A Month With Windows 7: My Review

I've got a theory about most reviews of products online. Actually, it's mostly a theory about electronics, technology and software, though it definitely holds in other areas as well. My theory points to the following scenario being behind something like 80% of the reviews you read about this stuff.

A person does a bunch of reading, often of pre-release information, about the product. They place an order and anxiously hit F5 on UPS.com for 2-3 days watching their package bounce around the country until the doorbell rings and they scrawl their unrecognizable John Hancock on with that plastic pen.

As they take the package into the house, they reach for the digital camera and a box cutter and tear open the brown shell to document the technological goo within. They push the buttons, flip the switches, glance through the menus and, about 10 minutes later, they start writing their review, which often consists of them going over the marketing materials and checking features off as they find them on the device.

I think that's a problem.

I've got more gadgets than the average bear and have had my fair share of "normal" stuff like cars, houses, lawn mowers, etc. And, without exception, those products were VERY different a few weeks, few months and few years after I first got them.

Some gadgets that I wasn't entirely sure about turned out to be some of my absolute favorite. Worse however, were the gadgets, devices, luggage, and other stuff that I was thrilled to have bought only to discover the problems later. When I read a review or someone's summary of getting the item, I want to know what those downsides are, because EVERYTHING has them.

So, I'm not really a fan of the whole genre of "unboxing" articles/videos/etc. They're fine for what they are, but they focus exclusively on the first impression, which is, by definition, a small part of your total experience with a product or service.

That's why, a while back, I promised myself I wouldn't jump in with my assessment of any particular technology until I'd lived with it for a while. And, after installing the Windows 7 beta a month ago on my laptop, Windows 7 is something I've lived with for a while, so here are my impressions.

I've been running "Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit Build 7000" on my Thinkpad R61 laptop with 4GB of RAM, a 200GB 7200RPM primary hard drive, and a 320GB 5400RPM secondary hard drive.

For the most part, it contains my normal daily stack of software: Visual Studio 2008, XMind, E Text Editor, the developer browser cluster (IE/Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera), Windows Live Writer, OpenOffice.org (instead of MSOffice 2007, due to not wanting to deal with activation on what's a temporary setup), my giant pile of utilities, etc. The only "big" thing missing from what I'd consider a normal workstation is a regular install of SQL Server 2008.

Overall, my impression is that this release will fit into Microsoft's existing pattern of Windows versions.

1. A version that makes some major changes. People generally end up disliking or hating these versions. Windows 3.0, Windows 95, Windows 2000 (as a workstation) and Vista.
2. A matching version that smooths out the kinks and ends up being the version that people hold on to for several years. Windows 3.1, 98, XP and, now, Windows 7.

Some of the refinements are pretty handy:

• The thing that I am genuinely most impressed with is its handling of hardware. This is particularly noteable given that this is a pre-release version of a 64-bit edition of Windows. It picked up and installed, without me having to search for drivers the following:
• The internal bluetooth adapter, WiFi card, webcam, sound card, SD card reader, etc. If you take retail versions of XP or Vista and install them on your HP, Dell, Toshiba or Thinkpad, without those vendor's install discs, you'll note how big of a shift this is.
• The WiFi Epson inkjet printer on my network, including remote scanning.
• My bluetooth mouse.
• My projector. It's now just as easy to use a Windows laptop with a projector as it is to use a Mac, if not easier. Given the number of times I've suffered through Fn-F5 button smashing myself and watching others as 10 people watch on, if you use a Windows laptop to give presentations, this alone is worth the upgrade price when it's released.
• The task bar "pinning" of applications and the context menu, clustering and "recent items" that are all part of the retooling of the task bar are a distinct shift in the right direction. Lots of this stuff is reminiscent of the Mac dock, but without grafting a Mac metaphor where it wouldn't fit.
• The searching of the "Start" menu (which is now just a circular Windows® logo, so it's not really a "Start" menu anymore) that showed up in Vista (and was one of my favorite Vista features) is spread through much more of the OS. This is particularly handy since they have re-organized the Control Panel YET AGAIN.
  
  I discovered that feature when I looked to the search area in exasperation after not being able to find something like "Administrative Tools". Subsequently, I heard on a podcast about how much work went into "regular" language search for things like "How do I change my wallpaper?" which gives you the right Control Panel entry.
• Speed. A lot of work supposedly went into making Windows 7 run leaner on the same hardware. Given the hardware that this laptop contains and the hardware in my day-to-day Vista64 machines, Windows 7 is noticeably faster.
  
  My Vista64 boxes, with 8GB of RAM, typically idle at about 5.5GB used when I've got everything open. The laptop is more like 2.2GB. That's not apples to apples, due in large part to not running SQL Server on the laptop. However, given that the number one negative against Vista when it came out was that none of the PC's in the stores could supply enough horsepower, this is a great improvement.
• Networking has gotten a bit smoother. The VPN connection is now in the system tray by the wireless. It also has fewer problems with going to sleep on one network and waking up on another, something Vista wasn't ever really very good at.
• The Remote Desktop Client has a few nice tweaks. My favorite is in full-screen mode. That little menu that pops down when you hover at the top can now be dragged to a position other than centered. Given how often I'm 2-3 levels deep in Remote Desktop sessions, this has proven very useful.
• I haven't run into anything that I can recall where the install complained about not having the right version of Windows. This happened to me CONSTANTLY when I switched from XP to Vista, so this is a welcome pattern.
• Also in Remote Desktop (though this was in Server 2008 and downloadable independently as well) is font-smoothing, which makes remote-work much more pleasant.

What's not so great

• There are some bugs in that improved Remote Desktop. It doesn't seem to want to close down well, whether because the connection died or because you're trying to kill it yourself. I've had to kill the process WAY too many times.
• Shutting down Windows itself is horrible. 75% of the time when I try to physically shut it off, I end up killing power because I can't wait for it anymore. Fortunately, I put it to sleep most of the time, but this must be fixed before the final release.
• After logging in, it can sometimes take up to 2 minutes before I get anything other than a black screen with the build number in the bottom-right corner.
• Google's Chrome, which runs fine in 64 bit Vista, needs to be set to run in backward-compatibility mode in order to run under Windows 7 64. No idea why.

I Don't Care

You're going to see reviews all over the place about things like the Aero glass, desktop gadgets, wallpaper that shuffles,improved Paint, rebuilt calculator, how "slick" and "smooth" it is, heck, even the improvements to security. I, personally don't care about most of that. It's all stuff I never use, turn off, etc.

Like I've told 1000 salespeople over the years. If it's not a feature I use, it's not actually a benefit you can convince me is worth paying for. All of that stuff fits there for me.

Overall

I know that lots of people either love or hate Windows. The same is true of Mac and Linux. I *like* them all. I still like Linux and I still like Mac. And, this release makes me like Windows a little morstronge than I did before.

While I'll keep Vista around for testing purposes, as soon as Windows 7 goes gold, I'll be upgrading any machine I can.