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First Look on Windows 7 – Features

• by Andy Gongea
• Jan 25, 2009
• 6 Comments »

When it comes to the IT world, I have a bad habit and test the latest appearances in the industry. Mainly my testing leans towards the software category. Since I’ve tested most of the operating systems out there Windows, BeOS, Linux, Mac OS, I think it is the perfect time to test and share with you my perspective on Windows 7. Let’s not waste any time and see what Microsoft has now for us.

Same Visuals

From the user interface point of view, the “new” Windows 7 looks pretty much like Windows Vista. There are only few elements that have a different look but even those elements are blending in with the rest of the interface and the overall feeling is that you have Vista installed. Which is not necessarily a bad thing but since it is a new version of Windows I would like a new theme, a different approach from Aero – something simple.

Improved Performance

While the interface is quite the same you can see big improvements regarding the overall performance of the operating system. First good thing compared to Vista is that now, my hard disk led is not blinking all the time anymore. Suddenly Windows 7 feels lighter and it has speed which was not the case of Windows Vista. Even when you want to shut it down guess what happens … it shuts down. The networking stuff is also improved. I just clicked one button and all 3 machines from my house were detected and ready to use without a restart.

User Experience

I must admit that this was the most impressive part of the new Windows. It is possible that a different design wasn’t needed but for sure a change in the user experience was expected. Microsoft didn’t failed this time like it did with Vista. It is exactly the opposite: the new user experience is great and catchy. And this user experience that I’m taking about is composed of windows management and taskbar, performance, good image quality and good feedback on almost any action.

As you can see in the video above, the taskbar now is the space for both shortcuts and running applications without any boundaries. You will receive a visual feedback that an application is running, through a border around its taskbar icon. And this is not all, when an application has more than 3 instances active you will see 3 borders around the icon. The big hit is the window preview where you can see minimal version of active applications and also the thumbnail is dynamic – you can see the motion in a website scaled down and displayed in the thumbnail.

For the windows management side Microsoft has a new approach. The first trick is when you have lots of windows on the screen, with a mouse over the lower right side you can see only the outlines of the windows. The second trick is related to the windows placement and movement. If you drag a window to a side of the screen, it will scale your window to half of the screen horizontally. And in the same way you can drag another window on the other side of the screen in order to perform comparison tasks – sweet.

Some applications are no longer available in Window 7 but some like Paint and Wordpad have the same revolutionary interface as Office 2007. Also the start menu has the same functionality as the one from Vista which means that we can have a boosted productivity using it.

Conclusion

Overall this beta version is one good operating system. The user experience is the best feature so far while the improvements and code optimization are quite visible. Windows 7 is more stable and faster than Windows Vista. Although there are many improvements I still hope that the final version will be much faster and stable. Hopefully the price will be “lighter” as well.

Performance
User Experience
User Interface
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