Windows 7 Beta 1
Introduction:
Windows 7 arrived surprisingly quickly considering the amount of time Microsoft spent on its much-maligned predecessor, Vista. If I were to wager a guess from a strictly outside-the-company perspective I'd say this version of Windows is almost a mea culpa of sorts. "We're sorry Vista sucked, please try this patched version instead." Steve Ballmer probably has a flashier, less apologetic way of saying that of course. It probably involves chairs at some point.
Nevertheless, there are those of us who are just operating systems junkies and we feel a compulsion to try the latest and greatest (particularly when it's dangled out there for the public to consume freely). I was in on the Vista betas and my heart sank as beta 1 and release candidate 2 failed to impress. In fact, they did worse than that. To say that my hopes were high that Microsoft had learned from their mistakes would be a great understatement.
The Download Experience™
I was one of those crazy people who helped to bring down Microsoft's servers on Friday in what was essentially a well-intentioned denial-of-service attack. We really were just interested in the beta, Microsoft. Honest. In all fairness, when you announce there's going to be a public beta to your newest OS which just so happens to be widely hated, and then announce that you're limiting the number of participants to 2.5 million, you've got to be ready for people to start hammering your site on release day.
An erroneous report on Ars Technica had folks in the Central and Eastern time zones trying to download the beta several hours early with varying levels of success. I was actually able to get a couple of download links for the discs themselves before 3:30pmCST on Friday, but the official site would simply give me "Server Too Busy" messages over and over. Sometimes it would take several minutes or even progress me one more screen and make me think I was getting my official key, only to drop me like an HMO onto the "Server Too Busy" screen.
After enough of this happened to the rest of the world, Microsoft wisely decided to pull most of the pages with download links (though not all, as I was able to download and install the 64-bit DVD at around 7pmCST on Friday using links from the Ars Technica forum. I monitored the official site and about midday Saturday I saw a real, honest to goodness link to apply for the beta. This time everything went smoothly, sort of. I got to the point where I'd given them my demographic info and an email and I saw a screen that said, "Now, wait for a confirmation email from us. It shouldn't take too long." It did. Too long by my estimation.
In fact, the confirmation email didn't show up until much later that evening (around 5pmCST Saturday). By that time I'd already gone back to the site and tried again, which yielded me a key immediately, sans confirmation. When I clicked the confirmation link later that night I received another key entirely. I saved them both just for grins.
Installing
Once I burned and verified the checksums of my DVD I backed up my XP files and popped in the DVD. The install was basically identical to that of Vista Ultimate, with one pleasant and notable exception: my wireless network was detected and configured properly. At one point during the install process I was given a list of available networks, on which mine was displayed, and once I entered my credentials all was well. This is a notable step up from Vista Ultimate.
I chose my existing Windows XP install (this was on Rig 4 by the way) and told it I wanted a clean install. There wasn't an upgrade option from XP anyway. What it ended up doing kind of surprised me. After installing and rebooting I found my old Windows directory still resident under the name "Windows.old." This may be something that was added strictly for beta testing to offer a safety net, but I can't be sure.
The only outward evidence that I was running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 was the duplication of certain directories on my C: drive. For instance, there's a "Program Files" and a "Program Files (X86)." There's also two versions of Internet Explorer (man it's hard not to type "Exploiter"). New 32-bit programs were put into the X86 version of Program Files.
Once I got up and running for a bit, Windows informed me that updates were available. Like Vista Ultimate, one of these included an Nvidia display driver. I downloaded it and rebooted. I was a little leery since Vista Ultimate had some issues with updating. There were no problems with Windows 7.
Usage Impressions
Let me preface this section before I get a lot of "you're an idiot" emails. There were a lot of features in Vista that I never got around to playing with because I was distracted by other problems with the underlying OS, so I do not claim to know if any of the things I mention here are actually new, or just new to Vista.
The first thing I noticed was a slightly cleaner looking desktop. Gadgets were turned off by default (thank goodness) and there wasn't a little transparent "shelf" taking up space on the right side of my screen. Even after going through the "Test your System" dialogs and enabling Aero Glass the gadgets did not return. They were however available to add from the right-click menu.
At idle, Windows 7 reported between 600-700MB being "used," down a bit from Vista Ultimate. I surrounded "used" in quotes because as I learned in my initial look at Vista, Microsoft has changed the way they report memory usage. Most of that reported usage is actually just cached, available RAM.
Paint and WordPad have had an Office 2007-esque makeover. Both programs have the "ribbon" toolbar along the top that was introduced in Office recently. In the case of Paint, I found that all the options included on the ribbon by default were useful to me, particularly "crop" which now keeps me from having to select, cut, and paste into a new image. There's also a standalone screenshot app (this appeared in Vista) called Snipping Tool.
I tested some file copying, since I've heard folks complain bitterly about how slowly Vista handles this. I copied several hundred small files in a reasonable amount of time (about a minute), but without some sort of scientific measurement I couldn't say whether this was an improvement. Suffice to say, it never took so long I noticed.
Windows Explorer, accessible by an icon on the task bar, feels more useful to me. This is purely subjective, but I didn't have any trouble navigating through the file system, particularly compared to my experience in Vista.
By completely unscientific means (1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi) I determined that Windows 7 takes about a minute and ten seconds from cold boot to a usable desktop. One thing I liked was the lack of "fake boot" that I run into in XP. Allow me to explain. My workstation runs XP and when either cold booting or logging on to it, I find that the desktop will pop up fairly quickly, but I can't do anything because Windows is still trying to load everything in the background.
The start menu is unresponsive for a period of between 10 to 30 seconds while all the various system tray programs load. I didn't notice this with Windows 7. Speaking of the system tray, all the icons share a uniform look now. I like this. It just looks cleaner, in my opinion.
An estute reader pointed out that the real name for my "fake boot" problem is "asynchronous boot" and that there is a way to fix this by changing a setting with "gpedit.msc." I must then sacrifice a live chicken under a full moon after burying a potato and an upside-down silver tea kettle in ground sanctified by a voodoo priest and speak rites unknown to mortals since the dawn of creation. Well, not really, but his full explanation did seem a bit arcane. Thanks for the input, though.
If User Access Control (UAC) still exists in Windows 7, it's been greatly reduced in annoyance. I didn't notice any untoward warnings from the system; in fact it actually caught a website attempting to download something I wasn't aware of. I don't mind Windows asking me if I'm sure I want to run an executable I just downloaded, but in Vista the dialogs were just unbearable.
Internet Explorer has an option called "inPrivate" for private browsing. It's a neat feature, but I don't know all the details about it. I would imagine at the very least it doesn't allow cookies to be written to your computer.
The "Rate My Computer" utility that's used to determine if you can turn on all the visual bells and whistles gave my system a 3.0 this time around. It's a lower rating than Vista Ultimate with the same hardware. Perhaps their metrics have changed?
The games selection is pretty much on par with Vista Ultimate, minus the "Ultimate Extras" Texas Hold 'Em game. It will not be missed. I'm still fond of Mahjongg Titans. I didn't see any version of Java installed. I guess Linux has sort of spoiled me there.
Testing
Once I played around with the operating system proper for a while, I decided to try out some games. They are after all one of the only reasons I use Windows at all. I picked one relatively safe title (Bejeweled 2) and one not-so-safe one (Titan Quest Gold). They were already installed in my "Windows.old" directory, but wouldn't launch, so I reinstalled them.
Both programs installed and ran just fine. I was worried about Titan Quest, as it's particularly resource hungry. I noticed no noticeable system lag on my usual settings, even in the more taxing worlds (such as Olympus).
I noticed that the "Games" folder was smart enough to recognize both of my new games and add links to them alongside the Windows standards like Solitaire and Freecell. This may not be a new feature, but it was new to me.
Preliminary Conclusions
I like Windows 7. There, I said it. This is the kind of thing I expected from Vista and didn't get. It feels like a solid upgrade from XP, and provided Microsoft doesn't crap it up with useless extra features between now and the retail release, I'll be quite tempted to pick up a copy for myself (at a student-discounted price, of course).