Windows 7

Tuesday marked not only a historic day for my country, but also the start of what has been a surprisingly wonderful relationship. I wiped my laptop (after creating a perfect copy of my hard drive with Mac OS X Leopard with SuperDuper!) and installed the pre-beta of Windows 7. Now, I'm admittedly a Mac fanboy, and while I've used Windows, with varying degrees of success, in the past, I was not expecting to play with Windows 7 for more than a few hours. I intended to restore my laptop with Leopard while I was sleeping that night. Well, I'm still in Windows. And for all the right reasons.

While an early, pre-beta build, Windows 7 has been extremely stable, fast, and usable for me. I only hit one compatibility issue, ironically while trying to install Microsoft's OneCare anti-virus suite. Other than that, I've installed Office 2007, Photoshop CS4, Lightroom 2.1, Firefox, Trillian Astra, iTunes, and a slew of other programs with no problem. I have yet to have a crash, and Windows 7 is very noticeably faster than Vista, Leopard, and almost even XP!

The UI has undergone some changes since Vista, most notably with the task bar. The task bar works more like a dock now, with only icons residing there; no more text labels for programs. While that might sound like it could get confusing, the genius is that no matter how many windows of a particular program you are running, only one icon shows. As you can see above, multiple "blades" next to an icon represent the number of open windows. Hovering over the icon pops up real-time thumbnails of each window that are selectable. Hovering over each window preview produces a small red X in the right corner, used to close the window without selecting it. This has vastly sped up program switching for me, which, in turn, has increased my productivity.

Aero has undergone a slight tweaking, making it less resource-intensive (translating to better battery life on a laptop) and looking a bit smoother. Personally, I expect it to be visually tweaked some more to match the new task bar, but I could be wrong. Also receiving some MUCH overdue "tweaking" (more of an overhaul), are Paint and Wordpad. Paint actually becomes a usable program for the first time since it's inception; I used it to do the screenshot crops for this article. In addition to retaining it's speed and lightness, it now has adopted the Ribbon interface from Office 2007 along with an arsenal of tools, making it my new choice for quick image edits!

The dreaded UAC (User Account Control) has been toned down so it's not nearly as intrusive as it was in Vista, while still gently providing the guidance needed to keep the user secure.

These are just a few of the things that I've come across that I've found notable. As time goes on, I'll post more about my experiences with Windows 7. I've read several reports out there saying it's very much a pre-beta, not yet near ready to ship. I contend that it could ship very soon (even though it's not going to) for the average user. It's at least as stable as Vista was when it shipped, if not more. It's my day-to-day system for the foreseeable future.