running and installing software with the UAC cutting in with the black screen until the prompt was dealt with. This lead to people disabling it so it wouldn’t be annoying and in turn, it reduced security of the OS. They did a much better job with fixing it so you aren’t tempted to disable it. The prompt is now non intrusive and you can deal with it at your leisure so you can continue on doing your computer tasks without being disturbed by these UAC prompts. They’ve managed to change how this works to make it much more user friendly and give people no reason to want to disable this. Thank you so much for this!
After having a not to pleasant experience with Windows Vista and trying to get it to install drivers for a Intel Webcam, I decided to take it to Windows 7 to see how it handled it. In Vista, I plugged it in and spent about 3 to 5 minutes waiting for it to identify the device, search for drivers, download the drivers and then install them. It does pretty much the same thing in 7, just much faster (just over 1 minute, which for most was the downloading of the driver) and it gives a better indication of what it is actually doing, including download percentages for the driver. It is such a small thing and I am happy it works right in this version.
This is just an introduction of a small selection of some major features coming in the next version of Windows. There is still more to come in terms of features, but nothing that major. Most of the stuff is under the hood which improves performance and reliability. This became very apparent to me when testing this operating system on an older machine, one that would slug with Vista on it. Windows 7 performed pretty well on this older hardware, better than expected to be honest. I really enjoyed using it and if the public beta, release candidates and release versions of Windows 7 are as great as this, Windows 7 is going to be a phenomenal operating system when it come out next year. I can’t wait!
Screenshots of Windows 7 can be seen here. A picture is worth a thousand words so there are an extra fifteen thousand.
Windows 7 was used on an Intel Pentium 4 3.2Ghz CPU with integrated ATI graphics and 512mb of DDR2 RAM. Experience may differ depending on system.
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