My Final Windows 7 Post

If you don't feel like reading this whole post, just know that Windows 7 is shaping up to be a very good, very usable operating system. Also know that I am NOT presenting any hard evidence to support my opinion, no numbers. It's all subjective.

I am an OS enthusiast. I've run all kinds of operating systems on different hardware for extended periods of time. My experience with windows extends all the way back to the 1980's when everything was monochrome. I used a VAXmate running Windows to use Pagemaker to write educational material for DEC.

Soon after we switched to Macs, and from that point on my personal computers ran either OS/2, Mac OS or BeOS (for the most part). Most of my development tool place on VAX/VMS or OpenVMS.

In the mid-90's I came back to Windows with Windows NT. The company I worked for wrote VB applications on NT, and Windows 95 (for the most part). From that point on most of my development shifted off mainframes onto PCs or Servers running Microsoft Operating systems of one flavor or another. We STILL use Windows XP at work, along with RedHat Linux.

When Mac OS X came out, we became a Mac household and we still are. The descendant of NEXTSTEP is a wonderful operating system, and there are a ton of wonderful applications that run on it. I even ran Windows XP on it when I needed it for work, and for games.

Recently I decided my life might be easier if I matched one of the operating systems at work and I picked up this nifty PC and installed Ubuntu on it. Ubuntu rocks. Seriously. Open source software is fantastic and the UI for linux has come a LONG way in a decade or so of development.

But back to Windows.

Over the past few years we have seen what must be termed as hype for the "next generation of Windows" (post XP). Microsoft leaked too many of their IDEAS to the public, who grabbed onto it with great hope. It sounded like the perfect operating system, better than OS X, was about to erupt. What users got instead was Vista.

There is nothing WRONG with Vista (at least based on specifications and technical information that I have read; I have never actually USED Vista); Vista simply did not live up to the hype that was spun in the media for 2 years prior to its release.

People felt Vista was a memory hog, it was slow, required better hardware to run on, the security was obnoxious, etc. Anything a person could praise about Vista, 100 people could find something wrong with it.

Microsoft came back with... Windows 7. No major promises with this release, it seems they are taking an under the radar approach (for Microsoft) and working on "cleaning up" Vista. I began reading reviews of pre-beta W7 (Windows 7), some bad, some good, many hopeful, and decided to check it out for myself. So here I am writing this blog entry to convey my feelings about an early beta version of Microsoft's next stab at Windows.

First, let me describe my hardware. I built a Shuttle Glamor model, based on Intel chipsets. It has a Core 2 Quad CPU @ 2.4 GHz, 4 GB of RAM, an NVidia 8400 GS graphics card with 512 MB of RAM, 2 250 GB SATA II hard drives, a DVD/CD burner and a 1920 by 1080, 24" LCD monitor. Let me mention one other thing about the hardware: the LED power light on the front of the computer could be used to generate absolute zero temperatures in a science lab. I can light the whole bedroom with it at night, and if I point the light outside, the coyotes gather in the wash and howl at my house.

Let's move on.

I ran Ubuntu on this same machine for a couple of months before putting Windows 7 on it. I chose Ubuntu because it is easy to configure, attractive and is Linux, and our servers all run linux. Ubuntu ran well with all the compiz settings pegged, and I was able to build my own kernel that supported the full 4 GB of RAM. Noting this is important because I am using Ubuntu as a basis for comparison with Windows 7 regarding speed and memory usage on THIS computer.

I am going to start my assessment with the negatives, and there are not many. The first issue is of my own doing. Since I hate having memory sit there unused, I opted to install the 64 bit version of Windows 7. I automatically enter into shakier ground doing so as (for example) driver support is limited, and the performance of 32 but applications are not optimal. Most applications are 32 bit. The second issue was that my network chip was not recognized, and I had to burn a driver CD for it from my Mac. I should be thankful a driver was available (NOTE: I had to install the 64 bit driver for Vista). The third issue is that my MICROSOFT ARC MOUSE did not function properly! That one irks me. The forth and final issue could be anyone's fault. I upgraded my Nvidia driver from the one that came with Windows 7 to the latest and greatest available on the NVidia site. Since I've done that, the screen has frozen several times for about 10 or 20 seconds, then it went blank, and then came back and Windows reported an error with the driver. It is not a frequent occurrence, and probably avoidable if I just left the original driver alone.

Onto the good.

Windows does not come with a large amount of software. Just some basics. With Windows 7 you can also download additional applications (that do not install from the disc), such as their Windows Live suite of applications. I really like the Windows Live Mail application. This, however, is not a bad thing. There is a ton of software on the internet available to complete most people's needs. I immediately went out and snagged a couple of necessary applications: Notepad++, OpenOffice.org, Firefox (a 64 bit experimental version too) and Google Chrome. I was then able to install the other applications I need to do my work, such as Java, OC4J and Apache/MySQL/PHP. I have also installed a bunch of other do-dads as well. I have been able to get up and working in a short amount of time with all the applications I want or need.

Then there is gaming. My hardware is really not suited for gaming, and I am not a big gamer but I do have a few games I play. Spore, Black & White 2, Bioshock, and some others like that. They all install and run fine on Windows 7, altho' they still have their own bugs and I have hardware limitations, but they do run. This is good news I am sure for gamers (altho' the best video drivers might not yet be available, I cannot speak to that).

The look and feel is much improved over XP. Probably not much different from Vista, except perhaps for the start bar. I actually like the Explorer. The breadcrumb trails are a welcome addition, the side bar and preview work well and the file indexing and searching is great. The actual appearance of the widgets and also font rendering is beautiful. The appearance is very much like KDE4 on linux, and that is most obvious in the start bar.

The special effects do not seem to slow it down; windows open, close and resize well. The special effects are clean and simple, not overdone as I expected them to be. I also like, but have to get used to, the hot spot window manipulation, where if you move a window to a specific part of the screen it will resize it and place it for you. That's a little weird but it is configurable.

The start bar shows previews of windows as you hover over the icons and if you hover over one preview, it makes all the other windows invisible (with an outline still visible) so you can see the window over whose icon you are hovering. Right-clicking on the icons will pull up application menus which can vary from program to program. Since there is no definition of what a right-click will give you, some people have complained about this feature, I think it should be up to the application to give you any options it wants you to be able to access from the icon. The message center/icon tray is also cleaner looking.

While I have no experience with UAC on Vista, I have read the myriads of complaints about how intrusive it is to workflow. Since I have not used Vista I cannot offer a valid comparison between Vista and Windows 7, but I CAN offer this: It is no different from security messages served up by by Mac OS X. I do not find UAC on Windows 7 intrusive, on the contrary I find them sensible.

Finally, I want to note that memory usage on Windows 7 is no different than Ubuntu or Mac OS X. While it will cache as much memory as it can, at any given time there is no more than between 1 and two gigabytes of memory in use. Most of that memory is sucked up by running applications, not operating system services. I will note that the Explorer itself seems to gobble up a hefty chunk, but I assume it is caching all the folders you visit in a session. I have not, however, seen hard faulting.

To summarize (personal scale of 1 to 10 based on my usage of them, albeit mac os x on different hardware) with out of box performance, functionality, looks and resource gobbling, 1 being awful, 10 being fantastic:

OS	performance	functionality	looks	resource usage
OS X 10.5	8	7	9	8
Windows 7 (BETA 1)	8	6	9	7
Ubuntu 8.10*	7	8	8	8

I think all three of the aforementioned operating systems are great, but I think that in comparison to Windows XP, Windows 7 Beta 1 is light years better. It is easy on the eyes, quick, not overly hoggish with memory, and has more useful features than its ancestor. It is pleasant to use, even when I don't HAVE to use it. Is it polished like Mac OS X? No, not yet anyway. Is it feature full like Ubuntu? No, but then again what is? But it is competent, applications are available for it, and I think it will be adopted readily when it finally arrives for public consumption. (NOTE: This assumes Microsoft does nothing to ruin it from now to September).

And with this blog, I am done talking about Windows for awhile. :)




* custom kernel with support for latest CPUs and extended memory, with compiz on and active.