First Look: Windows 7 Beta

First Look: Windows 7 Beta. Part One.

 

 

My right index finger hurts from the constant clicking of the refresh button. Half the time the web page doesn't even load, I'm probably competing with a few hundred thousand people looking to get the same thing. My heart is beating faster than normal, my anticipation is overwhelming my senses and I nearly drop the cup of coffee in my left hand. What am I and thousands of others going after to cause such chaos as to have Microsoft put up a note that all new downloads have been disabled so they can add more servers? Is it some new hotfix we all desperately need, is Mr. Gates giving away millions of dollars or is it a glance of the future that will make or break Microsoft? Windows 7 Beta Build 7000 is indeed the cause of this mass hysteria and for good reason.

To put it lightly, Windows Vista of all favors, was a dud. The early marketing blitz of Windows Vista promised that the move from the matured Windows XP to Vista would be smooth, easy and most of all better for your computing needs. It was none of the above, the combination of legacy program issues, performance woes and a great advertisement campaign by Microsoft rival, Apple, show that Vista wasn't ready for the limelight. The trouble wasn't the brand new PC's loaded with Vista (those at least came with hardware, software and drivers that worked with Vista), the hurt came from consumers trying to upgrade from a Windows XP PC to Vista. The majority of programs that worked so great in XP didn't run as well or at all in Vista. While the blame could be placed on the developers of those programs, Vista was a brand new OS that included many new security features that hindered the operation of a lot of applications. Many XP users couldn't even get most of their hardware to work in Vista, a lot of drivers didn't work. Add to the mix that Vista in its early days (and arguably still does) runs much slower than XP yet requires more resources, gave many consumers headaches to the point most reverted back to XP. I guessing around this time, Apple's marketing division caught wind of this and those embarrassing but true Get a Mac commercials came out.

 

Right now, Windows Vista is a much different beast than what was ridiculed during its first year. While there are many programs that still won't run in Vista, we have plenty of native alternatives that work as great or better. There are a host of performance tweaks, tips and more to get Windows Vista running as least as fast as XP and Microsoft finally fought back with the “I'm a PC” and “Windows Mojave” campaigns, but is it too late? The public perception of Windows Vista is low. With poor media criticism and the bad taste lingering in the mouths of early adopters, Microsoft has to push beyond Vista in order to save its OS dominance. Windows Vista is no doubt the new Windows ME. Can Windows 7 reintroduce Microsoft to the public as an innovator instead of an aging software giant that seems to be copying & pasting what others are doing? Read on

 

Windows 7

 

 

Installation

 

If you ever installed Windows Vista, you will notice that both Vista and 7 share the same installation format and look. Rather than upgrade from my current OS of Windows Vista Premium, I shrunk the partition containing Vista and made a new partition with 120GB, then I installed the Windows 7 32bit edition there. The installation took under 28 minutes to completely install. The PC I installed the Window 7 Beta on has 3GBs of RAM, Intel C2 Extreme QX9650 3.0GHz quad processor and a Nvidia GTX 280 graphics card.

Installation of Software & Drivers

 

I was expecting the worse when Windows 7 Beta booted into the desktop which only took 39 seconds. The nightmares still linger of my first install of Windows Vista Premium on a custom PC rig I built awhile back. I read on a tech website that Windows 7 Beta is compatible with the same programs, hardware and drivers as Vista, and I can confirm it is true. Windows 7 recognized all but two pieces of hardware, my wireless USB card and Nvidia GTX 280. I installed the Vista version of my wireless USB card driver and it worked perfectly. I had to search a bit to find a Nvidia driver that would work with Windows 7, I ended up using the Nvidia 185.20 Beta x86 driver.

 

Everyone that uses a Windows OS knows Microsoft is notorious about the zealous integration of applications like Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer and more in a Windows OS. Besides WMP, IE 8 and a couple other Microsoft applications, there aren't many Microsoft programs pre-installed. If you do like Windows Movie Maker and Windows Liver Messenger, you can download them and many other Window Live programs in the free Windows Live Essentials pack on the Microsoft website. I have to say, I love the Snipping Tool and Sticky Notes apps that come installed, they are very useful and I hope they remain in the final build of Windows 7.

 

I didn't bother installing any of my company's inhouse software tools since we have yet made the jump from XP Professional to Vista on our workstations. Our programmers are hard at work to make them compatible with Vista, so the jump to Windows 7 should be easy. I was able to use all programs that are compatible in Vista within Windows 7 Beta like VLC Media Player 0.9.8a, AIM 6, Firefox 3.0.5 and Thunderbird 2. I will give you all an update when I install my media editor, Adobe Master Collection CS4 and some PC games like Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2 to see if they install and perform as good (or better) as they do in Vista.

Photo of my Windows 7 Beta Desktop

 

GUI Operation & OS Performance

 

If you read about Windows 7, you know Microsoft has made a lot of tweaks and improvements to the Graphical User Interface (GUI) over Vista's. The most apparent and biggest improvement (some will disagree) is to the desktop taskbar. Windows 7 groups up all windows associated to a program in one spot on the taskbar. Hover over any icon on the taskbar and a small preview window with thumbnails gives you quick access to any window inside the group. Although this new way handling windows took some time to get use to, I grew accustomed and now prefer it over XP's and Vista's windows organization.

 

Not to break Microsoft's terms, I cannot show any benchmark tests. The good news, even in its beta form, Windows 7 Beta outperforms Windows Vista (even with performance tweaks) in speed and performance. I installed a fresh installation of Windows Vista Premium in another partition to see how both compare and Window 7 Beta blows it out the water. On that fresh installation of Vista Premium, Vista automatically uses 1278MB of RAM without any startup programs or programs running. Windows 7 Beta, on the other hand, uses only 632MB of RAM on boot. That is almost half of what Vista uses on startup.

 

Conclusion

 

I know this article is a little bare bones with the information and probably created a lot more questions than it gave answers, but I will give you a more detailed look in Part 2 of First Look: Windows 7 Beta. I know I barely even scratched the surface that is Windows 7. Given that I only used the beta for two days now, I love the direction Microsoft is heading with Windows 7. It's a large improvement of the basic fundamentals of the Windows Operation System and an evolution of Windows Vista. This is what Windows Vista should have been, taking the best parts of the PC experience, improving on the user interaction of the OS, strong security measures that can be customized to your needs and a visual aspect that is sexy in its simplicity.

 

I only see great things in the future for Windows 7. After the Windows Vista bombing of the Windows name, they only have one way and that is up. If Microsoft continues down this path with Windows 7, you'll see a lot more PC users that aren't ashamed to say, “I'm A PC” without having to be paid to do so.

 

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