Windows 7 – First impressions

2009 March 14

by Andy

So far so good – I installed the beta on a couple of laptops in the last month, and so far I like what I see. It’s very much Vista centric, but without the sllllloooooowwwwwness. Boot time is much improved (under a minute) and there are some added features that I like. The improved task bar holds all of your open instances of an application in a single icon. I was a big an of this in XP, and it’s better in windows 7. Hover over IE, for example, and every open page you have is displayed in a menu. Choose the instance you want, and you are good to go. Very useful.

I’m not as happy about IE 8 being included, but what can you do. I’ve had lots of issues with Active X and other pluggins with IE 8 on lots of sites. I’m sure that this will work itself out as IE 8 is adopted and coded to in more applications, but for now, it’s a pain in the rear, and I’ve been using Firefox instead. I’ve also been toying with the latest version of Safari, and frankly, it kicks ass. I’ll post a more in depth review, but the bullet is that it is wicked fast, and displays your page history in an iTunes-esque pane view from which you can choose your destination. There are pluggins for Firefox for this too, and I think a windows Gadget or too.

Speaking of Gadgets, one of the really neat things about Vista and Windows 7 are the sidebar gadgets. These are little (quite literally) applications that sit on the right side of your screen that provide all kinds of useful, and some not so useful, information. There are clocks, calendars, calculators, CPU meters, search tools, IM tools – basically anything that you might think of has probably already been done. And that is the cool part – anyone can develop an app and have it posted to the Gadget site. Check it out. It’s so open of Microsoft – very cool.

This is the Gadget window. Windows gadgets