Continuing my current trend of fiddling with Windows and non-games related stuff I spent my weekend looking at Windows 7.
First some context: I was previously using XP Pro as my main OS on two machines (my Gaming PC and my Netbook). I never looked at Vista because I didn’t want to spend any money on a new OS and had heard that the performance wasn’t as good as XP.
However I had heard that Windows 7 was proving to be faster and use less memory than Vista and since I was wanting to reinstall my machine anyway as it had started to slow down I decided to give the Beta a go. Worst case scenario I end up reinstalling XP which was the original plan in any case.
Find out what I thought below…
First off I’ll start by saying that Windows 7 has been the easiest to install version of Windows I’ve ever used. Aside from having to select my keyboard layout and language the installer was completely autonomous. This is largely because Windows 7 installs everything. If you want to add or remove certain parts you can do so without having to put the disc in the drive. This makes a lot of sense to me.
PERFORMANCE
First thing I checked was the memory use. I only have 2Gig in my gaming rig (Which will at some point go up to 4) and with XP I was sitting at an idle memory use of about 35–40% and using about 10% cpu.
After a fresh boot Windows 7 would sit at around 35% memory (usually a little less) but after 30 minutes or so this grows to about 50%. This is most likely because of a feature where it keeps the files used by frequently used applications in memory so every time I open an application that I’ve had open before it opens much faster.
CPU usage when idle sits at under 1% (and I include playing music on iTunes as “Idle”) and everything seems much faster in general (file operations like move and copy seem to be faster and applications install quicker). I’m not sure how much of this is due to running a 64bit OS as opposed to 32bit though.
Overall performance though is definitely better than XP. Here I probably differ from hard-core tech web sites because I quantify performance as how quickly I perceive something to run and not how few processor cycles or how little memory it used to achieve it. The OS may be using more memory than XP but that memory was just sitting there not doing anything.
I’m yet to notice any adverse effects on gaming but I’ve not been playing cutting-edge super-graphics/memory intensive games recently.
THE TASKBAR
There is no longer an option to have the “Classic” Start Menu anymore so I finally had to face the future and get used to something new.
For me however new things were good. I had recently taken to using RocketDock extensively because I realised I was only using the same half-dozen programs frequently and Quick Launch just wasn’t cutting it anymore.
The new “Pin-To-Taskbar” functionality turns the Taskbar into a Dock which is awesome. The fact that the Taskbar is still a Taskbar is a good thing too and makes it better than a pure Dock. The amount of effort that has been put into revamping this age-old concept is huge and has been very much worthwhile. It took some getting used to; as any new feature does, but it quickly became second-nature.
If you want more details on the changes to the Taskbar then have a look here.
I still have RocketDock installed however. The Taskbar treats all Folders pinned to it as a single Explorer Icon which is a bit crap. RocketDock now sits hidden on the left of my screen and holds shortcuts to my drives, Networks and Libraries.
LIBRARIES
Ah Libraries. Libraries for those not aware, are abstract locations which represent many different locations. You have 4 (Documents, Music, Videos, Pictures) out of the box. By default these will point to both your own “My n” Folder and the machines Public version. This makes it easier to share files between users as you can drop the file into the Public folder and anybody on that machine who opens up their Videos library will be able to access both their own Videos and Public videos.
Some people are unconvinced about these but I have to say they are growing on me a lot. I have a media server at home that stores all my music and films as I use my Xbox as a Media Centre and I often like to watch movies on my Netbook. With the Libraries I just add the remote drive to the respective libraries and I can browse through my files as if they were on my local machine.
GENERAL OTHER STUFF
I did a lot of file-copying and moving at the weekend as a result of the reformat of my main PC. This was a pain on XP but a joy on Windows 7.
The reason for this is that on Windows 7 you can just drag a window (any window) to the left or right sides of the screen and it will dock it to the side, resizing it to take up exactly half the width of your desktop. This made moving files between drives much easier as I can hit Windows+E twice to open two file explorers, drag one to each side of the screen and then just drag files between the two.
For those people who used an Amiga extensively in the past it’s a bit like using Dopus. This is a good thing. That the docking works for any windows based app is incredibly useful so you can compare two websites side-by side or drag files from an Explorer into FileZilla easily. This is all stuff you could do before but this just makes it much easier to do it.
Windows Messenger is not built-in. This is great news as I have always disabled it on every machine I use.
UAC I disabled after about ten minutes use. This meant that Gadgets wouldn’t work (no great loss really) but they can be re-enabled with a little registry poking.
The System Tray no longer annoys you. The default behaviour of an icon is to not show up but still display balloon notifications. Given the new taskbar pinning this makes sense as anything you may have wanted to open from the System Tray you probably wanted to pin anyway.
Being able to search inside the start menu is more useful than I thought it would be and I often find myself hitting the windows key and typing in “Calc” to get to the Calculator rather than navigating the programs list.
THE NETBOOK
I have an Advent 4211 (a re-badged MSI Wind) with 1 Gig of ram and the 80gig hard drive. Windows 7 installed very easily onto the machine from a USB hard drive and detected almost every piece of hardware straight away. The only drivers it didn’t have were for the WiFi but with a wired network connection it managed to pull them off Windows Update in a few seconds.
The Wireless networking is much nicer than XP and is incredibly easy to setup (and has a useful signal strength indicator on the system tray). Battery life seems to be about the same as XP but again the charge indicator on the system tray is now much easier to read.
Overall I’m quite impressed with the performance on this low-power machine especially considering the beta is the “Ultimate” edition and MS are making an OEM edition that should run faster on Netbook type machines.
CONCLUSION
So far I’m very impressed with Windows 7. In terms of usability it is a step up from XP and appears to perform better in day to day use. There are a few little niggles but they are just that: niggles. XP is full of problems that have been solved in 7 and while 7 has a few new ones they are tiny in comparison.
We’ll see how it fares over the long-term as I plan to use it as my main OS at least until August when the Beta expires. For now though the new-user experience is looking pretty good.
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