Six on 7: Six months of Windows 7
October 27th, 2009 by Jonathan ZawrotnyThe commercials are out, the advertising machine is hard at work and now that October 22nd has passed, Windows 7 is at our doorstep.
Having been a tinkerer of computers since modifying the config.sys file on my father’s 386 to play games, the new offering from Microsoft immediately intrigued me. I decided to be an early adopter on my home machine, dutifully using the Windows 7 Beta and Release Candidate for roughly the past 6 months despite my general distaste for the Vista offering.
Windows 7 is the smoothest and most stable Windows OS I have encountered. Yes, this includes my time using the Beta build. My machine crashed exactly zero times in the past half year running it. This honestly surprised me. For those wondering, I have not been one to back Microsoft products without question. In fact, my first machine ran IBM’s OS/2. This should help form the basis that I have put Windows 7 through a certain range of paces that match my normal home usage.
While this is not a scientific top to bottom view of the OS, it will help to highlight some of the main points that one may encounter when using the software.
Part 1: Installation.
The installation experience has been improved with Windows 7. The wizards are less clunky and the screens more informative than in previous iterations of Microsoft OS’s. Even better, the entire process always had a feel of continued progress. This is in stark contrast to some previous offerings, such as XP or even Server 2003 in which you may be staring at a “Loading Devices” screen for the better part of 30 minutes.
I intentionally decided to not scrub my machine’s OS partition prior to installation to see what my options would be. I was happily surprised to see that Windows 7 recognized my previous installation and essentially quarantined it. This previous installation could later be accessed easily through Windows Explorer by going to the Windows.old directory. Given that my normal operating procedure in any OS load would be to move all of my important files, configs etc to a different drive before formatting the partition and starting from scratch, this feature is a great benefit. How many people forget something when moving files around? Now those files can be easily searched and any missing pieces found. Further, if you have decided you don’t need the old files at all, simply delete them.
The overall slick feel of the installation instilled confidence that what I had been hearing about Windows 7: “It is everything Vista should have been” may in fact be true.
Part 2: Your new desktop
Admittedly, I never fully adopted Vista. As such, some of the UI features that came from Vista into Windows 7 are essentially new to me. Logging in for the first time, I was stunned at the desktop. My graphics card had not changed, I had no more RAM and indeed these were my same monitors, yet wow! The difference in the UI, especially for those moving from XP such as myself, is stunning. Again, same exact hardware but I felt like I just traded in a jalopy for a Jaguar. The visual treatments of the start bar, the icons, etc really work. They are not over the top, but rather understated. The result is a tremendously clean feel.
The start menu, now a larger round button, contains all the items you would expect. In addition, the search feature right in line with the menu allows for quick access to programs for which you do not want to hunt. For someone who grew up professionally using net commands, this ability to type is a benefit. For those programs you use most often, you can choose to “pin” them to the start menu or to your taskbar.
Moving a bit more through the desktop, I found the greatest use out of the Library system. Essentially one has sections within Windows Explorers called Libraries that are linked to such things as Documents, Pictures, Downloads, etc. You are free to edit the existing ones or create your own. These provide an easy mechanism for organization. They are essentially a collection of folders that are contained under a single item. They default to locations created by the OS, usually C:\Users\… I tend to have my information on other drives, so historically I would eschew the use or move such items as “My Documents” to point to my preferred location. Now, I can not only do that, but I can add in folders to include into the library. If you wish to segregate items for a home machine, you could create folders within your documents library for all the users within the household. Or for pictures, perhaps you have an area that you want to use as a scratch directory for edits and another that you want to make sure gets backed up. With this facility, you can access all the pictures as necessary through the library while under the hood, you can have the different folders line up with whatever backup or security regime you desire. This single point of entry for the most used items has been enjoyable and easy to use.
Part 3: Performace, i.e. the “paces”
My home computer serves a myriad of purposes. From planning out home improvements, to running CAD programs, playing video games to listening to music, it is a hub of both production and entertainment. I find I usually need to be doing two things at once and as a computer nut I find I usually try to break things. Now that I was suitably impressed by the look and feel of Windows 7, it was time to try and break it.
Some machines, CPUs, and Operating Systems multi task better than others. Years ago I was able to run X-wing in a window while listening to MP3s on my OS/2 machine while people around me couldn’t run two contiguous directory commands in Windows 95 without delays between the two windows. I essentially recreated this test, just updated by 12 or so years. The machine in question is powered by a 3 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, a 512 MB ATi video card and a 500GB 7200RPM SATA Drive.
I began by bringing up 3 different browsers: Safari, IE and Chrome. In Chrome I started pandora to stream music. In IE I had the machine look for updates, and Safari I directed to Youtube, muting a longer video but letting it play. I then opened up 2 instances of World of Warcraft, logging in two different characters. To further tax the machine, I then decided to burn a Blu-ray. With this happening, the music only skipped when I initially loaded up a new program, the Youtube ran cleanly and I was able to alt-tab between both instances of Wow and play without any framerate issues. Looking through task manager I could see that none of the Cores on the CPU were spiked and there while there was heavy RAM usage, it was not detrimental to any of the individual program.
I did this until the Blu-ray finished burning, at which point I ended the very unscientific test and checked to see if the data on the disc was good. As it turns out, there were no errors. Also, there were no errors in any Windows logs. This same test, performed with the identical hardware on XP SP2 suffered from skips in both the video and audio playback. The CPU usage ramped up much higher as well, peaking at 100% in some cases. To its credit, the XP machine also did not have much issue with the instances of Wow. As I mentioned however, these tests were not performed on the same build of hardware or similar machines, but actually on the same exact hardware.
While this is not a conclusive test of the sturdiness of the OS, it is a more practical application of the types of things that it can handle as part of normal usage.
Part 4: Wait and see?
I looked at the opportunity to use Windows 7 as a way to ease concerns. Machines will now be shipping with Windows 7 loaded, and for many, there is no comfort level with the new offering. More than anything else, the experience of the last 6 months has shown that there is a lot less to fear than in the past.
Is there a learning curve? Certainly. However, and this is vitally important, the system is stable. No lost files, no random crashes. While everyone’s mileage may vary and no one can say that it is bug free and will never fail, the humble opinion of this blogger is that the benefits outweigh the risks. For older machines that may not see the benefit of its resource handling, etc, then XP is probably still fine.
If you are in the market for a new machine, though, I would not turn away because of Windows 7. So far I have no personal indication that there is a need to “wait for service pack 1″ before buying. In fact, as I start shopping for my next laptop, you can bet that Windows 7 Ultimate will be one of the first choices I check off.
