7 Heaven
Thanks to a fan I’ve got a fully legit version of Windows 7 Professional on my Dell Studio XPS desktop, and it’s awesome. I’m running the 64-bit version, and this is the retail code, only about 10 days before release. I toyed around with the Release Candidate a couple of months ago, so I had a taste of the goodness, but the retail version is even better. This is seriously Microsoft’s best OS release, period. Windows 95 had the hype, Windows XP was a huge step forward, but Windows 7 is near perfection. It’s fast, rock solid, secure, and even pretty.
What do I like thus far? Well, everything.
1. The look and feel is polished and refined, and I love the new changes to the taskbar and the desktop. It’s a huge improvement over Vista, where the glorified Flip 3D feature was a joke, barely better than regular alt-tab. Witness how brilliantly Expose works in Mac OS X; it lets you see all windows at once! Flip 3D just highlighted a single window at a time; you still had to alt-tab through them to find the one you want. Idiotic. Flip 3D is gone in Windows 7, and instead there’s much more useful functionality that lets you locate the application you want and navigate the clutter of windows on your desktop, but at the same time it doesn’t feel like a Mac rip-off.
2. I seriously wanted to rip the throat out of whoever designed Vista’s UAC system. I’m a power user, but every time I want to do something to my system I have to hit the “Mother May I?” button as many as three times. “Oh,” the UAC defenders proclain, “Linux and Mac OS X require you to give permission to the system, too!” But the key thing there is that they only ask you once! If I want to do something pretty docile to the control panel settings in Vista, I’ve got to acknowledge that I’m doing something that could change my settings, and then when I actually change my settings UAC kicks in and requires me to sign off again. Come on, Microsoft, I’ve already signed off. Why do you think people dive into the control panel in the first place? In Windows 7, UAC is still there, but it’s been toned down to be much more common sense.
3. Why does Vista require 5 to 10 minutes to shut down at times? It’s mind boggling. Windows 7 shuts down when you tell it to.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Now, it sounds like I’m praising 7 mainly by damning Vista, but that’s just part of the story. Vista was annoying, but it wasn’t as terrible as Apple would have you believe. Windows 7 isn’t just Vista-done-better, though. It displays a refinement and sense of craftsmanship that I rarely attribute to Microsoft. Windows 7 is Microsoft, finally, firing on all cylinders.