Let’s face it, Windows Vista was broadly rejected by the general public for its alleged lack of stability, performance issues and hardware incompatibility. After Apple‘s public humiliation of Vista, in its well-known Get a Mac ads, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect that the Microsoft team would bend over backwards to avoid another PR nightmare by rolling out a perfectly polished Windows 7. Three weeks ago I decided to check out the Windows 7 Release Candidate and even though I had high expectations, I was pleasantly surprised by its stability, performance and usability.

The installation of 7 on my Dell Inspiron 1520 ran smoothly. Nowadays, and despite common misconceptions, operating system installations are quite simple (even Linux ones) and anybody can do them, so the smoothness of 7′s doesn’t really stand out. Being exited (as only a geek such as myself can be when installing a new operating system), I didn’t measure the installation time but it certainly was fast.

After the installation was completed I was immediately surprised by how fast it booted up. After three weeks, I am still not used to these blazingly fast start-ups. Shutdowns are also fast too, and unlike all other Windows operating systems I used (98, Me, XP and Vista), so far I am still to experience frozen programs delaying shutdown indefinitely. I did experience programs freezing a couple of times during shutdown (which is normal as after the shutdown process is initiated, non-system program’s permissions are harshly restricted), but in each case Windows was able to force those programs to quit, and shutdown the computer.

The first thing I did after the installation was completed was open the Task Manager, where I found out that my laptop’s physical memory usage was around 32% of my 2GB of RAM, which is not even close to Vista’s 48% at start-up. In fact as I’m writing this, iTunes is running in the background together with around a dozen Chrome processes and the physical memory usage is 42%, still bellow Vista’s at start-up.

As for hardware support, the release candidate’s driver library did not include drivers for my memory card reader, nor for my Nokia E51 phone; but having in mind the number of devices on the market, that cannot really be taken as a flaw. What impressed me though is the way Windows handled this issue. I was presented with a window informing me about the lack of drivers, and a download link to a specific driver in each case. I was done in just a couple of clicks. And as if that didn’t make my life easy enough, after the installation of my Nokia drivers I was presented with another window that informed me that I am missing Nokia’s PC Suite. It also had a download link, so Windows did all the work for me. No CDs, and no searching on Nokia’s web site.

Truth to be told, I did experience a couple of annoying problems with the hardware support, but having in mind I am running just a release candidate I am sure those will be fixed before October 22, when Windows 7 is due to come out. The first one is a real pain in the neck as it involves drivers for the USB interface of my iPod which freezes when I try to sync it with the Disk Mode disabled (but simply enabling that mode solves the problem). The other problem I have is with buttons on my touchpad. Under Vista that was shipped with my Dell, a middle click is achieved by pressing both touchpad buttons at the same time and that doesn’t work anymore in my case.

As for system stability, it did not crash once in the past three weeks.

As for usability, Microsoft obviously put a lot of work into user interface which really stands out from Vista. The traditional taskbar withstood heavy modifications. It does take some getting used to, but when you do, you will wonder how could you ever use the traditional one without a headache.

One of the main things new Vista users complained about were the so-called “cancel or allow” messages which proved to be a great idea for this Get a Mac Apple ad Windows 7 offers several levels of security, and that setting sets the frequency of these messages. You rarely get them by default.

A lot of tools were drastically changed as well. For example, the Resource Monitor is now more detailed, and much better organized than its Vista counterpart. The integrated backup program was also changed and works great too.

Microsoft took a great blow with Vista’s failure because of bad PR. I have been a Vista user for two years and I do not think it is half as bad as people made it to be. Although a good product, it wasn’t released polished which allowed unsubstantiated rumors to spread. With the Mojave Experiment Microsoft did try to combat these rumors, but its PR department obviously failed. Unlike Vista, the release candidate of Windows 7 appears to be almost perfectly polished. As history repeats itself, I am sure that Vista will be remembered as Me of its time, and as for 7, come October 2010 Microsoft will probably declare it to be its lucky number.

Photo courtesy of www.itsmywindows.com.

Tagged as Windows + Categorized as Opinions, Reviews