Windows 7 -- the 48 hour review
In which I review the user experience with Windows 7 after 48 hours, not that the review will take 48 hours.
So it is time to bid a fond farewell to XP, and since I'm going XP->7 and not Vista to 7, it's going to be a clean install. I actually prefer this because I'm a computer geek. However the Vista to 7 upgrade is likely a lovely feature for those who have Vista and are just moving to 7 for the improvements. Also, important to note here is that while I've used Vista a good bit over the years, I never owned a Vista system, so some of the improvements I note in 7 may actually have been implemented in Vista at some point, and I just missed it.
A clean install means I've spent the past [extensive period] cleaning up data and backing up and archiving. I love my external USB hard drives. It also means I'll have to go and reinstall all my programs after the install, and that is likely going to take a long time.
First, though, in goes the DVD and we're off. Only we're not, it obviously tells me I need to reboot to use it, but I'd just done that. Reboot again. And XP is loading. What? Try one more time, no, definitely XP. OK, what's going on here? Did they forget to make the DVD bootable? Manual override, boot from DVD, and we're good to go. This isn't Windows 7's fault. It's a BIOS issue. Note it, and fix it later.
On the install: Impressive. A+. I've installed on some computer every version of Windows since 3.11. This was the best experience. It was everything that a novice wants--clean, easy, fast--and almost everything a professional could ask for--fast and powerful. I was able to muck around with drives and partitions to my heart's content, but the guy off the street could click twice and be done. Then followed the lengthy install process, right? No. No more user interface is required at all, which is remarkable in and of itself. Even more impressive is that it wasn't all that long! Now, my PC is still quite powerful, but an average computer is going to blow through this install in less than 20 minutes. That's amazing.
On the first boot: C+. This is the boot that most users will never actually see because they buy their computer OEM and they've mucked about with the install files and booted themselves to get exactly what they want on the machine. But for the end user who's upgrading, it's still in existence. This is the boot where stuff may not work properly, if at all. And you have to know what you're doing to make the tweaks to get things working right. 7 does a decent job of identifying what's wrong, but is very poor in helping you correct it. That's fine by me, but not so good for in general. Noted issues: Sound isn't working, Network has a few glitches. Noted items of impressiveness: Monitor/video card has auto-corrected to the recommended resolution. Under XP it couldn't even get there.
Start loading programs: B-. This includes upgrading drivers where necessary. 7 notes the drivers that have issues (3, sound card, network card and keyboard) and lets me upgrade those after I fix the 'important security issues'. I actually probably could have done them first, but--no. There are about a dozen important security issues, and they all appear to be actually important, except for the Malicious Ware tool, which I never install, so I set those up and sit through the necessary reboot and get my drivers, and reboot. The constant need to reboot here is a fact of computers, but it'd be nice if I could get through a larger chunk of the stuff I need to do between reboots. The Malicious Ware tool is tricky to convince the OS I don't need, learning curve of a new OS. Also, the fact that I'm not letting Windows just run my updates seems to offend it and it lets me know. Telling it to get over itself was tricky as well. With drivers set, we're ready for real user software, for that I need a browser, IE8 comes preinstalled of course. Ok, "Internet Explorer, go get me Avast!", since I figure the first thing I need is some solid and free anti-virus protection. IE takes me to a page for an Avast! reseller promising me support for Avast. $12 per year. Right, wrong place. IE, you fail. "Internet Explorer, go get me Chrome." And we get Chrome, install and let's try this again. "Chrome, go get me Avast!" Now we're talking, right page, download install and good to go. The only annoyance here is that Avast's interface is atrocious. At first I thought this was a 7 upgrade, but it's apparently been around for a bit. Wow. It's a really good thing or Avast! that AVG pissed me off so badly.
The remainder of the programs install in rapid order without any issue. The comments that need to be made are on the tweaking of the User Account Control, that classic annoyance out of Vista, "X has done Y, and needs your permission to continue." It's ubiquitous here as well, and I'm sure needs some tweaking on my end, but I'm not there yet. But I recognize it for what it is and am glad for it.
On Aero: B+. My system can handle it, and let me be the first to say that I like blocky squares. But Aero is clearly a step in a direction that needs to be headed. But if your system can't handle it, ditch it. Fast. The only item I had a real problem with is that transparencies are turned on by default. Not only does this use more resources, I found it a huge distraction. Had to go. Digging a little deeper into the system there's a tool that rates your hardware (0-7 right now) and tells you how well it should perform various tasks. This is handy, but a little simplistic. My system is sitting at a 4.2, and, I noted, could not possibly get any better, the limiting factors are RAM speed and processor, both of which are MOBO controlled, so Wilson is stuck at 4.2.
On Look and Feel (non Aero): B+. A decade more of tweaking has things really popping in some areas. The taskbar is still there and still elegent, the start menu has been refined. I actually dislike a lot of changes there, but some of the most critical are the best anyway, so it works. The desktop is just so much more alive now. I'm a person who has tried to make the computer look like Win3.11 on occasion. Not doing that here. I'm adjusting to the different feel very quickly. Speaks well for Microsoft that such an adjustment is possible so quickly. I imagine after 6 months of using this I really will look back at XP as that dated OS.
On the Taskbar: A. The only thing reserving this to an A and not an A+ is that I told it not to collapse program groups, and it still does, and I don't think there's a way around this. I'll tweak some more, but in 48 hours, I haven't found a solution obviously, and haven't looked hard enough to find one. The first thing I noticed was that quicklauch was gone. My taskbar's sections were missing, and I felt the rage rising. The very nimble controls of the status area calmed me down a bit, but that's going to take weeks to really get a handle on. The rage of the quicklaunch was palpable. Only, there was a quicklaunch, it was just ugly and wrong somehow. And then it started to fall together. Quicklaunch exists as "pin"s now. If the item is open, the pin changes subtlely and you can use the pin as you would for any other taskbar icon. You close the item, the pin changes back and sticks around on your taskbar waiting for your next use. This is brilliant. It really takes using it for a few hours to see how fundamental, and yet, how minimalistic this change is. It saves screen space, gives the user the control they want, and so much more all at once.
Overall: A-. Windows 7 is pretty much everything it claims to be. It took all the pain that was necessary in Vista and followed through on the promise. The system is clean, and while I haven't used it really heavily yet, it's multi-tasked to many windows for me quite nicely. The organizational ability of the system to control those windows is also nice. There are many minor enhancments that you don't really even notice until at some point you see something's a little different, and you wonder, 'Why is that', and it comes to you. An example, as a power saving tool, the system can put the computer to sleep. This is hardly new, it's a standard for laptops and a staple of operating systems for a long time. But what surprised me here was in 7 it appears to be on by default (Uh-oh). Any other time this happens, I'd be writing a rant attacking Microsoft for turning this feature on by default on my desktop. Why am I not?
Because it works. Sleep/Hibernate was so abused not because it was a bad concept, but because it was poorly executed! If you shut down your computer completely, it would take 2 minutes to reboot, and you had to have saved all your data. If you hibernated your computer it would take a minute and a half to reboot and you might not have had to have saved all your data. It just wasn't worth the hassle.
My computer comes out of sleep in Windows 7 in less than 5 seconds. It might as well have just been sitting there idling at full power as it was before. That is how sleep is supposed to work.
So it is time to bid a fond farewell to XP, and since I'm going XP->7 and not Vista to 7, it's going to be a clean install. I actually prefer this because I'm a computer geek. However the Vista to 7 upgrade is likely a lovely feature for those who have Vista and are just moving to 7 for the improvements. Also, important to note here is that while I've used Vista a good bit over the years, I never owned a Vista system, so some of the improvements I note in 7 may actually have been implemented in Vista at some point, and I just missed it.
A clean install means I've spent the past [extensive period] cleaning up data and backing up and archiving. I love my external USB hard drives. It also means I'll have to go and reinstall all my programs after the install, and that is likely going to take a long time.
First, though, in goes the DVD and we're off. Only we're not, it obviously tells me I need to reboot to use it, but I'd just done that. Reboot again. And XP is loading. What? Try one more time, no, definitely XP. OK, what's going on here? Did they forget to make the DVD bootable? Manual override, boot from DVD, and we're good to go. This isn't Windows 7's fault. It's a BIOS issue. Note it, and fix it later.
On the install: Impressive. A+. I've installed on some computer every version of Windows since 3.11. This was the best experience. It was everything that a novice wants--clean, easy, fast--and almost everything a professional could ask for--fast and powerful. I was able to muck around with drives and partitions to my heart's content, but the guy off the street could click twice and be done. Then followed the lengthy install process, right? No. No more user interface is required at all, which is remarkable in and of itself. Even more impressive is that it wasn't all that long! Now, my PC is still quite powerful, but an average computer is going to blow through this install in less than 20 minutes. That's amazing.
On the first boot: C+. This is the boot that most users will never actually see because they buy their computer OEM and they've mucked about with the install files and booted themselves to get exactly what they want on the machine. But for the end user who's upgrading, it's still in existence. This is the boot where stuff may not work properly, if at all. And you have to know what you're doing to make the tweaks to get things working right. 7 does a decent job of identifying what's wrong, but is very poor in helping you correct it. That's fine by me, but not so good for in general. Noted issues: Sound isn't working, Network has a few glitches. Noted items of impressiveness: Monitor/video card has auto-corrected to the recommended resolution. Under XP it couldn't even get there.
Start loading programs: B-. This includes upgrading drivers where necessary. 7 notes the drivers that have issues (3, sound card, network card and keyboard) and lets me upgrade those after I fix the 'important security issues'. I actually probably could have done them first, but--no. There are about a dozen important security issues, and they all appear to be actually important, except for the Malicious Ware tool, which I never install, so I set those up and sit through the necessary reboot and get my drivers, and reboot. The constant need to reboot here is a fact of computers, but it'd be nice if I could get through a larger chunk of the stuff I need to do between reboots. The Malicious Ware tool is tricky to convince the OS I don't need, learning curve of a new OS. Also, the fact that I'm not letting Windows just run my updates seems to offend it and it lets me know. Telling it to get over itself was tricky as well. With drivers set, we're ready for real user software, for that I need a browser, IE8 comes preinstalled of course. Ok, "Internet Explorer, go get me Avast!", since I figure the first thing I need is some solid and free anti-virus protection. IE takes me to a page for an Avast! reseller promising me support for Avast. $12 per year. Right, wrong place. IE, you fail. "Internet Explorer, go get me Chrome." And we get Chrome, install and let's try this again. "Chrome, go get me Avast!" Now we're talking, right page, download install and good to go. The only annoyance here is that Avast's interface is atrocious. At first I thought this was a 7 upgrade, but it's apparently been around for a bit. Wow. It's a really good thing or Avast! that AVG pissed me off so badly.
The remainder of the programs install in rapid order without any issue. The comments that need to be made are on the tweaking of the User Account Control, that classic annoyance out of Vista, "X has done Y, and needs your permission to continue." It's ubiquitous here as well, and I'm sure needs some tweaking on my end, but I'm not there yet. But I recognize it for what it is and am glad for it.
On Aero: B+. My system can handle it, and let me be the first to say that I like blocky squares. But Aero is clearly a step in a direction that needs to be headed. But if your system can't handle it, ditch it. Fast. The only item I had a real problem with is that transparencies are turned on by default. Not only does this use more resources, I found it a huge distraction. Had to go. Digging a little deeper into the system there's a tool that rates your hardware (0-7 right now) and tells you how well it should perform various tasks. This is handy, but a little simplistic. My system is sitting at a 4.2, and, I noted, could not possibly get any better, the limiting factors are RAM speed and processor, both of which are MOBO controlled, so Wilson is stuck at 4.2.
On Look and Feel (non Aero): B+. A decade more of tweaking has things really popping in some areas. The taskbar is still there and still elegent, the start menu has been refined. I actually dislike a lot of changes there, but some of the most critical are the best anyway, so it works. The desktop is just so much more alive now. I'm a person who has tried to make the computer look like Win3.11 on occasion. Not doing that here. I'm adjusting to the different feel very quickly. Speaks well for Microsoft that such an adjustment is possible so quickly. I imagine after 6 months of using this I really will look back at XP as that dated OS.
On the Taskbar: A. The only thing reserving this to an A and not an A+ is that I told it not to collapse program groups, and it still does, and I don't think there's a way around this. I'll tweak some more, but in 48 hours, I haven't found a solution obviously, and haven't looked hard enough to find one. The first thing I noticed was that quicklauch was gone. My taskbar's sections were missing, and I felt the rage rising. The very nimble controls of the status area calmed me down a bit, but that's going to take weeks to really get a handle on. The rage of the quicklaunch was palpable. Only, there was a quicklaunch, it was just ugly and wrong somehow. And then it started to fall together. Quicklaunch exists as "pin"s now. If the item is open, the pin changes subtlely and you can use the pin as you would for any other taskbar icon. You close the item, the pin changes back and sticks around on your taskbar waiting for your next use. This is brilliant. It really takes using it for a few hours to see how fundamental, and yet, how minimalistic this change is. It saves screen space, gives the user the control they want, and so much more all at once.
Overall: A-. Windows 7 is pretty much everything it claims to be. It took all the pain that was necessary in Vista and followed through on the promise. The system is clean, and while I haven't used it really heavily yet, it's multi-tasked to many windows for me quite nicely. The organizational ability of the system to control those windows is also nice. There are many minor enhancments that you don't really even notice until at some point you see something's a little different, and you wonder, 'Why is that', and it comes to you. An example, as a power saving tool, the system can put the computer to sleep. This is hardly new, it's a standard for laptops and a staple of operating systems for a long time. But what surprised me here was in 7 it appears to be on by default (Uh-oh). Any other time this happens, I'd be writing a rant attacking Microsoft for turning this feature on by default on my desktop. Why am I not?
Because it works. Sleep/Hibernate was so abused not because it was a bad concept, but because it was poorly executed! If you shut down your computer completely, it would take 2 minutes to reboot, and you had to have saved all your data. If you hibernated your computer it would take a minute and a half to reboot and you might not have had to have saved all your data. It just wasn't worth the hassle.
My computer comes out of sleep in Windows 7 in less than 5 seconds. It might as well have just been sitting there idling at full power as it was before. That is how sleep is supposed to work.