The coding blog of Alastair Smith, a software developer based in Cambridge, UK. Interested in DevOps, Azure, Kubernetes, .NET Core, and VueJS.
I recently upgraded my main PC at home to the public beta (build 7000) of Windows 7. Whilst it’s no longer available from Microsoft, I’d downloaded this during the public availability phase with the intention of setting it up in a Virtual Machine. The public beta and later builds are available if you know where to find them, and build 7000 is still available to MSDN subscribers. This post covers my experiences with Windows 7 so far. I started off by attempting an upgrade of my existing Windows Vista installation. This appeared to go ok after requiring a restart to release file locks on system files, but later failed. Sadly, I didn’t manage to work out why this was, so I’m not able to offer any solutions to other people encountering this, nor submit the appropriate feedback to MS. I then went ahead with a clean installation (obviously, after backing up), but didn’t format the disk first. As such, I have my old Vista installation still present but unusable in a folder called Windows.old.
The first second thing you notice is how much like Vista Windows 7 is. The actual first thing you notice is the jaw-droppingly beautiful boot animation. This is one of those little changes that really puts the gloss on the finished product, and given that the Vista boot animation was still pretty poor for a modern OS (640x480x16pp!!), it’s good to see this finally brought into the 21st century. The Microsofties have managed to get an entire blog post out of the new animation (with an appropriately mixed bag of comments!). Health warning: it contains words like “bioluminescence” and “organic”. I’m not going to do the same, you’ll be pleased to hear!
So back to similarities with Vista. Vista was sold by Microsoft as a “platform release”, that is to say, it’s a new Windows platform, unlike anything gone before it, and it would form the basis for future versions of Windows. That is evident with Windows 7, as the installation experience is identical to Vista’s, allowing for the necessary string changes. Once Windows 7 is installed, you’re greeted with the Vista configuration, but with a new colour scheme; whilst Vista was greeny-blue (dare I say turquoise?), Windows 7 is most definitely a deeper blue. It also seems visually sharper, if that’s possible (I’m not using an HD monitor or connection). Fonts, window layouts, etc., are as they were in Vista.
There are other visual tweaks, too: whilst maximised windows in Vista turned the title bar from a glassy transparency to an opaque black, in Windows 7 they remain transparent. The same modification applies to the task bar.
And there’s the task bar itself. This is perhaps the biggest, most obvious new feature of Windows 7, and how Microsoft haven’t landed themselves a patent-infringement lawsuit with Apple, I don’t know. The new task bar is very similar to OS X’s dock. It’s not an exact copy, but the style is the same. As in previous versions of Windows (XP upwards), windows are grouped by application to reduce the amount of space occupied in the task bar. However, now the task bar only displays a large icon, not a trimmed window title too. A subtle (but not too subtle) “stacking” effect is used to indicate that there are multiple windows open in that application.
| [img_assist | nid=76 | title=The Windows 7 taskbar | desc=Not unlike the Apple Dock… | link=none | align=center | width=400 | height=32] |
| [img_assist | nid=77 | title= | desc= | link=none | align=left | width=53 | height=72] The Windows Pearl (or Orb, as it was called in Vista) acts as before, providing access to the Start Menu. Unlike in Vista, it fits within the task bar rather than protruding from the top (an effect I quite liked). Given this, it’s now a little hard to identify amongst the application icons - it’s only about two pixels larger in each axis than the green Spotify icon in the screenshot above. A nice new effect, however, is the way the Pearl “crackles” visually when it’s clicked (see left). |
Frequently-used applications can be “pinned” to the task bar, providing “quick launch” functionality that has been in Windows for a little while now, albeit sometimes disabled by default. Right-clicking the icon can provides a number of other options, such as pinning recent or specified items of content to the application and giving basic control of the application (e.g., next, play, etc.).
Window management has been tweaked a little. For example, you can now opt to maximise a window in the vertical axis only by dragging it to one side of the screen or the other; when the mouse encounters the screen edge, the cursor “pulses” and a preview is shown via Aero Peek.
Aero Peek is another of the new features, and comes in two halves. First, hovering the mouse cursor over an application’s icon on the task bar provides a good-sized preview of all the windows opened with that application. This preview is actually sizeable enough to be able to identify separate instances of an application by their content, and so is actually useful.
The second half of Aero Peek works as follows. Hovering over a window preview will display the window’s location on the screen by fading out all the other windows to an outline; each window retains a glassy sheen to them, which is more noticeable for background maximised windows. These effects are played out via a short and slick animation (seemingly a fade-in/fade-out transition mostly). This is quite useful for locating windows, but I’ve found it actually quite hard to get used to. This may be because I’m always swapping between Vista (at work) and Windows 7 (at home), but my instinct is to go for the revealed window with the mouse rather than simply clicking as I should. The problem is that by the time the mouse cursor has got to the revealed window, it has disappeared behind the other windows again!
| [img_assist | nid=78 | title=Aero Peek | desc=Three windows are open in total, with the Firefox window being the subject of the “peek”. The other two are Vuze and the Outlook reminders window. | link=none | align=center | width=400 | height=250] |
Paint and Calculator have been given an overhaul to bring their UI into the 21st century: Paint now sports the Ribbon interface that made its debut in Office 2007, and uses PNG as the default file type (replacing JPEG in Vista and bitmap in all previous versions).
Performance- and stability-wise, I’ve found Windows 7 to be incredibly stable. I think I have had just one crash so far (caused by installing a virtual DVD drive), and the only on-going problems I’ve encountered are a couple of niggling driver issues with my graphics card and sound card. It also appears to be much more performant than Vista; for example, my current memory usage (whilst running iTunes, Outlook, Firefox and Vuze) is a smidgeon over 1GB, 50% of my total RAM and about 66% of what Vista used. This bodes well for the netbook support Microsoft are offering with Windows 7 (primarily to get everyone off XP).
There are so many other new things to cover that I simply can’t fit them all into this blog post without making it any more epic than it already is. There is, for example, multi-touch and gesture support, jump lists, the inclusion of PowerShell 2.0 (it’s even enabled by default!) and HomeGroups. I’ve aimed to give an overview of the most interesting (to me!) new stuff that hopefully will inspire you to try it out for yourself.