The Lifestream of Jon Moss

A first peek at Windows 7

January 12 2009, 11:58pm

Even as a committed Mac user I have been very interested to try out the latest version of Windows from Microsoft, they’ve made a Beta release of the forthcoming Windows 7 operating system available to the public, and so you can legally download this, install it and become familiar with the new software. It is beta software and so some caveats apply, it’s reasonable to expect that a few bugs remain during the beta test period and it’s not advisable to run this on a computer that you depend upon for mission-critical work.  Microsoft Windows 7 Homepage Microsoft have certainly earned some kudos from me for offering this beta to the general public, it provides Windows power users with an opportunity to get stuck into this new OS and for Microsoft to get their feedback and resolve the flaws in the code before release. It looks like the businesses and consumers that part with their cash for system upgrades or complete new machines will get something a little more tested and polished this time around. Clearly lessons have been learned since the launch of Windows Vista.  The download didn’t really seem to take too long, within about 45 minutes I had the 2.5GB ISO file on my Mac and was fit to burn it to a DVD and get stuck in. Microsoft were very prompt and emailed the trial license key over to me and so I was ready to rock. I’d not really made up my mind which computer to install Windows 7 onto, but I plumped for using the excellent Parallels virtualisation software to create a new “virtual machine” on my Mac and to run this beta harmlessly alongside OS X. Well, that was the plan anyway but it seems that Windows 7 is a bit too fresh and raw for Parallels and so I over-wrote my Boot Camp partition instead and installed 7 there. The process was entirely successful this time and was possibly the fastest Windows installation I’ve ever experienced at a touch over 30 mins. I popped in my Mac OS X installation DVD hopefully and installed the Vista drivers and was delighted to find that my MacBook was fully operational! We were in business! So what of Windows 7? Well, if you’ve ever used Vista then you pretty much know what to expect. I would say that even in beta form Windows 7 is a lot snappier than either XP or Vista and seems far less of a resource hog just to tick along with the operating system. This is brilliant news for anyone wishing to upgrade an older machine, and a very pleasant surprise. The look and feel will probably be refined before the launch, but at present is very similar to the Vista user interface. Several dramatic improvements leapt out at me right away though, networking was painless and intuitive and I was online pretty much as soon as I was logged in. Tweaking the interface through Control Panel to set things like my mouse tracking speed was easier than ever before and very straightforward. Within minutes I’d set the system to please my eye and behaviours, and even employed one of the built-in desktop gadgets to keep an eye on RAM and processor utilisation.   Windows 7 Screenshot (source: Wikipedia) It was all very easy and I feel rather optimistic about Windows 7. Now that I’m familiar with the basic interface and the installation process I’m planning on installing it on an Acer Aspire One netbook, to experiment with a slower machine and to find out how the beta performs on a low end netbook computer in the real world. I don’t think that Microsoft have quite brought their usability up to the standards set by Apple with OS X yet though, and for users that don’t want the technology to stand between them and completed tasks then I’m still a firm advocate of Macintosh OS, but certainly the folks from Redmond are on the right track.  2009 is looking great, before the year is out we’re likely to have truly interoperable and reliable alternatives in computing to meet our budgets, needs and preferences. Apple (OS X), Microsoft (Windows) and the Linux community (Ubuntu) have all brought attractive and unobtrusive operating systems to market and we’ll see some really healthy competition, which can only be good news for everyone. The Magician suite of web applications will run very comfortably on all of these current and forthcoming systems and we’ll be testing new operating systems, web browsers and client applications to ensure full compatibility and access to all of the latest technology and security for our customers. Magic Ian