Playing with Windows 7

Normally my desktop PC runs Ubuntu, and by and large, I'm happy with it. It's stable, reliable & highly customisable, and it does everything I need. I have WINE set up with Internet Explorer 6 in case of any balky websites but I can't remember the last time I needed it. Certainly not for 2 or 3 years.

But I need to "keep my hand in" with Windows. My laptop mainly runs a vanilla Windows XP preload, as Linux' power management isn't quite there yet - & it's also the machine I use for updating my smartphone's firmware & suchlike, the odd task thar mandates Windows.

I did try Vista out in the form of TinyVista, a drastically cut-down version to be found on various Bittorrent sites. It ran happily on my 1GB Athlon XP 2800+ for a couple of months, then fell foul of the dreaded WGA. (Which is fair enough, really, as it wasn't genuine.) So did the copy of TinyXP that lived alongside it.

So last weekend I decided to nuke both & try the release candidate of Windows 7 out. It's not officially available 'til May 5th but it too is all over the torrent indices - look for Build 7100. You'll need a beta licence key, but MS are still issuing those to anyone with a Technet sigh-on. (I believe that any MS Passport ID will do, so dig out your old Hotmail address or MSN sign-on.)

Especially compared to Vista, W7 is quite sleek & pretty. Rather than Vista's forbidding blank black boot screen with just a copyright notice & an activity indicator, W7 has a nifty little animation: 4 dots in red, green yellow & blue swirl out of the black, coalesce in a flare of rendered light, which fades slightly to reveal a pulsing, glowing Windows flag.

The setup program is very minimal: it asks for language, which disk partition to use & then swings into action with a warning that several automatic reboots are to come. it's not kidding: I wasn't paying close attention & the 1st, at 71%, took me by surprise & made me think I had a hardware problem. When W7 booted, it tried to start the setup program afresh. I swore at it, rebooted and bunged an elderly copy of Windows 2000 Pro on instead, in a different partition.

Even an elderly Athlon is quite quick for Win2K & in about 20min I was in action - ready for hours of installing drivers, services packs & other essentials for a usable PC. I started but after a couple of reboots, I decided out of boredom to see what it was that Windows was calling the "unknown operating system on C:" - which actually used to be a copy of MS-DOS extracted from a Win98SE boot floppy. (It's just the thing for reflashing BIOSes & so forth, & having a tiny unused FAT16 boot drive is handy for catching out badly-written crapware that writes to C:\ even when Windows is installed elsewhere.)

And lo! The "unknown OS" was in fact the intact Win7 bootloader, with additional entries for the defunct & overwritten TinyXP & TinyVista. I chose W7 just to see what happened. This time, there was a very different boot sequence. Apparently some 26,577 or so files needed to be updated - I know not why. Then it updated its registry and did some initialisation. After this, I was prompted for a username and password - still, to my surprise, no licence key - and I was into the desktop.

Apart from the strange iconic taskbar, it's very Vista-like. Happily my chipset-integrated Ethernet port was working, meaning a live Internet connection, & W7 asked if it could go online & fetch some updates. It proceeded to download & install various drivers - sound, graphics card etc. - until almost everything was working. Oddly, the PC's 2nd LAN port, an onboard 3Com Ethernet chip, was skipped, and I had to install my pre-downloaded driver for that. My favourite Vista feature - yes, there are some! - survives here: I could just point W7 at the root of my directory tree full of drivers & it happily recursively searches for those it needs. XP & all its ancestors, by contrast, needs to be manually pointed at each individual folder, a tiresome hassle I've performed more hundreds of times than I care to recall.

There's no sidebar any more, and "screen resolution" has been promoted to the top level of the desktop context menu, which should be a crowd-pleaser. I was easily able to set up my dual monitors and move the taskbar to one vertical edge, where - like OS X's Dock - it naturally belongs. Screen height - vertical pixels - are too precious to waste on toolbars in these days of ubiquitous widescreens.

The taskbar is... Odd. All 3rd party system tray icons are hidden by default. You can manually choose some to be shown, or, as I have, just tell it to show all of them. There's little visible distinction between the analogues of QuickLaunch icons - "pinned items" in W7 parlance - and running apps. Icons flash when launched and ones denoting running apps have a frame; hovering the mouse pointer reveals the name or title and for running apps a thumbnail window preview.

It's a big change, but frankly not as disruptive as I expected. The influence of the Mac's Dock is painfully obvious, and it's neither as attractive or polished. It's not a rip-off - it's still the taskbar. Just. I'm not sure it's an improvement, but it does work.

The installer preloads a selection of wallpaper photos from the country chosen in the regional settings, so I got some ever-so-slightly cheesy but still pleasing photos of Stonehenge, Tower Bridge, the Giant's Causeway, some lakes and lochs & whatnot. Mac-like, they slowly cycle past. It's actually quite pleasant.

The control panel is still a Vista-like muddle of renamed entries - for instance, there are no "add & remove" applets. I had to hunt for "Programs and features". This will wind up XP migrants unmercifully, but it's still better than the XP control panel's "simple view". In the Programs & Features c-panel, it's straightforward to hide unwanted bundled apps like Media Player, but they're not removed, merely hidden. This I don't like - a concealed app can still be run & exploited, it's still taking disk space, registry entries and so on. I want the bits I don't use gone.

I still find the transparent window borders tacky and useless. The new show-desktop option is handy, reducing windows to a glowing rendered frame, but it's not even slightly close to the power of Apple's Exposé. I use an ancient IBM Model M keyboard, with no Windows keys, so I can't tell you if the 3D Flip window-selection thing still works. It too was pretty but useless, unlike Exposé, I though. If MS is so blatantly going to nick Apple ideas, can't it at least find a way to replicate the functionality, rather than just the visual glitz?

The desktop is more useful than ever before - and I include the abhorrent ActiveDesktop in that assessment - because now it's the home of "gadgets", the floaty-accessory things that lived in Vista's "sidebar", wasting screen space and CPU cycles. Now they float on your wallpaper, though if you like the clutter, you can set them to be transparent (in increments of 20%, which actually is a good simplification) and set them to be always on top. The CPU/RAM meter is quite useful, and I also have a calendar - which, annoyingly, only shows today, not the whole month - and a weather applet. On the whole, though, Google Desktop will give you that and the search functionality on XP just fine, for nothing. Nice but not actually particularly useful.

I really dislike the new Explorer. With tweaking it's possible to make it vaguely useful but frankly I don't find any of the changes an improvement and it's horribly slow and unresponsive. Give me the NT4 one with the web-folders turned off any day. Since then, it's only gone downhill. I feel that the file manager is one thing where you want no chrome at all, just lightning-fast responsiveness. This one is the opposite. It's a bit less uncooperative than Vista's, but on discussion with alexpiom, I think some of the issues I had with it were because of TinyVista, not Vista itself.

Overall, so far, after a few days, I'm grudgingly impressed. It's pretty and shiny, it works, it's much less of a resource hog, and it was easy to get going. I don't like the Explorer or the new Start menu, and generally it's still bigger and slower than I'd like, but I could use this.

And I daresay soon enough we all will. My money says that as soon as this thing ships, MS will ruthlessly and completely extirpate XP from the channel and from support, ASAP, and try to get all XP and Vista users over onto Win7 as fast as they possibly can. I expect some new must-have products, especially for the big corporates, that mandates Win7 in the near future.

Me personally? Well, I spent that extra few hours getting Win2K Pro current. SP4, drivers, Firefox, Flash, Java, RealAlternative, QuicktimeAlternative, AdBlock+, Privoxy, IE6, couple of rounds of WindowsUpdate. WinAmp, OpenOffice, Pidgin, and we're in business.

It boots in well under a minute - about a quarter of the time of W7 - is fast and responsive in use, all my preferred apps work fine and it goes like stink on this hardware. (To be fair, so did TinyXP, mind you. Complete with the MediaCentre "Royale" theme and all.)

Given the choice of only one of the two, I'd have to go for W2K, I think.

But I shall be back to Ubuntu, shortly, for the 9.04 upgrade... And there I think I will be staying, for the most part.