Windows 7 Hands On

 

Recently I made the transition from Windows Vista to Windows 7 because Vista was driving me absolutely insane. I’ve been checking out all the feature available in the release candidate and I’ve got to say, it works well, very well in fact. The release candidate has pretty much all the features built in that Microsoft have promised will be in the retail version(except virtual pc which can be downloaded from the Microsoft website), the new tab system, shake to minimize and the ability to snap a window to the edge of the screen all feature and work really well.

The design of Windows 7 is based on up and coming multi touch screen technology so everything is a little chunkier to cater for fat fingers the world over.

The whole focus of the Windows 7 GUI is the new taskbar; chunkier and based around the new tab system which is really easy to get used to, if you open more than 1 window to an individual program they all get moved to one tab that starts to glow orange. To get a mini preview of a window, just hover over the tab, to get a full screen preview, hover over the mini preview. The desktop icon has been replaced with a bar next to the system tray which, if you hover over you get a full screen preview of the desktop.

Windows Aero has been tuned up, the taskbar and toolbar now stay transparent when the window has been maximised. Aero also seemingly now requires less system resources to run as Aero is available on all versions of Windows 7.

The gadgets that were introduced in Windows Vista have had an overhaul, the gadget bar has been removed completely and now gadgets go straight on to the desktop and can be resized.

But the most important feature of Windows 7 is the ability to turn off the User Account Control warnings on a user by user basis. It was the worst feature of Vista and for Microsoft to make the option to turn off the warnings is an absolute Godsend.

All in all Windows 7 is an absolute necessity for Windows XP and Vista users, it just works, that’s all anyone ever wanted in an operating system from Microsoft and finally, after 30 years of making computer software they have made an operating system that users will be happy to install on their computer.

 

That’s the good parts, check back later for a post on all the things wrong with Windows 7 RC.