October 2009 Product of the Month – Windows 7
Windows 7 was the largest pre-order product of all time, knocking Harry Potter to 2nd place! It’s received acclaim from nearly every technical outlet, and has seen early adoption within workplaces and by system manufacturers.
We’ve been using it within Lucidica for the past month and here are our top ten for why it’s better than Vista and finally worth the leap from Windows XP
- It’s quicker than Vista
Well, not much quicker in the benchmarks, but it is more responsive, things open quicker, machines take less time to boot, and the average user will definitely feel the difference.
It is not though quicker than WindowsXP particularly in benchmarks, so don’t go switching your Photoshop or video editing suites if you’re a speed freak
- The security has been ‘sorted’
Windows Vista was just plain annoying, so much so, I have seen countless people just turn off the main security improvements either to make their life easier or in some cases make things work! Windows 7 now has the balance right, it is much more secure in many ways than XP and Vista, and yet doesn’t get in your way
- The Task Bar
This may seem small, but it’s worth mentioning, many pieces of press I’ve seen tout Windows 7 as ‘being able to put applications on the task bar’. Windows ’95 could do this, it’s just been turned off by default, so this isn’t big news. What is nice, very nice in fact, is the application management on the taskbar. Applications can be pinned to the taskbar, and they automatically group, and then fan out when you hover over them. You can seamlessly navigate through your open web pages or word documents
- Shortcuts
anything to make users lives easier is a winner, and Windows 7, makes it easy to ‘pin’ not just common Excel to the start menu, but documents. Most users under Vista will be opening Excel in 2 clicks, under Windows 7 Excel is one click and your commonly used file is 2 clicks
- Shuffle & Snap
Windows 7 has actually added new interactions that are intuitive and can easily be picked up. Things like a ‘Windows shuffle’ (simply grabbing an open application and shaking it with the mouse) will cause all other applications to minimise. A snap will resize the application depending on where your snapping to, so drag your application or window to the side of the screen and it will tile horizontally to the side
- 5 Knots is 257 centimetres per second
Ok, so not the most relevant statistic, but now not only to things like ‘Paint’ and ‘WordPad’ not look like they we designed in the 1980s they now have useful features, like unit conversion on the calculator, and oh my god a decent brush in the painting application. Obviously a long way from Photoshop, but at least they now are fit(er) for purpose
- You get no email program, or photo editor
This may not sound so good, but Outlook Express (or Mail for those of you on Vista) was woefully out of date. It’s ok, if you receive the quantity of email most people did in 1998, but for even moderate users it groaned its way onto Windows Vista with a slight refresh. Now it’s gone, but Microsoft has replaced it with Windows Live Essentials, a web downloadable suite of programs for everything from video editing, to email and calendar, and they are nice, hurrah, your computer can now actually do something out of the box, rather than sitting their expecting Microsoft Office at an extra £350!
- Backup is Easy
It’s easy (and yet powerful) to configure and you can chose many methods of backup from simple disk to network. In fairness Windows Vista started on a great basis for backup, but Windows 7 has really shown how it should have been done
- Bitlocker is quite a bit better
The file encryption method is now easy, quick and secure. If you have sensitive data on a USB key drive (or any drive, internal or external), you can password protect it with 3 clicks. You can also enforce the policy across your organisation stopping people putting USB keys into your computers with encrypting the data!
The major sticking point though, is that this feature is Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate only, so you have to put your hand in your pocket to benefit. For most (and for those on XP or Mac) check out our tech tip of from May this year
- It’s more compatible
Windows 7 takes Vista a little further and offers pretty much full compatibility with Windows XP applications by running them virtually on top of itself. It means that your 10 year old database program than you just can’t discard can now have a new lease of life!
Windows Vista did get a hard time from the press, it’s not an awful operating system, it’s annoying, and slow, but we use it here (bar the machines we’ve upgraded to 7) and at home and it serves its purpose well. It has also aged well, hardware is faster, software more compatible and people more familiar with the new interface. I suspect that Windows 7 would not have got such fanfare if it were released as the successor to XP, but being as it had Vista to take peoples anger as they got to grips with massive change and incompatibility it’s got much better reviews.
Is Windows 7 such an amazing operating system over Vista? No.
Is it better than Vista? Yes,
Is it better than XP? Yes,
Is there much to moan about in it? No.
Essentially that’s all you need to know!
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