Windows 7 Beta: first impressions
January 11, 2009I was keen to get my hands on the Windows 7 Beta as it’s the first beta operating system that I’ve installed, and compared to Vista doesn’t require that greater system to run efficiently. As I just installed Ubuntu yesterday, I didn’t relish the thought of installing a third OS onto the same system, so instead decided to run it virtually within Vista using ‘Virtual Box‘ and used this great guide to get Windows 7 up and running. Due to running it virtually, I ran into a few issues like having to assingn my network interface card driver manually via device management and pointing it to the virtual disc drive to look for the virtual box drivers.
Onto Windows 7 itself, and the first noticeable difference is the change of taskbar. It’s been described as being like a Mac OSX dock, I however see it as being somewhere between the dock and the quick launch section of the old Windows taskbar. It has some nice touches like when you hover over Internet Explorer it shows up the active tabs available to select directly, this functionality however doesn’t transfer to Firefox; which I promptly installed when the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress didn’t load correctly in Internet Explorer 8; it looks as though IE still isn’t built properly as there were errors reported on most web pages.
Opening the Windows photo viewer, I found that the basic editing features have been removed, instead only allowing the user to switch to Paint. It’s alright and offers limited cropping capability, but it doesn’t feature the basic tools that most users would’ve liked such as red eye removal and colour correction. I notice that Paint has new brush options, akin to Photoshop brush plug-ins that allow the user to draw onto the canvas with what appear to be the stroke of pencils, markers, spray paint as well as the standard paint brush.
Some other interesting features I’ve noticed so far include the option to go to the next desktop background image; something I imagine is designed for someone who changes their desktop as much as me, but not that necessary compared to browsing for the image I want and setting it as a desktop background. There are more theme options, with the promise of being able to grab more online in the future and gadgets now no longer live in the sidebar, instead they’re shown on the desktop by default. Finally, it does run much more efficiently than Vista, as it doesn’t hog system resources. Like Leo just said on TWiT Live, ‘it’s just Vista cleaned up’, so there’s no real incentive to try the beta unless you’re feeling geeky. However, it does bode well for Microsoft to get their foot in the door with the netbook market particularly since better resource management should maximise battery life better than running Vista. However, then you have to question whether people would pay a premium to have Windows installed on a device that’s primarily designed to surf the web and check email.
I’ve also grabbed the Windows 7 beta (being a geek) and have installed it “properly” on my laptop, with the intention of using it as the primary OS on that machine. (Yes, I took an image of the XP install before I started)
So far, so good, it installed, found the WiFi card, found most of the hardware – took a couple of reboots to get the graphics drivers up, but once it’s been on a few days and I’ve been using it in anger, I’ll probably write a little piece on my own site… will be very interested to see if the battery lasts longer too…
@ Tom M I only just reinstalled Vista less than a month ago so really couldn’t be bothered, as other than performance, it’s not THAT much different to justify a full install for me at least. Good point about battery life though, as system resources are definitely managed more efficiently.
Hi, I have installed the beta too and am really enjoying it at the moment… Have been posting my impressions on my blog at http://www.chrisforever.wordpress.com
Thanks!
[...] the release candidate of Windows 7, probably installing it alongside Vista and Ubuntu, rather than the virtual machine I used for the beta. Might even see if it can cope with a netbook. Possibly related posts: (automatically [...]
[...] the release candidate of Windows 7, probably installing it alongside Vista and Ubuntu, rather than the virtual machine I used for the beta. Might even see if it can cope with a netbook. Possibly related posts: (automatically [...]
[...] as pinned items move around making the taskbar unorganised and messy). When I first blogged about my first impressions of the beta, I found it weird that Windows 7 no longer bundled its own photo viewer. Instead, you have to get [...]