Windows 7 won’t be officially available to the public until next week—Thursday, August 6, to be exact—when MSDN and Technet subscribers will finally get the chance to download the software legitimately and activate their copies with product keys. It’s the first step on a long rollout that will end October 22 when the software will be available for purchase in retail boxes and on new PCs.
I’ve been able to get a head start, using the official RTM build (7600.16385). For the past 10 days, I’ve been methodically installing and testing the final release of Windows 7 on a wide range of desktop and notebook configurations in my home and office. I’ve done upgrades and clean installs, with and without the Easy Transfer utility, using different editions in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. I’ll have a through review of Windows 7 next week, including a deep dive into its most interesting new features.
Windows 7 isn’t perfect, but it is greatly improved over its predecessors in many ways. Calling it an “evolutionary” release in comparison to Windows Vista is probably a fair characterization. However, if you assume that Windows 7 is simply “Vista, fixed,” you’ll miss many small but meaningful changes and several large ones that give Windows 7 its own identity. In daily use, I continue to be impressed by the attention to detail that went into the Windows 7 iterations of features that are part of every Windows user’s daily routine.
From a design standpoint, Windows 7 makes the 2001-vintage XP design look downright primitive. Switching between Vista and 7 is less jarring, but the improvements in consistency and visual presentation are still noteworthy and make 7 feel more graceful and modern. The palette is softer, and many of the UI rough edges have been smoothed out.
Arguably, the visual presentation is just eye candy. The more important changes, as far as productivity is concerned, are those that improve usability. When I switch from Windows 7 to a PC running an earlier version of Windows (or, for that matter, running OS X or Ubuntu), I miss some of the window management tricks that I’ve come to rely on, including the ability to peek at thumbnails of open windows on the taskbar and to “snap” windows into position with a flick of the mouse.
Over several months of use, I’ve really come to appreciate Jump Lists, which are pop-up menus that can be summoned with a right-click on a taskbar icon (or, more easily, with a quick upward flick of the mouse. The default Jump List for a program allows you to see a list of recently used files and pin favorites to the menu.
In terms of performance, Windows 7 feels quick and responsive. It’s a solid performer even on hardware originally designed for Windows XP, and I’ve found that it uses significantly less memory, disk space, and CPU cycles than Vista. The Windows Experience Index, which was initially intended as a marketing tool for Windows Vista, now does a more through job of testing and reporting on your
system’s capabilities (more on that next week). One of my favorite new Windows 7 features is Resource Monitor, which allows you to perform some serious real-time sleuthing into running programs, services, and processes to see which ones are affecting performance or making
unexpected network connections.
In terms of multimedia, the biggest news in Windows 7 is that it now supports most popular audio and video formats. You can play back MP3 and WMA tracks as with previous Windows versions, but now you can also use built-in Windows code to play unprotected music ripped and saved in iTunes or purchased from the iTunes Music Store in AAC (M4A) formats. You can also play movies captured by digital cameras in QuickTime Movie format. Neither iTunes nor QuickTime is required for playback of either format. Windows 7 also supports playback and streaming of video files compressed with the popular H.264/AVC codec; however, it does not natively support the popular Matroska (MKV) container format (DivX is working on a solution that will add MKV support to Windows 7 via the Media Foundation framework.)
