The Windows 7 Review: Yes, you should really upgrade!

We know you’ve been waiting for this. All of you are itching for a glimpse of this newfangled OS from Microsoft, but you’re not quite sure whether the water’s still too cold or too hot for you. Well, with a little help from ArsTechnica.com, what we have for you is one of the most comprehensive looks at Windows 7.

But we give you the goods right here at the beginning, and we agree with ArsTechnica 101% (emphasis is ours):

“Windows Vista, for all its (alleged) flaws, was the best version of Windows ever shipped. The underlying changes it made were essential to the longevity of the Windows platform, and user features like the searchable Start menu remain an absolute joy that make XP look clunky and ancient in comparison. Windows 7 is even better than Vista, so XP holdouts should upgrade with confidence. Windows 7 is a great OS.”

Windows 7 is, overall, a fantastic OS. It builds on a solid platform, and just makes it even better.

The full review from Arstechnica.com is 15 FULL pages of wonderful Windows 7 details. If you want all that information (it can be a tad bit long for most readers), read the full article here. MacPCWiz be the “highlight show” for this. Here we go, and yeah, say “Hasta la Vista” and “Goodbye to XP“.

The Background

• No matter what people say, Vista was progress for Microsoft. A lot of the transitions that had to be made from a clunky and outdated Windows XP was carried out by Vista — the searchable Start menu, new video subsystem, “no restarts” for driver installs, Vista’s new sound stack that lets us set audio volume on a per-application basis — all of these were good things from Vista. It was a major overhaul of what was then an outdated XP platform, and we should have really expected that the transition was going to be a bumpy ride.
• Version confusion? None of that from Windows 7. While Vista confused buyers to their wit’s end about which version to buy, Windows 7 presents a more streamlined path. Although there are still these versions — Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate — we’ll let you in on our little secret. Vista had features turned on and off almost arbitrarily between versions, and you don’t really get a feel of what you upgraded for. With Windows 7, there are really just 3 choices — Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate. Starter and Home Basic are crap versions — they are “Linux” alternatives from MS. Enterprise and Ultimate are really the same versions — they differ in licensing.
  • Home Premium – contains all that you need for home computing. And no, none of that “limited networking capabilities” crap.
  • Professional - this version is for small and medium businesses
  • Ultimate - for people like me who needs “all of it. ALL OF IT!”

The installation

• We discussed this at length in our “How to: Installing Windows 7″ article here.
• There is less user interaction. Most user input comes before the install starts and near the very end. This was a Vista foundation. Goodbye XP install process.
• RAID was a beeyatch to install in XP, as the installer required the drivers only from a floppy disk source alone. None of that in Windows 7 (again this was a Vista foundation), you can dig drivers that the install process may need from any source — USB, optical media, or HDD.
• Don’t want IE8? (you bet your ass we don’t want it) You have the option to untick it. Yey for that. As a browser, it can actually be removed. The other browser-like applications within the OS still works. Cool, huh?
• Driver craziness? None of that. This gave us fits in Vista. Microsoft cleaned up their act on this one. As we told you in our install article, everything mostly just works. And what doesn’t can usually be solved with a Windows Update. How about legacy devices? Well, as a rule of thumb, if it didn’t work in Vista, it probably won’t work in Windows 7 as well.

Desktop and User Interface

• The new start-up logo is a beauty. We likessss it.

• Vista users will immediately notice that the Sidebar is now gone, but the Gadgets remain — they hover just below the desktop icons.
• The new Taskbar, as per ArsTechnica:
  • “The most remarkable new feature of Windows 7, and the one that people will interact with most often, is the new taskbar. The new taskbar melds the old Quick Launch toolbar with the traditional taskbar, providing a single place to both launch applications and switch between them. Replacing the mix of small Quick Launch icons and large textual buttons, we have simply a row of large icons. Left clicking an icon either starts or switches to the app. If the application has a single window, clicking the icon switches directly; if it has multiple windows, clicking the icon presents a thumbnail view of each window, requiring a second click to switch to a specific window.” – There are just a lot of cool things about the new taskbar. Playing around with the new OS is actually enjoyable.
• Jump Lists – This a new feature, special context menus shown on the taskbar and Start Menu icons that give quick access to more application-specific functionality. Even 3rd-party apps that don’t have native Windows 7 coding can have jump lists. ANY software that uses the  Most Recently Used list (MRU) feature will have that list in its jump list.
• Here are some User Interface images (credit ArsTechnica for images):

Windows Live Messenger Jump List - functionality for you

Windows Media Player Jump List

IE8 shows thumbnails per tab (!!) upon mouse hover

See the green portion? That's your download progress. Snazzy.

• It’s not all roses, though. You remember that uber-slow Search Window in Vista? Yep, it’s still there.
• Device Stage – Connecting new devices to your system can sometimes yield different results — a verrrry slow device driver install in Vista (with no guarantee that it will work), to a dreaded BSOD in Windows XP. In Windows 7, connected devices, both USB and Bluetooth, now appear in the single Devices and Printers control panel. If the device is supported by Device Stage, it has a pretty little icon that looks like what it is.

The Devices and Printers Window

• Double click into a device with “Device Stage” support — these come as XML files provided by the manufacturers — and you will get a pretty and useful staging window to do stuff with said device.

• Windows Management – Ahhhh, new things here. Let us list them down for you.
  • Aero Peek – allows a of a hidden window without minimizing all open windows. Hovering the mouse over its thumbnail in the taskbar will make every other window turns to a glass outline, with only the window being pointed at remaining visible.

Aero Peek -- transparent windows give you a view of a desired window

• • A similar feature exists for peeking at the desktop. The right-hand edge of the taskbar is the “Show Desktop” button; clicking it does the same show/hide desktop behavior of past OSes. Hovering over it, however, does an Aero Peek of the desktop.
  • Aero Snap – Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes it; dragging it off the top of the screen restores it to its previous size. Dragging the window to the left or right of the screen makes it take the left or right half off the screen. In this way, two windows can easily be tiled to assist this two-window usage. Nice.
  • Aero Shake – Probably one of the most quirky window management tools on the OS, hold your desired window by the title bar and give it a left-right shake a couple of times, and all other windows minimize except for the one you’re holding. Another shake restores other windows back to original state.

Bundled Apps

As per ArsTechnica:

Windows Vista came with lots of bundled applications; Windows Media Player, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Mail, Windows Media Center, and Windows Movie Maker. Windows 7 has scrapped Mail, Photo Gallery, and Movie Maker moving these applications into an add-on pack called the Windows Live Essentials. Microsoft has decoupled them from Windows so that they have their own release cycle and sidestep bundling and anti-trust concerns. The company hopes that OEMs will preinstall the Essentials, but apart from a download link, the company does not otherwise promote them within the OS.

• Windows Media Player 12 – This is crap. It’s the 12th time of asking, and still Microsoft fails to deliver on its flagship media player. The design is clunky and non-intuitive, and it really isn’t very friendly to users. The only plus side here is that Windows now ships with built-in support for MPEG2, MPEG4 (which covers DivX and other widely-used formats), and H.264 video, along with AAC audio.
• Though some applications are no longer included, the time-honored Windows stalwarts, Paint, WordPad, and Calculator, are all still there, and all have shiny new versions in Windows 7. Paint and WordPad both incorporate a ribbon-based user interface — if you remember your Office 2007.
  • Paint is about as useful as it’s always been – which is not saying much. One good decision is that now it saves to PNG by default, in contrast to Vista’s choice of JPEG and XP’s BMP.
  • WordPad is considerably more useful, it can now read and write to Office XML .docx (Word 2007) files, and Open Office .odt files. Though obviously it does not support all of the features of these formats, being able to open them for quick viewing in a non-memory hogging app like WordPad is a boon.
  • Calculator‘s changes are substantial. It has four modes now – Standard, Scientific, Programmer, and Statistics – as well as features for unit conversion, date arithmetic, and other stuff.

Other Features

• Native support for High Definition(!)
• Native support for Blu-Ray drives
• Hitting Win+P provides a great tool for presentations. You can now choose how to handle an externally connected monitor on laptop systems — all four options (laptop only, mirroring, extending the desktop, external only) — at the click of a button. Goodbye Fn key combos!

No more Fn key Combos. Windows key + P gives all these.

Windows Vista vs Windows 7 concerns

So did we really get a better OS now that we (sorta) have Vista under control? Should we upgrade because it “fixes” Vista problems? The answer is more YES than NO. Dig these:

• Windows 7′s HDD requirement is lower – a tad over 5GBs while Vista was at 7-plus GBs
• With the new WDDM 1.1 memory usage management,  its memory usage is lower. Not by a huge amount smaller, we grant you. We still don’t recommend running Windows 7 on systems with less than 1 GB RAM, but the new OS is a little more snappy than Vista.
• If you hated Vista’s look-and-feel (UI), we’ll tell you upfront you’re probably going to hate Windows 7 as well. If you don’t like new and shiny things and want to stay with XP, there is very little that Windows 7 can do to make your transition better.
• As we mentioned earlier, if you’re scared of the driver issues, there’s none of that here.

All in all, is Windows 7 a better OS? Heck, definitely. Should you upgrade from Vista to Windows 7? Yes, the new Redmond OS will come as a definite relief for Vista users, and will probably reinvigorate what love was lost between the PC public and Microsoft OS’s. Should you upgrade from Windows XP to windows 7? If you were waiting for a “better” version of Vista, well it’s here — upgrade with confidence. MacPCWiz will now start to ask the people up top with annoying questions like “When the heck is my laptop getting that Windows 7 upgrade?!?!“