Windows Gets a Face Lift
01/23/09 07:51 AM Filed in: Technology
Microsoft has been
(officially) beta testing their newest operating
system, Windows 7 (previously known under the
codenames Blackcomb and Vienna), for about nearly a
month now, and the results are looking extremely
promising.
According to the "reliable" source of Wikipedia, it's due out in late 2009 with ... *groan* ... numerous editions yet again. With all the notes Microsoft seems to be taking from Apple, why can't they understand one of the most significant notes? And that is, users want simplicity. We don't want seven editions, we want one. One edition that does it all. But really, as far as Windows 7 goes, that's the ugliest monster in the room. No speculations as to the price of the new OS yet, but if it's reasonable, Windows 7 may be promising enough to get me to upgrade from XP on my laptop.
Originally, Microsoft planned for Windows 7 (at the time called 6.1) was supposed to be a minor upgrade from Windows Vista. Sort of like a service pack. Microsoft also decided they were going to pull out all the stops and get the operating system out in less than three years! However, with the horrible publicity and reputation that came upon Microsoft with the release of Windows Vista, they decided to get as far away from the Vista name as possible to regain their name. To do this, they decided to quit with the naming convention and just stick to numbers, and since Windows Vista was technically Windows 6.0, they jumped a whole number altogether to get away from it.
Windows 7 isn't built from the ground up. To do so for a universal operating system like Windows would be grueling and only introduce a tremendous amount of bugs. It is still, in fact, an upgrade to Windows Vista. It's an upgrade to Windows Vista that shows real potential in getting Microsoft back into the game of practicallity and putting them back at the forefront operating systems, a lead they've lost with the growing popularity of user-friendly and eye-candy operating systems like Linux Ubuntu and Mac OS X.
Microsoft decided to take notes. After their advertising campaigns to compete Apple's anti-Windows ads backfired humiliatingly (numerous campaigns, I might add, entailing hundreds of millions of dollars each) and only ended up to increase the popularity of Apple's products, they decided their money might be better suited in actually reparing their horribly broken operating system.
Initial benchmarks show that Windows 7 outperforms both Vista (obviously) and XP in almost every area, including start up time, shutdown time, application launch, the recovery from sleep. It still requires a ridiculous 1GB of memory to run properly and leaves an enormous footprint of nearly 13GB (it requires 16GB to install, though). Users often excuse this, saying it doesn't matter since our computers now come with terabyte hard drives and 4GB of memory straight out of the box. This is not a legitimate excuse. A dual-core 2.4GHz processor can compute some 48,000,000,000 periods per second; do you understand the raw power your computer could harness without an operating system (and perhaps the von Neumann Bottleneck) getting in the way? If Microsoft spent less time bloating their operating system and more time allowing applications to speak directly to the hardware, the supercomputers of the future that we so frequently dream would already be here. Anyway, OS X Leopard only requires 512MB of memory to run and 9GB of hard disk space, numbers that still aren't excusable but are good for comparison.
So how about the interface? Like performance, it's significantly better too, right? Definitely. The new taskbar finally dares to do what Vista was too scared to; it abandons the bulky wordage that Microsoft has kept since Windows 95. All applications are represented only by a larger icon of what they are, a design strikingly similar to that of the Mac operating system. To access your entire list of programs, the start menu is still on the left; it looks nearly identical to the menu in Vista with a few added features for simplicty and an improved search speed. Hovering over any icons on the taskbar will render a preview of the open application.
My Computer seems to have been revamped as well with a new way of organizing thing ... A way that, again, looks strikingly similar to the way Apple has chosen to organize Finder. They now support Libraries (Smart Folders), HomeGroup (Bonjour, anyone?), and a nicely organized tree on the left to sort through all the files on your computer. And thank goodness the device manager has finally been tweaked to be more organized.
Perhaps one of my favorites are the new gestures that Windows 7 employs. Drag a program to the top of the screen to maximize it. Throw it against the left or right side of the screen to maximize it to only that side of the screen for easy cascading. Want to hide all the windows so you can see your desktop? Click on the bottom-right hand corner of the screen. And want to make all those other nasty windows disappear except the one you're working with? Click on the menu bar and shake the window. If you need them all to reappear, shake it again. Shaking windows, Microsoft? Now you have been taking notes from Ubuntu ...
Finally, users can decide what they want and don't want in the system tray. This was allowed, to some extent, in Windows XP (and sort of in Vista), but only through the control of the application itself. Microsoft promised it would be allowed for both XP and Vista, but they have yet to come through on their promise. Until now. In Windows 7, if you don't want that icon in your system tray, or if you want it in a different location, just move it! You decide what and how things go in your taskbar!
After using Windows 7 myself and reading several reviews on the subject, the best quote I've heard yet comes straight from AppleInsider.
"But the company is also focusing attention on new performance and usability improvements over Vista, essentially marketing Windows 7's departures from Vista's originally touted features as a feature in itself. There's much less attention on gloss and a new effort in place to present fewer system interruptions due to warning messages like those associated with User Account Control."
"Actual new consumer-facing features in Windows 7 are slight enough for Microsoft to refer to "screen dimming" as significant new feature related to battery life. The Windows 7 website notes, "Bright idea: With a display that dims automatically, you get longer battery life" (below). This feature has been in Windows for at least fifteen years, so it appears the company is rather desperately scraping the barrel for features it can promote in its new operating system release."
I don't say all this to rag on Microsoft. In fact, I'm quite impressed that they seem to be trying to roll out an operating system in less than six years this time. But whether you like Vista or not, if you understand proper proramming and proper computing, you understand Vista was and is a failure. Windows 7 has huge promise, and I'm not upset one bit that the "promise" it's showing (much like all the promise Windows Vista showed, though it was little) is coming straight out of Mac OS X and popular Linux distros such as Ubuntu. Microsoft is the computing giant in the world, and we all know giants move slowly. The little companies have taken off, and Microsoft is finally getting around to catching up. If the final release even maintains the light shown in this beta release (but I'm hoping it still improves even more), I will gladly purchase a license and finally perform a full upgrade from Windows XP on my ... MacBook Pro.
According to the "reliable" source of Wikipedia, it's due out in late 2009 with ... *groan* ... numerous editions yet again. With all the notes Microsoft seems to be taking from Apple, why can't they understand one of the most significant notes? And that is, users want simplicity. We don't want seven editions, we want one. One edition that does it all. But really, as far as Windows 7 goes, that's the ugliest monster in the room. No speculations as to the price of the new OS yet, but if it's reasonable, Windows 7 may be promising enough to get me to upgrade from XP on my laptop.
Originally, Microsoft planned for Windows 7 (at the time called 6.1) was supposed to be a minor upgrade from Windows Vista. Sort of like a service pack. Microsoft also decided they were going to pull out all the stops and get the operating system out in less than three years! However, with the horrible publicity and reputation that came upon Microsoft with the release of Windows Vista, they decided to get as far away from the Vista name as possible to regain their name. To do this, they decided to quit with the naming convention and just stick to numbers, and since Windows Vista was technically Windows 6.0, they jumped a whole number altogether to get away from it.
Windows 7 isn't built from the ground up. To do so for a universal operating system like Windows would be grueling and only introduce a tremendous amount of bugs. It is still, in fact, an upgrade to Windows Vista. It's an upgrade to Windows Vista that shows real potential in getting Microsoft back into the game of practicallity and putting them back at the forefront operating systems, a lead they've lost with the growing popularity of user-friendly and eye-candy operating systems like Linux Ubuntu and Mac OS X.
Microsoft decided to take notes. After their advertising campaigns to compete Apple's anti-Windows ads backfired humiliatingly (numerous campaigns, I might add, entailing hundreds of millions of dollars each) and only ended up to increase the popularity of Apple's products, they decided their money might be better suited in actually reparing their horribly broken operating system.
Initial benchmarks show that Windows 7 outperforms both Vista (obviously) and XP in almost every area, including start up time, shutdown time, application launch, the recovery from sleep. It still requires a ridiculous 1GB of memory to run properly and leaves an enormous footprint of nearly 13GB (it requires 16GB to install, though). Users often excuse this, saying it doesn't matter since our computers now come with terabyte hard drives and 4GB of memory straight out of the box. This is not a legitimate excuse. A dual-core 2.4GHz processor can compute some 48,000,000,000 periods per second; do you understand the raw power your computer could harness without an operating system (and perhaps the von Neumann Bottleneck) getting in the way? If Microsoft spent less time bloating their operating system and more time allowing applications to speak directly to the hardware, the supercomputers of the future that we so frequently dream would already be here. Anyway, OS X Leopard only requires 512MB of memory to run and 9GB of hard disk space, numbers that still aren't excusable but are good for comparison.
So how about the interface? Like performance, it's significantly better too, right? Definitely. The new taskbar finally dares to do what Vista was too scared to; it abandons the bulky wordage that Microsoft has kept since Windows 95. All applications are represented only by a larger icon of what they are, a design strikingly similar to that of the Mac operating system. To access your entire list of programs, the start menu is still on the left; it looks nearly identical to the menu in Vista with a few added features for simplicty and an improved search speed. Hovering over any icons on the taskbar will render a preview of the open application.
My Computer seems to have been revamped as well with a new way of organizing thing ... A way that, again, looks strikingly similar to the way Apple has chosen to organize Finder. They now support Libraries (Smart Folders), HomeGroup (Bonjour, anyone?), and a nicely organized tree on the left to sort through all the files on your computer. And thank goodness the device manager has finally been tweaked to be more organized.
Perhaps one of my favorites are the new gestures that Windows 7 employs. Drag a program to the top of the screen to maximize it. Throw it against the left or right side of the screen to maximize it to only that side of the screen for easy cascading. Want to hide all the windows so you can see your desktop? Click on the bottom-right hand corner of the screen. And want to make all those other nasty windows disappear except the one you're working with? Click on the menu bar and shake the window. If you need them all to reappear, shake it again. Shaking windows, Microsoft? Now you have been taking notes from Ubuntu ...
Finally, users can decide what they want and don't want in the system tray. This was allowed, to some extent, in Windows XP (and sort of in Vista), but only through the control of the application itself. Microsoft promised it would be allowed for both XP and Vista, but they have yet to come through on their promise. Until now. In Windows 7, if you don't want that icon in your system tray, or if you want it in a different location, just move it! You decide what and how things go in your taskbar!
After using Windows 7 myself and reading several reviews on the subject, the best quote I've heard yet comes straight from AppleInsider.
"But the company is also focusing attention on new performance and usability improvements over Vista, essentially marketing Windows 7's departures from Vista's originally touted features as a feature in itself. There's much less attention on gloss and a new effort in place to present fewer system interruptions due to warning messages like those associated with User Account Control."
"Actual new consumer-facing features in Windows 7 are slight enough for Microsoft to refer to "screen dimming" as significant new feature related to battery life. The Windows 7 website notes, "Bright idea: With a display that dims automatically, you get longer battery life" (below). This feature has been in Windows for at least fifteen years, so it appears the company is rather desperately scraping the barrel for features it can promote in its new operating system release."
I don't say all this to rag on Microsoft. In fact, I'm quite impressed that they seem to be trying to roll out an operating system in less than six years this time. But whether you like Vista or not, if you understand proper proramming and proper computing, you understand Vista was and is a failure. Windows 7 has huge promise, and I'm not upset one bit that the "promise" it's showing (much like all the promise Windows Vista showed, though it was little) is coming straight out of Mac OS X and popular Linux distros such as Ubuntu. Microsoft is the computing giant in the world, and we all know giants move slowly. The little companies have taken off, and Microsoft is finally getting around to catching up. If the final release even maintains the light shown in this beta release (but I'm hoping it still improves even more), I will gladly purchase a license and finally perform a full upgrade from Windows XP on my ... MacBook Pro.