The Energon Pub

Microsoft has officially and publicly released the beta for Windows 7. Anyone else installed it yet, and if so what are your thoughts?

I threw my old 80GB Seagate in and installed it to that. Installation ran well, very quick by Windows standards. Got through the set up and launched up to the desktop.... For anyone wondering, this thing is almost a carbon copy of Windows Vista in terms of looks. Some might like that, others not.

Let's start with the improvements. Quick Launch has been replaced with a feature that is called Pin to Taskbar. Lets say we pin Firefox to the Taskbar. It sits in the bottom left like a quick launch icon. You click that and your Pinned icon launches up into Firefox. Here's the neat part though, it doesn't add another button to the right of it that you would normally use to minimize, maximize etc. That Quick Launch button has effectively become your Firefox Browser window. This includes grouping the multiple windows of it if you dislike tabbed browsing as I do. If you have multiple windows open, it adds a hair thing extension to the side to notify you that more than one window is open on it. If you hover over it, AERO kicks in and shows you real time previews of every window you have open of that specific program, then you just click on the one you want. Overall, a very neat function. Unsure if it was in Vista or not.

Many folks will be wondering where show desktop went to. If you look all the way to the right, theres a box that looks like a nondescript clear 'thing'. This is actually Show Desktop. I like the idea, but wish you could move it over by the windows button. Oh well. It's out of the way so as not to interfere with the Pin function.

Next nice thing is the action center. It's over on the far right beside the clock. From here you access your updates, your firewall, and of course User Account Control. No longer will you have the little update icon popping up about firewall, updates and other random things. Now they all sit inside this single button. And if there is something new, only that single button will notify you. It's very non intrusive. Another plus for me. Also if you're tired of getting notified of updates and the like, you can completely turn off the popups and just allow it to do the updates and installation in the background. Even video drivers. It installed my Nvidia drivers without even bringing up a window in the taskbar.

The Sidebar returns along with it extra sometimes useful functions. I've grown accustomed to it so not having the weather and such would have been heartbreaking. But it's there, it works, and I'm happy with it.

Windows 7 also includes the new version of Windows Media Player. Looks like the last version, but has a white color instead of black. Nice feature is it pops up to the library and with a simple icon click, it automatically goes to a small compact now playing viewport. You'll have to try it to understand it.

I know this will shock some folks..... They updated Paint.... No you did not misread that sentence. They actually upgraded it so it doesn't look like a direct copy from Windows 95. It now uses the often hated, sometimes loved, ribbon system from Office 2007. THEY EVEN ADDED IN NEW BRUSHES! HOLY ****!.... I'll stick with Photoshop CS3, but it's nice of them to show a little progress in it.

Other little things like Sticky notes like in Outlook are in here. Nice if you need to remember something and don't want to open up notepad or Word or whatever.

Snipping tool! Tired of having to do a PRNT SCRN every time you want to copy your desktop or whatever and then open up Paint etc. Then paste it, resize it, and finally save it? Yeah, Snipping Tool hated that as well. Now you just open that fella up, select the portion of the screen you want to save, and pick the name and format. BANG instant screen capture. Lovely.

Now, the things I dislike. And most are a direct carry over from Vista. File structure is still horrible in my opinion. I still hate that you can't have to selected item information displayed on the left hand side of the screen. It's still locked to the bottom like in Vista. That was one thing I absolutely hated and could not understand the reasoning behind. When I'm selecting items, I do it by name, and in XP, what was directly to the left of the name? Oh yeah! The information pertaining to that item. At least give me the freaking option to organize the crap how I want to.

That carries over into my other problem. I dislike not seeing the actual path of my file structure. To see this, you have to click the path bar to get it to convert. The Up One Level button is still gone as well. I think it was in Vista also. However, this I can get used to. I shouldn't have to as there should be an option to use the old file system, but I can work with it. It's tolerable.

Now remember that Pin feature I was talking about? It's great right? Yup sure is. However I found one glaring flaw in it. If you have one window open and click it, it minimizes as it should. Unfortunately that cannot be said if you have more than one window open in it. If that is the case, clicking on it, only opens and closes the active previews. To get to the desktop or a window behind it, you either click the other program, or slide over and pick show desktop. Can't find a way around this yet.

Windows still managed to **** up animated GIF images. As in, they don't in their poopy image viewer. BRING BACK WINDOWS PICTURE AND FAX VIEWER YOU DOUCHE BAGS! Eh hem. Sorry.

Now, the real kicker. Performance. Or lack thereof. Regardless of what Microsoft might say, Windows 7 still takes up a **** ton of memory. As in right now it's using 24% of my available memory. As in it's using an entire freaking GB of memory just to run at optimum. The full installation also took up give or take 10GB of storage space. That's.... A lot. So if you're thinking you'll get a performance boost over Vista, don't count on it.

I'm also getting some stuttering while scrolling on most sites. Even with smooth scrolling turned on. I haven't rebooted since I installed the video drivers though, so we'll see if that fixes things.

Overall, it has some very nice features that even I would use, However the fact that it's still a resource hog makes me shy away from it a lot.... And that damn GIF image deal. Sheesh. I dunno. I surely won't be an early adopter like I tried to be with Vista. But hey! LEAST I DIDN'T GET A BLUE SCREEN WHILE OPENING WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER WITH THIS! **** Vista.

TL:DR version for the short attention spanned, looks like Vista without most of the Vista problems. Some cool things added in. Some things still **** up royally. However, in the end, mostly impressed.

Sounds like a proper service back that you get to pay for.

I'll take it one point at a time:

Let's start with the improvements. Quick Launch has been replaced with a feature that is called Pin to Taskbar...

I like this feature too. Nice improvement over the quick launch. And seeing as I really never used Quick Launch this seems like something I might use. Heck I've already Pinned Firefox to it.

Many folks will be wondering where show desktop went to. If you look all the way to the right, theres a box that looks like a nondescript clear 'thing'. This is actually Show Desktop...

Did not use it in XP, don;t think I'm going to use it here. I have yet to find a situation where I need to get to the desktop so quickly that I can't take the time to minimize some windows down to do it.

Next nice thing is the action center. It's over on the far right beside the clock...

Pretty neat. Still I like to be notified of things since I like to know what updates windows wants to install on my system. Letting it do its thing by itself cause caused major problems in the past. Thankfully the Action Center lets me still do that.

The Sidebar returns along with it extra sometimes useful functions. I've grown accustomed to it so not having the weather and such would have been heartbreaking. But it's there, it works, and I'm happy with it.

Me too.

Windows 7 also includes the new version of Windows Media Player. Looks like the last version, but has a white color instead of black. Nice feature is it pops up to the library and with a simple icon click, it automatically goes to a small compact now playing viewport. You'll have to try it to understand it.

Not exactly happy about this one. I liked the Now Playing Screen from before. but other than that its o.k.

Now, the things I dislike. And most are a direct carry over from Vista. File structure is still horrible in my opinion. I still hate that you can't have to selected item information displayed on the left hand side of the screen. It's still locked to the bottom like in Vista. That was one thing I absolutely hated and could not understand the reasoning behind. When I'm selecting items, I do it by name, and in XP, what was directly to the left of the name? Oh yeah! The information pertaining to that item. At least give me the freaking option to organize the crap how I want to.

That's a good point. I also liekd the info bar to the left, but what you gonna do. Itys not that bad on the bottom. Though I do despise the way the file tree is assembled now.

Now, the real kicker. Performance. Or lack thereof. Regardless of what Microsoft might say, Windows 7 still takes up a **** ton of memory. As in right now it's using 24% of my available memory. As in it's using an entire freaking GB of memory just to run at optimum. The full installation also took up give or take 10GB of storage space. That's.... A lot. So if you're thinking you'll get a performance boost over Vista, don't count on it.

I think this is different depending on the system. Its still a resource hog, but I installed this on only 768MB of RAM and it decided to only hog 536 of them. Still hogging, but its not as bad as I feared.

All in all so fare its bean pleasant, but I feel that its going to get bogged down real quickly if I have more than a select few things running at startup.

So I'll have to be very weary of what I install.

Sounds like a proper service back that you get to pay for.

Ahh no. the Beta is free thus far. The final version yes. but I'm guessing Microsoft will try to make it replace Vista in a rather short time span.

I think that's what Getter is getting at. A service pack is meant to correct problems with your operating system. 7 does that with Vista. But you have to pay for it. I really hope they offer a discount if you're a Vista owner.

TheMuffin wrote:I think that's what Getter is getting at. A service pack is meant to correct problems with your operating system. 7 does that with Vista. But you have to pay for it. I really hope they offer a discount if you're a Vista owner.

Ohh yea sorry.

As for discount like any other MS OS. I'm sure the upgrade will be significantly cheaper than the full retail version. So if you have Vista you qualify for an upgrade.