Alicia Cermak

It’s no secret that I love Windows Vista, so it should come as no surprise that I spent most of Friday frantically trying to download the Windows 7 Beta.

I was really worried that I wouldn’t be able to get in under the 2.5 million download limit, and the more the server lagged, the more worried I became. Fortunately for me (and the millions of others who were unable to get through due to server capacity issues) they ditched the cap, so I was finally able to pull down a copy on Sunday evening.

I had considered burning the ISO and upgrading from Vista on my Dell, but decided that I wasn’t ready for that level of commitment. Instead, I opted to create a new Parallels VM on my MacBook Pro. I read a few complaints from people who couldn’t get it to work, but I found that using the ‘Windows Express’ Vista settings and the ISO as the installation source made for a really quick and painless install. So far, overall performance has been better than my Vista VM.

My initial reactions:

• Redesigned Task Bar
  The Windows 7 Task Bar reminds me a lot of the OS X Dock. They’ve kept the Start Menu and some elements of  Quick Launch, but have done away with the labeled rectangular buttons we’ve been seeing since Windows 95, instead showing us only the application’s icon.  I’ve always been really fond of the labels in Windows, and in OS X I often find myself mousing over the icons in my dock to see the title, especially when running multiple instances or windows of an application. In Windows 7, if you mouse over the icon for an application you have multiple windows open for (think Microsoft Word during finals week), it displays a list of window titles so you can efficiently change focus.
  
• Redesigned Start Menu
  The Windows 7 Start Menu (”Destination Menu”) looks almost identical to the XP and Vista Start Menus with one notable improvement: Vista’s weird mystery meat shutdown icon has been replaced with a really functional (albeit hideous) text dropdown menu. Sadly, there’s also one notable omission: no “Classic Start Menu” option. If I upgrade to Windows 7, I’ll need to leave behind the comfort blanket that is “Classic” and learn how to use the XP/Vista Start Menu. Uh oh.
  
• New Device Management Window
  Since I was running Windows 7 in a VM, I didn’t have many peripherals configured, but from what I can tell, this new menu in the Control Panel (it doesn’t replace the old “Device Manager”) splits all of your connected devices into nice categories with gigantic pretty icons. I’m not sure I’d use this feature, but it seems like the sort of thing that’ll be really great for novice users.
  
• Updates to ‘Accessories’
  One feature that really surprised me was the upgrades to the ‘Accessory’ applications that haven’t really been touched since Windows 95 (for many of them, 3.11). WordPad was given a very Word-like restyle that includes ribbon navigation, while Paint underwent an extensive upgrade, and Calculator includes neat new features like unit conversion.
  
  
• Improved Theme System
  The new theme system is a little more intuitive, and allows you to change most interface options with just a few clicks, as opposed to the maze Vista offers. Also, I’m thrilled to say that a variation of the “Classic” or “Standard” theme is still available.
  
• Toned Down UAC
  I’ll be the first person to say that UAC is annoying, but I also find that it’s often helpful in saving users from themselves. Thankfully, Windows 7 has lost a lot of the annoying. In the few hours I played with it, I was only prompted for authorization a few times, and there’s even an area for managing UAC preferences that isn’t buried deep within the menu system.
  
• Control Panel
  By now you could probably predict that I use the “Classic” Control Panel view in XP and Vista, so imagine my delight when I saw that the Control Panel has a “All Control Panel Items” view. Unfortunately, the Control Panel is up to 55 different items (that’s up from about 25 in XP and 50 in Vista) so I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to stick with that old habit.
  

Conclusion? Windows 7 thinks it’s going to change my old habits, what with its lack of classic Start Menu and crazy Task Bar. Meh. We’ll see about that. I’ll still run it in the “Classic” theme.