Windows 7: First Impressions – 6801

Setup

The majority of the setup procedure is directly inherited from Vista/Server2008 and continues to use the .WIM format – which is good as it works well and the existing tools to manage Vista/Server2008 installation images such as WAIK and ImageX should continue to be useful.

Just as Vista was easier to install compared to XP, 7 has been made even easier. XP forced you to constantly watch the installation progress for the dialogs (locale/networking/etc) which pause the install until answered. With Windows Vista you entered some information at the start, it installed and then you answered some more information at the end. While this was better, there were still two separate points to input significant amounts of information – which just seemed unnecessary. Anyway it seems someone has made this point to them as prior to installation the only thing Windows 7 asks is which partition to install onto. It then installs and asks all questions in one hit at the end. Much easier.

First Boot

The first thing you will notice when installing is that the installation background has changed. While it seems fairly trivial at this stage to worry about such a thing, past experience tells me how much the boot screen and background excites people so here they are, enjoy:

As soon as you log in you notice a distinct lack of clutter. Vista had too much enabled by default on the first login with the Welcome Centre, sidebar, gadgets, etc. Windows 7 has a much more simplistic (and welcomed!) approach of nothing. The following are two screens of first logins for Vista and 7:

Performance

As much as I like Vista and think it gets far more stick than it really deserves, I think we can all agree it isn’t the fastest thing in the world. It often seems to just sit there with plenty of free memory and CPU taunting you while it nails the disk for what seems like an eternity after you asked it to do some random simple task. I have one colleague in particular that I swear is going to lose it the next time Vista does this, I’m going to have to put a webcam on him because its going to be good viewing.

Anyway, Windows 7 performance is well…… fantastic! Back in October/November 2007 when Server2008 got to the final stages of its beta I started to use Server2008 on my primary workstation. One benefit of this was the Hypervisor, but the main reason was the fact it was so much faster than Vista. Whenever I go back to Vista from Server2008 now it is immediately obvious how much slower Vista is. The good news is that we now have the same effect with Windows 7 being faster than Server 2008.

If this is anything to go by, Windows 7 is going to be quick!

Explorer

Not going to go into the changes too much as they are not too significant and I’m not convinced it will look much like this in later releases, suffice to say its easier to use and a bit more polished:

Vista:

Windows 7:

Notice the more “explorer” view in the left navigation pane compared to Vista and the inclusion of Libraries (more on that later). Personally I never liked Vista’s way of just displaying the favourite links and the folder tree requiring an optional click to expand it up from the bottom, it was often the first thing I went for and it was never laid out quite how I wanted. Its a relatively minor change but makes a big difference, to me anyway.

Another similar change is the change of default state for “Save As” and such dialogs. In Vista they were minimised, something that did nothing but frustrate me as if you wanted to see where to save it other than a default location you needed to expand it. 7 thankfully no-longer has this behaviour and also defaults the save location to the new download library. I sense lots of saved mouse clicks every day.

Vista:

Windows 7:

The nasty black effect when maximising windows with the Aero Glass theme enabled is gone and you keep the glass effect. As it should always have been:

Window Docking

One of my favourite features of Windows 7 is the window docking feature. If I try and explain how much I like it I’m going to sound stupid, so just take my word for it. Its so simple its brilliant and whenever I’m not using 7 now I still find myself flicking windows around expecting them to dock… it was like second nature within the first 20mins of using it and I find it painful going back to Vista/2008 where it doesn’t exist. There is a little animation to let you know it is going to dock, but it only displays if you hold the window there long enough for it to display. This is nice because if you are not sure then you can hold it there and see the animation, but if you just want to dock and forget it is instant. To use it just:

· Drag a window to the top border of the screen to maximise across the whole screen

· Drag a window to the left border of the screen to maximise across the left half of the screen

· Drag a window to the right border of the screen to maximise across the right half of the screen

The stages of docking are:

1. Dragging the window to a screen border, this shows the “Ping” animation showing that you are about to dock a window:

2. Animation displays the screen area that window will dock to. The box starts from the point of the “ping” and expands to the screen space the window will dock to. I have docked it to the top border which uses the full screen, you can see the border around the edge of the desktop:

3. It docks the window when you let go of the mouse button. It just looks like a normal maximised window so I wont provide a screen of that as I think we know what that looks like. Once it is docked you have all the same normal options (minimise, etc) but you can also continue to dock in different ways, hold the mouse button down on the title bar again and just drag it to a new position, for example the right hand border which docks to the right side of the screen:

You get the idea. I find it really useful as I often have multiple applications that I want to see at the same time and not keep alt-tabbing between. Sure I could just resize the windows manually, but that requires effort and I’m lazy – which is why I like this so much. Flick a RSAT tool to the right, flick a Powershell window to the left and you’re off!

The big win with something like this would be the ability to configure instead of it just being locked as it is right now. The thing I would really like to see here is a docking configuration screen where you can assign different areas of the screen border to dock to different screen space. A good example of the configuration would be to allow two windows to dock on the left border instead of one. I have a 1920×1200 screen so I have the real estate and I want to make the best use of it. I would like to be able to assign the left border’s top half to dock to the top half only, leaving the bottom half free to dock something else. Something like:

Maybe the configuration screen could be accessed from a key press similar to Win-D for the desktop or Win-G for the gadgets? Perhaps the screen could fade like it does for UAC/Flip3D and get a simple drag drop where you want things to dock like:

Windows 7? Are you sure?

With the recent announcement that “Windows 7″ will be the final name, some people have applauded the simplicity while others have picked holes at whether it really is version “7″ or not. Technically the build numbers are still in the 6.1x range as it is a direct evolution of NT6′s Vista/Server2008, but personally I don’t think there is a justifiable need to artificially roll the build numbers up to NT7 and would be surprised to see it happen. The only possible issue might be if MS continue the new naming scheme with Windows “8″ as it could really be NT7 and that could get slightly confusing to people that regularly check the actual build version numbers for some reason. Does anyone plan to lose sleep over this? I certainly don’t.

Personally I like the name and applaud what they are trying to do – less fluff, less “WoW” and more focus on delivering a solid product.

There also appears to be some confusion on whether 7 is just Vista SP2, the answer is a resounding no. Vista SP2 is currently running in a separate beta program and will update both Vista and Server2008 using the same service pack. Windows 7 is a different entity.

Inbox Applications

While some of the inbox applications have received significant updates to their UI to fall inline with the new Ribbon design, others have been removed completely. There are also a couple of welcome newcomers.

The following shots show the new Ribbon UI for Paint, Calc and Wordpad applications:

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Microsoft have *at last* included the ability to burn an ISO from a default installation! Its simple and functional, nothing fancy – but it does exactly what it says on the tin.

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PowerShell V2 is now included by default in Windows 7 and it comes with a simple editor:

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Another useful addition is the inclusion of a set of basic codecs to play DivX and Xvid so you can watch your favourite shows without installing any 3rd party codecs. Media Player has also been updated to look more in line with the OS

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Worth noting quickly is that the sidebar in its current form has been removed from 7, so has the Welcome Centre. Gadgets are still present, but they now just reside on the desktop and can be moved anywhere. They will stick to any edge of the screen should you want them to.

Viewing the gadgets is now easier as the “Win-G” key combination now shows the gadgets instead of the sidebar. In Vista, if the gadgets were not docked in the sidebar they did now show and you had to tab through to display them.

Lastly, some of the bundled applications have been removed:

· Windows Mail

· Windows Photo Gallery

· Windows Movie Maker

This was done for three main reasons:

1. People were getting confused having both inbox packaged applications and the downloadable “Live” brand applications which seem to do the same role. A good example of this is the inbox “Windows Mail” and the “Windows Live Mail” – both are mail clients, look almost identical and both have a very similar feature set.

2. Anything that goes into Windows needs to go through a huge amount of testing and updating them is not a simple task. By removing them from the windows build users should get a better experience as they can be updated more frequently and Windows development is

3. Less applications installed by default for users that have no intention of ever using them.

Installing the “Live” applications is simple, just run a shortcut in the start menu and it starts a download to install the latest versions of the applications you choose from the web.

System Tray

The number of icons taking up space in the system tray has been reduced and only the core system ones are shown all the time by default:

When you install programs that have system tray icons they are not shown, to see them click the little up arrow:

If you are not happy with this default behaviour and want to permanently see some of them click “Customise” and a menu will appear:

Just choose the appropriate option for the icon you want. The options are:

· Show icon and notifications

· Hide icon and notifications

· Show only notifications

I like this new behaviour and find I can hide about 6/7 icons on an install with normal applications installed. Things like WLM/Skype/PowerISO are generally the only ones I show all the time as those are the ones I use most, but its down to personal preference at the end of the day.

Windows Update

In Vista you have to RightClick->ViewDetails an update to see the description, which makes finding what each update does unnecessarily difficult. In 7 the description field has been given a higher priority and its own screen space. Also the type field has been removed in favour of a clearer categorisation view on the left that shows Important/Recommended/Optional updates: