Windows 7 First Impressions

I've put Windows 7 through its paces, and compared it to a Mac I've been trying out. Here are my impressions.

I've now been running Windows 7 on my laptop at work for about a week. And I've been comparing it on a Sony Vaio SZ from 2 years ago, against a 6 month old MacBook Pro running Mac OS, which I’ve been using for about a month. Before this, I was mostly using the Sony with Vista on it.

On the laptop, the upgrade from Vista went seamlessly, and actually didn't take very long, though I have to say I didn't pay that much attention. Once it finished, I was up and running straight away.

So what are my impressions about Windows 7?

I think it's fantastic. Even though it’s clear that we’re looking at an improved version of Vista, I really wouldn’t want to go back to Vista. The new UI is the biggest improvement, and solves numerous usability problems. Windows 7 has been stable so far in my use of it, and I’m seriously thinking of letting people at work upgrade to it, though I’m worried about the upgrade path once the beta runs out.

Positives

• Library and favourites – This feature is great. I’ve always found myself trawling through explorer dialogs and windows over and over again to get to the same folders. Now you can put any folder you want in a favourite or into a library, and they are always one click away. Big time saver.
• Taskbar – The taskbar is very Mac like, in that both open applications and applications that are pinned to it, are in the same place. But the implementation of showing windows for each application is what makes the feature so good. An application which is running has a subtle box around it, and multiple boxes if there are multiple windows open. Hover over the icon, and Win7 pops up thumbnails to show you each window. Usually that’s enough to, and you can click on the thumbnail and go to the window on one smooth motion. However, hover over a thumbnail, and the full window is revealed with all other windows made seethough. This saves huge amounts of time.
• Window moving key sequences and gestures – This I like, because now with a simple gesture—dragging a window to the right of the screen, I can resize that window to take up half the screen. Same for the left. Now I have two windows taking up half the screen each, and I can compare them. If I drag a window to the top, the window is maximised. Again, big time saver. Together with the taskbar, I can switch between different tasks on my laptop with ease.
• Revealing the desktop – Hovering over the right bottom corner shows the desktop, and clicking minimises all the windows. Again, I can get to what I want with a simple mouse gesture and a click.
• Connecting and disconnecting secondary monitor – this was better in Vista than in XP, but still cause a lot of problems because occasionally the driver would forget what state it was in. Win7 appears to do better, though I’ve had the same Vista problems arise, and I suspect I’m merely benefiting from a more stable driver. I’d really like to see some improvement on this topic, as it makes using a laptop with a second monitor a lot harder than with a Macintosh, which seems to get this one right all the time.
• All Vista drivers seem to work (or Microsoft came up with a new one that work and I didn’t notice)
• Less User Access Control messages – this isn’t huge for me, but it is quite nice not to constantly be clicking the UAC messages.

There were a few smaller problems, so not everything was peachy.

• Once I’d upgraded, I found that the contents of my profile had been moved. This seems to have something to do with the new Libraries, but many of my development tools (Netbeans, SSH, etc) expected some hidden directories to be at the top level of my profile, and didn’t work until I move them back there. I think this is what killed Chrome as well, though I’m not sure (it seems to install itself in the profile instead of in Program Files, so maybe this is Google’s fault, not Microsofts).
• I can still manage to get the secondary monitor into a state where it won’t go to full resolution until I reboot (mentioned this above).
• Sound volume didn’t show up on the taskbar until I fiddled around with it for a while. That was annoying. (I can’t remember how I fixed it, sorry).
• Some of the Sony tools don’t appear to have fully made it through the upgrade, meaning that the Sony Update Manager doesn’t seem to work. But, there haven’t been any updates from Sony in a while, so I’m not too worried.
• Chrome failed to work until reinstalled, as mentioned above.

Compared to the Mac, there’s a lot to like in Windows 7. Here are some points of comparison for me. YMMV.

• Really like the new Win 7 UI much more than the Mac. It’s just more efficient, such as making a window full size.
• Mac wins hands down for the sleep feature, which works instantly on the Mac, and takes plenty of time on Windows. The Mac also barely drains the battery in sleep mode, while Windows last about one night at most in sleep mode.
• This particular (much newer) Mac, performs much better, and the windows machine in general feels it needs to hit the disk constantly. In fact, excessive disk IO is a long standing windows problem, and it doesn’t appear that Win 7 solves it.
• Since I use office products a lot, and Outlook 2007 especially, Entourage 2008 is a pale imitation and literally makes using the Mac much less pleasant than the Windows equivalent.
• But I do like doing my Ruby on Rails programming on the Mac much better, as it has a proper linux-like terminal, where Win7 is still hanging around with the god awful cmd.exe.

In addition to the Sony, I've fresh installed Win7 three more times, in a VirtualBox VM on the MacBook Pro, in a VMWare Fusion VM on the MacBook Pro and on a Pentium D desktop which operates as my main Media Center, with a Hauppauge T-Nova 500 dual tuner DVB-T (freeview in the UK) card. I'll write about the Media Center experience (mixed) in a different post. All installed without significant problems, though the media center didn’t recognize the Linksys WRT54G PCI card, meaning it was a bit of a struggle to get online.

So how did I get on with the virtual machines? Pretty well, actually:

• Though everything installed perfectly, VirtualBox was a real pain to use, as it fails to install its guest tools, so there is no UI and mouse integration. Also, I wasn’t impressed with performance, with the VM occasionally slowing the rest of the Mac.
• VMWare Fusion works fantastically well (I’m still using it), especially in Unity mode, where the applications integrate seamlessly into the Mac environment. I installed Win 7 as a Vista VM, which seemed to work flawlessly. I haven’t see any slowdown in the machine (though I do have 4 GB of RAM which helps). However, there are times when the VM’s UI gets corrupted, especially after the Mac coming out of sleep. And oddly, Fusion seems to suspend the Windows VM when the Mac goes into sleep mode, meaning that when the Mac wakes up, you have to specifically resume the Windows VM.
• However, I’m happy with the Mac now since I can use Outlook 2007 in a Unity mode, which eliminates my problems with Entourage.

Hope this is all helpful. If your experience differed, please let me know in the comments. Any questions, let me know as well.