7 is UrbanWire’s new lucky number.

The one software almost every PC user had been eagerly waiting for has finally arrived.

Ok, actually we’re joking. It’s not exactly out yet, but we were so eager that we were up all night on May 5, when Microsoft, the big daddy of the PC desktop operating system (OS) market, released the Release Candidate (RC) build of its much-hyped next-generation Windows 7 OS.

This especially after the incumbent Vista was criticized by many as a horribly slow, resource-hungry and bloated joke of an OS, leading most consumers to passing up on it, opting instead to stay on Windows XP until another new, faster and more streamlined Windows OS was rolled out.

Naturally, the resident techie in UrbanWire was only too eager to get his hands on the Windows 7 RC ISO file as soon as possible and take the new OS out on a test spin. And because expectations for Windows 7 are so high, we actually tested it against both Windows XP Home Edition SP3 and Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 to see just how Microsoft’s next-gen OS would fare against its older, more established predecessors.

So, how did it fare? Read on to find out what we had discovered.

 
The minimum ‘must-haves’ for Windows 7, as stated by Microsoft.

Although Microsoft claimed that Windows 7 will be less resource hungry than Vista, the minimum hardware specs it had put up on its website were almost identical to those of Windows Vista. In fact, the only difference in requirements between both OSes was that Windows 7 asked for 16GB of free space for installation, while Vista demanded that 15GB be freed up for installation.

With that in mind, we decided to test Microsoft’s claims that its next-gen OS is much more forgiving on hardware and used a PC that falls near the lower limit of Microsoft’s minimum requirements for our Windows 7 review.

Installation

The interface for the Windows 7 RC installer has been tweaked a little. Back in Windows XP, you had an ugly text one, which was ‘upgraded’ to a more visually appealing graphical interface in Vista.

Windows 7′s installation screen is nothing more than a touched-up version of Vista’s, with a new colour scheme and what looks like flowers at the side of the screen. It’s purely for aesthetic purposes, but it does make for a slightly better experience.

If you are one of those Windows users who skipped Vista in favor of Windows 7, the new installer is a welcome change from the text-mode installer in XP.

Surprisingly, installing Windows 7 in the test PC didn’t take long: all it took was about 30 minutes, an improvement over the longer installation times for XP and Vista, of which both exceeded the 30-minute mark. After a couple of restarts, a hardware test and keying in the details needed for a default user account, we found ourselves in the newly designed Windows 7 desktop, which in itself is a sight to behold, so much that it deserved to have its own section.

 
My, what a pretty OS.

It’s no secret in the PC world that ‘Windows’ and ‘good looks’ are almost never mentioned in the same breath, but Windows 7 is reminiscent of the show Britain’s Got Talent‘s ugly duckling Susan Boyle after a makeover.

The Windows 7 desktop. Despite how it looks, the guppy is NOT animated.

Microsoft’s Aero interface, which debuted in Vista, was torn apart by many for having too much unnecessary eye candy that did almost nothing to improve the user experience. Worse, it was also labeled as a huge resource-hogger, adversely affecting performance on PCs with more dated hardware.

Fortunately, it seems Microsoft has learned its lesson with Vista and Aero. In our test PC, which only had 1 GB of memory and an integrated Intel GMA 950 graphics core, Aero runs extremely fast, and there were virtually no signs of the slowdown that plagued Vista. Some features especially stood out in the new Aero interface.

Perhaps what must be one of the most revolutionary changes in the Windows interface is the newly designed Taskbar.

Windows veterans would most likely remember how the Taskbar used to house a little panel called the Quick Launch panel, which was nothing more than a little row of shortcuts placed next to the Start menu for…um…quick-launching applications.

In Windows 7, the Quick Launch panel has been merged into the Taskbar, giving it a much more seamless look than that of Vista. But Microsoft went and added something extra to the Quick Launch: they essentially turned Quick Launch into something akin to a mini window management system.

These icons are no longer mere shortcuts: each of them is its own application
window manager.

By default, in Windows 7, any running application will have its own icon in the Taskbar, which keeps track of the number of windows that the application has opened. Clicking on the icon throws up a list of thumbnails displaying the windows that are associated with that software. Want to close a window from that app? No problem: just click on the tiny red ‘X’ on the top right corner in the thumbnail, and whoosh, that offending window has vanished from your desktop. An extremely neat and time-saving feature, especially for those who often work with multiple windows per application, and in our opinion, way superior to the Dock in Apple’s Mac OS X, which does not offer the same kind of control over application windows.

Aero Peak-a-boo

Remember Expose in Mac OS X, which allowed a user to navigate between multiple windows by tiling all windows as thumbnails on the desktop for easy selection, all at the touch of a button? I’m sure you do.

Aero Peak is Microsoft’s answer to window clutter, although it works very differently from Expose: while Expose thumbnails every available on the desktop, Aero Peak hides all available windows save for the one selected.

Watch your unwanted windows disappear into empty borders with Aero Peak

While not a revolutionary feature on its own, it’s still a welcome addition to Windows, considering that even in Windows 7, the only method of window navigation is still the familiar Alt + Tab. At the least, it adds some degree of functionality and style into a painfully old method of window control.
Better wallpaper control

Even up till Windows Vista, Microsoft only allowed wallpapers 3 modes of display: Centered, Tilled, and Stretch to Fit. Of course, this meant that unfortunate users with wallpapers that do not fit the resolution of their displays had to contend with a centered wallpaper or a distorted image which had been ballooned up (or shrunk down) into less-than-ideal aspect ratios. This situation has changed in Windows 7 (finally!)

Say goodbye to distorted and badly-resized wallpapers in Windows 7…Forever!

Of course, this is nothing new at all: Linux and Mac OS X had all these wallpaper display controls for a very long time already, and if anything, we could criticize Microsoft for taking so long just to come out with a feature that has been considered mainstream in other OSes. However, we prefer to look at it as a positive sign that Microsoft, and Windows in general, is starting to value consumer needs and feedback much more than it did with its previous version of Windows, which can only mean an improved user experience for us consumers.

Windows, lightweight? You gotta be kidding, right?

Honestly, we thought so too: one of Windows’ biggest characteristic as perceived by many people is that it’s a bloated chunk of an OS which occupies unnecessary hard disk space, unlike the OSes of the past, where every single byte was counted to ensure that space was optimally used.

More importantly, Windows 7′s minimum requirements as posted by Microsoft just did not seem to back its claim that Windows 7 is more streamlined and lighter than Vista. Out of curiosity, we clicked on ‘Computer’ in the Windows menu shortly after installation, just to see how much space on our hard disk had been devoured by Microsoft’s new OS.

The results? Microsoft had shown the world again that its not to be taken seriously, although this time, we were extremely glad with what we saw:

Microsoft said 16GB, but we got ours out with only 7GB:
less than half the minimum requirements.

In addition to he much-lower hard disk requirement, we decided to fire up Windows Task Manager to see just how much of our memory was taken up by the OS when everything was idle. Again, it was nothing short of a pleasent surprise, considering just how much eye-candy and the type of features that were added to the OS.

They look ALMOST like Windows XP specs when idle. Microsoft must
have finally done something right to get memory consumption down
to such a level.
 

Windows on steroids

When we compared performance between Windows XP and Windows 7, we were unable to experience any noticible speed differences between both OSes: applications launched almost immediately as soon as they were executed, and both were almost on par with each other in multi-tasking and shutting down. (Window 7 actually edged XP out by a few seconds in our tests, hardly noticeable unless you’re the kind of person who times your PC with a stopwatch or with other benchmarking software.)

What was ironical though was that when we compared Vista SP1 with Windows 7, we were also unable to detect any significant performance differences between both OSes as well. But that may be due to the fact that the DVD of Windows Vista we were using for our comparisons was already factory slipstreamed with SP1, which supposedly fixes most of Vista’s early performance problems.

Regardless, the RC still runs blazingly fast on our entry-level test PC, a characteristic which most people don’t usually relate to Windows. Add on the fact that it runs (slightly) faster than XP, which many have used as the baseline for performance comparisons, Windows 7 is probably one of the fastestWindows OS ever released.
 

Usability

When Windows Vista was released, many users were understandably irked by the new User Access Control (UAC) security feature added into the OS, which demanded that the user authorise almost every single action they do before the progra or application is allowed to run, resulting in some just turning it off completely, negating Vista’s security features in the process.

To their credit, Microsoft was fully aware of the complaints that were levelled at UAC, and in Windows 7, had the feature tweaked to allow for multiple settings, instead of  the simple ‘Turn On/Off’ option in Vista.

Actually, the default setting was level 3, and not the maximum. But for the sake of
security, a litle inconvinience won’t hurt.

And for the first time in years, Microsoft finally made an improvement to the almost-useless Wordpad in Windows 7. Many will remember how limited Wordpad was in prior versions of Windows, only being able to read and edit files with the .rtf or .txt extensions. This is set to change for the better: Wordpad in Windows 7 now supports many additional formats, including its own OOXML format (.docx only) and even the competing Open Document format (.odf).

You could almost ditch MS Office now that .docx and .odf is suported in Wordpad. Almost…

 
Compatibility issues…or rather, the lack of it.

Fast and stable as the RC may be, we actually managed to trigger the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) the very first time the Windows 7 RC was launched. Fortunately, after some quick debugging, we managed to trace the problem down to a faulty hardware driver for our USB wireless internet (WiFi) adaptor that was connected to the PC. After a 20-minute trip down to a nearby hardware store and $30 later, we junked the problematic adpator with extreme prejudice, attached the new one into our PC and everything ran like clockwork from then on without any more BSODs.

On the software side, we didn’t run into any compatibility problems either: we managed to install Microsoft Office 2007, OpenOffice 3, Adobe Reader and MSN Live Messenger without any issues, all of which worked perfectly as if they were running on Windows XP or Vista.

Games, however, were a mixed bag. Because of the entry-level specifications of our test PC (and our budget), we were only able to test 3 games on it, namely Counter-Strike Condition Zero, Sudden Attack SEA and Maple Story SEA. And that was where the problems started: Condition Zero and Sudden Attack refused to run no matter how we coaxed them to, and the former also managed to take the system down with it after too many failed attempts.

In fact, Maple Story was the only game that was seemingly able to run without issues (save for a compatibility warning before the game was launched). But such compatibility will be up to the game manufacturers to provide, and as far as we are concerned, it’s not a problem that Microsoft or Windows 7 should concern themselves with.

 
Verdict

After having test run the public RC build of Windows 7, we can see why everybody, and even Microsoft, is getting all hyped up about its release. For the moment, Microsoft seems to have done everything correctly. And the list of improvements mentioned here are not all that there is to Windows 7: there are many other improvements that just did not make it intot his article because of length and space constraints.  

We’d caution against getting too optimistic about Windows 7 now though: even Vista, during its beta and RC stages, was extremely well-received until everything just seemed to go wrong for the final release. While it is unlikely that Microsoft will repeat the same mistake with Windows 7 (they cannot afford to do so anyway), it still remains to be seen, considering how many of their products had suffered similar fates in the past. (Windows 95 and Windows ME comes to mind)

But all things said and done, it has been a long time Microsoft actually released an OS that requires fewer resources than its predeccessor, much less one that actually runs faster as well. This is definitely one of the best, if not the best Windows OS that Microsoft has to offer to the computing public, considering how it’s still in RC status.

* UrbanWire strongly discourages its readers from using the RC build to replace their primary computing environment, as the RC build is time-bombed to expire and deactivate on Jun, 2010.

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