Reviewing Windows 7

Been working with the Windows 7 right from the beta stage to
the RC1 now.Just felt like reviewing it. It is by far their best operating system.Finally microsoft has managed to bring out something thats good.

After the bloatware/malware that was vista, Windows 7 has a real light footprint.Its way faster than vista without losing out on the looks. The Aero interface is carried forward from vista and its way better. It still has the annoying user access control that pops up a msg when ever you want to do something other than watch movies or browse.

The toolbar is neat and it clubs the buttons and hides the labels by default. Instead of carrying forward the sidebar for widgets as in vista the microsoft guys have allowed free placement of widgets which are very handy. One of the things i liked about windows 7 is the Resource monitor tool that is in the performance tab of the task manager. This gives an application wise usage of network, disk, CPU,etc. This comes in very handy when wanting to close those CPU/Memory hogging applications.

Yes the total install size of Windows 7 Ultimate edition is about 8GB but the memory foot print is quite low.It only uses around 500MB logical memory with a basic regular usage of browsing and watching movies as compared to 1200MB used by vista. In the Virtual machine it runs smoothly even with a 256MB RAM and a 1.2 GHz processor and 20GB Hard Disk. It even runs with a 128MB RAM but is slow and comparable to a vista on a 512MB RAM or an XP at 128MB RAM. Since the RAM used is less the OS is no doubt faster.

The start-ups and the shut-downs are very quick.20-25 seconds for a start-up or a shut-down. This is way quicker than the long wait for start-up or shut-down in most operating systems.Under the hood Windows 7 has a virtual machine that runs Windows XP programs without a glitch. Better than the compatibility mode in vista. So its completely backward compatible.

It runs DirectX 11. This is quite impressive. But the wait is on for D3D 11 which promises to be way better than D3D10. D3D10 executed D3D9 and lower based applications in a compatibility mode and this was quite buggy. D3D 11 to be shipped with the retail version of Windows 7 promises to address these issues.

But Microsoft where is the Ground breaking new File system that you promised to launch with your earlier operating system(longhorn/vista). We were expecting to see it atleast with windows 7. Yes we are still struck with NTFS and FAT32 on windows 7. The WinFS is not there atleast in the RC 1. WinFS promised search based on content of a file rather than the file name.

Windows 7 does impress. It does not have any ground breaking new technologies but it is much more user friendly and much more faster than Vista. Many will migrate to windows 7 directly from XP.

Next Posts: Screen Grabs from windows 7