Microsoft Windows 7 (Professional and Ultimate)
Introduction:
Windows 7 has been a long time coming, it seems, but in the grand scheme of things for Microsoft to push out a major new version of their flaship Windows OS in a little over 2 years is nothing short of amazing. Okay, given it was mostly just a facelift and overhaul to Windows Vista, but it says something to me about how poorly their last release was recieved that Microsoft brass thought it best to get all hands on deck and bang out a major release in this short a period.
In another departure from their usual playbook, Microsoft offered a beta version of Windows 7 to everyone interested, and although it was time-limited, the time limit was what I consider to be extremely generous (it's still good until March 2010, almost 6 months past the time the retail box became available). I've played with the beta and release candidate (RC), and I have to say, in general I'm impressed.
Having used Windows 7 since the beta came out roughly a year ago, I didn't expect much of a surprise when installing the final retail product. Read on to find out if I was wrong.
In the interest of full disclosure, I obtained the Professional version for my wife (she's a graduate student) at a significant discount, and Ultimate for free from a Microsoft IT conference called "The New Efficiency." Sometimes being a code monkey has its benefits. I also got free food out of the deal. Say what you will about the company, but having that amount of money to throw around results in some cool convention swag.
Part 1 (October 23, 2009)
- Install 1: 64-bit Professional Clean Install
- Playing with Windows 7 Professional
- Err... NOT Playing with Windows 7 Professional
- Odds and Ends
Part 2 (November 9, 2009)
Install 1: 64-bit Professional Clean Install
I booted the disc inside of the Windows 7 RC first, just to see what it offered. I didn't expect (or want) an upgrade path from the RC, but interestingly enough, the disc did offer the option to "Install." I decided to see what it would do.
Setup went through the usual install screens (see previous rants for screenshots or Google them). I was asked if I wanted to download the latest installer updates (I did) and the installer chugged along. Next up was the End-User Licensing Agreement (EULA). This is where most folks skip to the next screen, while a few read the fine print. I have no illusions that 99% of the world will skip through it. I am that 1%.
I was warned not to install this copy on more than one computer (check), not to copy fonts or system images unless I'm printing something (WTF?), and not to let more than one person use the OS at once. I wonder if my wife leaning over my shoulder to suggest Netflix movies counts as "simultaneous use"?
I was warned about mandatory activation (30 days after the initial install) and given the dire consequences if I didn't (basically your OS will brick itself). I actually didn't plan on activating this copy as I bought it for my wife's computer, but I received this copy of Professional several weeks before my scheduled conference and what can I say, I'm impatient. I figured I'd use it for a couple of weeks and replace it with Ultimate when I got it.
The rest of the agreement highlighted transferring rights (basically you can give it away or sell it but not retain a copy) and some legalese regarding the myriad codecs included with Windows. This is all pretty standard stuff for commercial software. I saw nothing terribly draconian.
On the next screen I chose "Upgrade" and here's where I hit a snag. It was an expected snag, mind you. The Windows 7 Release Candidate is *technically* the Ultimate Edition of Windows 7. Ultimate Edition cannot be upgraded to Pro (since essentially it's a downgrade). A clean install was my only option at this point unless I wanted to wait around two more weeks for my retail copy of Ultimate (I didn't).
The "Custom" install option is essentially a clean install, but it does the same thing Vista did about copying all your existing programs and files into a "Windows.old" folder so you can drag and drop them later. It's a nice feature, though it does assume you have a pretty beefy harddrive to store it all. I intended to drag off my documents and toss the rest.
I started the install at 9:45am. The installer menus haven't changed since the Release Candidate as far as I can tell. The system rebooted several times during the process. At one point I was presented a gray-and-black Windows bootloader with an option for "Windows 7 (rollback)". I found this interesting.
The installer stayed on the "Completing Installation" screen for what seemed like an awfully long time without movement from the progress bar. I'm sure things were going on in the background (the screen wasn't frozen and my harddrive light blinked furiously) but it would have been nice to have some sort of percentage or running log of what was going on behind the scenes.
I reached the welcome screen at 10:18am, putting my total install time at 33 minutes. That's a far cry from the 3 hours it took me to install Vista, though (in all fairness) that was an upgrade from a much older OS.
Playing with Windows 7 Professional
I unticked the "Activate Windows Automatically" option and after a few seconds of final setup, I saw the most godawful default desktop imaginable. Okay, perhaps it wasn't THAT bad, but seriously, with millions upon millions of dollars Microsoft couldn't have commissioned a better default image? I've seen better things on DeviantArt for free.
Since I was installing this at work, my first order of business was to set up the static IP ethernet settings. This process is the least intuitive thing I think I've dealt with in Windows since Vista. There's no cute little Next, Next, Finish for ethernet. There is for wireless, but to set up my static IP I had to go to Network and Internet, Network and Sharing Center, click on Local Area Connection, click on Properties, click on Internet Protocol Version 4, and click on properties again. Now, I've done this enough times to know where to look, but I don't think most people would.
If I'm mistaken and there is a more elegant way to do this, I'm all ears. Feedback AT Techiemoe.com is always available for suggestions. I entered in my IP information and (on a lark) clicked "Validate Settings on Exit." This brought up a dialog that whirled and blinked and spat out a message that Windows "couldn't detect the problem."
In other words, there was none; my settings were entered correctly. That's an odd way to say SUCCESS, in my opinion. I can imagine a doctor saying to me, "Well, unfortunately our tests came back completely negative for anything that might be wrong with you." Actually, I did have a doctor tell me that once... But I digress.
Once I got my network setup I went to the (always tedious) task of downloading drivers for things. Whilst trolling around for drivers I downloaded essentials like ClamAV antivirus and Mozilla Firefox. I also dug around the C: drive. The Windows.old directory did seem to have retained everything from my previous install, all 41.2 gigabytes of it. Suddenly I didn't think there was much on there I wanted to keep. I deleted it.
I ran Windows Update and got 10 updates. I guess since the OS hasn't been "officially" out for more than a couple of days at this point there wasn't much to get.
Looking through the updates I saw a few drivers (SD card slot, webcam), several security updates and something that sounded violent. One of my updates was called "ActiveX Killbits for Windows 7." I'm not sure what it is, but I take binary murder very seriously.
My soundcard worked without any special drivers, but I'm not sure how many (if any) of my previously-installed drivers might have been poached from the Release Candidate. That's something I'll have to look at when I do a clean install of Ultimate.
I still had to download video drivers, so I tried Dell (is it sad that I know my Service Tag number by heart?). This turned out to be an exercise in futility, since the only "officially-supported" operating systems on my laptop are XP and Vista 32-bit, neither of which would work.
Next I downloaded the latest and greatest from Nvidia directly. Normally on this laptop the installer warns me I should have gone through my manufacturer, but this time it didn't. It's a good thing too, since I'd be pretty much up a creek if I had to wait for Dell to release video drivers for a year-old (and thus ancient and unsupported) laptop.
Err... NOT playing with Windows 7 Professional
Thankfully the Nvidia driver installed fine and on reboot I had Windows 7 rate my video performance so I could enable all the wiz-bang eye candy. The only way I know how to do this is through the "Rate this Computer" link in the Games menu. My rating this time around was 3.4, which I think is the same rating I got on the Release Candidate.
Looking at the Games menu again, I was suddenly struck by something. Notice anything missing? Look hard. Still not seeing it? Well I know it's hard to notice but there are no games installed at all! This is an outrage! Not since MS-DOS has there not been so much as *Solitaire* on a fresh install of a Microsoft OS. What were they thinking?
I did some research on this, as an absence of any and all games is of monumental importance to me. I found this thread, which recommends turning the "Games" feature on. I noticed when I got to that screen that Tablet PC features were on by default. I went ahead and clicked them off. I enabled all the Games (minus Purble Place, I just don't get that one) and Windows wanted me to reboot. I find it odd that installing a handful of board games is so important that it requires a complete system refresh, but I did it anyway and took a deep, cleansing breath.
Upon restart, my games menu was populated as I expected. I question the logic of turning this off by default but turning on features for a device that most people outside of the medical profession are never going to own (a tablet PC). Then again, maybe the idea is that the Professional version is for business people and we all know that business people NEVER need to play a game of Solitaire.
This little snafu just adds one more step to the configuration process when I install this OS on my wife's laptop. She too would notice a distinct lack of leisure programs. Thanks for taking more time out of my weekend, Microsoft.
Odds and Ends
As far as I could tell (at least for the Professional version) the same desktop themes are available as were in the RC. These range from interesting to drug-induced and finally downright disturbing. Any of these, I might add, are an improvement over the chosen default.
The OS itself is really no different than the RC I've been using for a while now, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Windows 7 (RC or retail) works well for me and doesn't get in my way as much as Vista did. If there are new additions in the retail release, they're just not programs I ever use on a daily basis.
Install 2: 64-bit 32-bit Ultimate Clean Install
The Microsoft conference was informative and I did receive a copy of Windows Ultimate at the end. However, the version I got was *32-bit* Ultimate. I asked about the possibility of getting 64-bit, and it was available but only if I turned in my 32-bit version and filled out a form. I was told it would take up to 60 days to mail out my copy, so I mulled it over and finally decided that 32-bit in the hand beat out 64-bit in the proverbial bush.
For this install I deleted and wiped the Windows partition on my drive completely. No old version of Windows to handle this time. The install took roughly thirty minutes, and configuration another thirty. The only drivers I had to download manually were for my Nvidia display card and Synaptics touch pad. Everything else was either included in the default install or pulled down by Windows Update the first time I booted.
I'm not sure if it's just a difference in overhead between the 64-bit (which was technically an upgrade) and the 32-bit (which was clean) but the full installed size of 32-bit Ultimate was just under 10GB, which is significantly smaller than 64-bit Pro and a full one-third smaller than Vista. That's an upgrade.
Update - I've since done a clean re-install of the 64-bit edition and it also weighs in at around 10GB, so apparently the difference was in the upgrade versus the clean install. Either way, it's nice to see some system requirements actually go *down* for once.
Playing with Vista Ultimate
I was very pleased to see that all the games were installed by default. Windows 7 Ultimate is supposed to have all the bells and whistles, so I'd have been surprised if games weren't a part of that. I still did some tweaking of the things installed (bye bye, Purble Place, hello D&D Online) but overall I was satisfied with their default offering.
Performance of Ultimate, like Professional, was better than Vista and at least on par with XP. Windows 7 uses much more resources than XP, of course, but we're not looking at a gigabyte when idle. With Aero Glass running I clocked in at about 500MB of RAM "in use" (which includes cached) with no programs running.
One feature I didn't actually play with when it was first introduced in Vista was BitLocker drive encryption. This is a feature available in Pro and above (Pro, Ultimate, Enterprise). There are two versions available for 7: regular BitLocker and BitLocker "To Go." The former encrypts your whole Windows partition; the latter encrypts external drives like USB sticks.
The presenter at the conference mentioned the idea of keeping people from having access to your harddrive if it's removed from the PC and hooked up to another system (he actually used the example of a Linux system - props to him). This got me thinking. On my laptop I generally have two main partitions, Linux and Windows. I sometimes mount the Windows partition in Linux when I want to copy over a file I downloaded in the other OS, but this could also allow someone who knew how to get into my Linux account full access to that other partition.
As an experiment I decided to see if using BitLocker on the Windows 7 partition would prevent me from accessing it in Linux. There are several warnings provided in an FAQ about BitLocker in Windows 7. Most just tell you what happens if Windows 7 detects something odd about your configuration (like having the drive pulled out and put in a new computer). It doesn't go into full lockdown, but it does require a password.
I tried encrypting my partition, but apparently I lack a necessary hardware piece. I find that kind of odd since I can encrypt directories and drives in Linux using strictly software. I tried using the Bitlocker To Go, just out of curiosity. It seemed to work just fine.
A feature in Windows 7 that I wouldn't have known existed if the presenter at the conference hadn't mentioned it is PSR, or "Problem Steps Recorder." This little gem has several uses, but what it does is record menu selections, key strokes, and take screenshots of a process until you tell it to stop.
Once you record a process, it saves a web page with the screenshots and description of your steps in order to a zip archive. The example the presenter used was to help diagnose a problem with a less than savvy computer user. They can run this and show you what they're doing, in detail, so you can help them out. It would also be useful for tutorials, which is something we're investigating heavily at my work right now.
Conclusion
Despite some hiccups with the Professional install, Microsoft has managed to maintain the level of quality and unobtrusiveness I enjoyed in the Windows 7 betas with their retail offering. I don't mind having paid what I did for the academic version, though I'd be hard pressed to justify the price of a boxed retail version.
Ultimate 32-bit impressed me much more, but in all fairness I'm not sure how much of it was due to the lack of clutter in the clean install. I'm glad Microsoft decided to have their conference and give out copies of it. If I'd been able to try this beforehand I might even pay money for this version of Windows. That's about as high a compliment as I can give them. (Not $300... but maybe an upgrade price.)
I imagine some of you might question whether the fact that I got the OS for free (with food) influenced my opinion of it. Not at all. I liked Windows 7 before when I got the beta and relese candidate for free (no food that time). I had no financial incentive to like the beta. After all, the Vista beta and subsequent retail version (also obtained at a discount) were awful. If I encounter something I don't like in the future, I'll tell you.
I had a good experience with my hardware (Rig 4). Do I recommend Windows 7 to everyone? Definitely not. If you've got an older PC that runs XP like a dream, keep it. Most people aren't going to be buying 7 at the store anyway, so to them I'd say just use what you have until your current PC doesn't do what you want anymore and the next PC you buy (provided you go the retail route) will probably include its own copy of Windows 7. That is, unless you want to go the path less traveled and maybe learn some cool new stuff along the way. I'm just saying.