Windows 7 BETA 1 - a review.

Unstoppable_2

Windows 7 is faster than Vista SP2 BETA that I was running on this laptop. However, the user interface is a mix of brilliance and a chuffing joke. The taskbar and its operation is a joke - I'd tell you what was wrong with it but that's an entire post in itself. Everything now seems to have 50,000 places to launch from. The System Tray is a joke - icons are in one colour, white - and the action centre "flag" seems to pop up telling me Windows Defender wants to do something a fair bit although it's settled down over the last couple of hours. How people can say the Network Control Centre is less cluttered than the Vista one is beyond me. They've completely hidden the Enhancements menu in WMP12 (yes it is there - found it by accident in a completely unintuitive place). Aero peek has to be the most completely pointless feature ever. UAC changes are nothing more than what the Symantec tool offered. Wifi GUI is an improvement but not a world changing difference. Homegroup is broken. You change the password and it says you can't because the network location isn't set as Home even though it is. So you delete the homegroup and create another only to be told you can't because of the same reason as the password change.

Now I've slagged it off...
Everything on my laptop worked straight out of the box. I guess a lot of the 2.4GB or 3.2GB installation media size is taken up with drivers. ALL MY SOFTWARE WORKED including stuff from the early "naughties" with the exception of Diskeeper 2007/8 which refused to install as it said it was an unsupported version of Windows.
It takes next to no time to boot up - considerably quicker than Vista. Shutdown appears to be too. The new Explorer with "Libraries" is good (groups all pictures from various locations into one "folder" for example) as is "Devices and Printers". Jump menu is nice on applications that support it - for example, click on the right arrow next to "Notepad" gives you a history of documents opened in it. IE8 seems to have had some tweaks to it.
Nice being able to select a load of pictures as desktop wallpapers and have them work as a slideshow. Lots of services either not set to automatic or delayed start which improves bootup. Lots of stuff stripped out so no mail or IM client for example. The Start menu on the default install looks very empty.



What I'm going to do this week is create a customised installation DVD of Vista using vlite. Going to strip it down to the same stuff as is in Win7. I'm also going to change the services to the same as Win7 and see if there's any speed difference.

With Win7 being based on Vista, I reckon Vista SP2 could see the same speeds. For a lot of people, I think that they'll be happier with the Vista GUI than Win7 one. The ideal for me would be Vistas Taskbar and System Tray on top of Win7 as it really is that horrendous and there's no way of tweaking it to work the same. Maybe someone will work out how to do it.