Well, if you’re into reading random crap on the internet (and if you aren’t, how the hell did you end up at The Agency?) you’ve got to be aware of Windows 7. Here’s what we have so far. If you’ve read ANY other article about Windows 7, you know this much, because they all say exactly the same thing. I’m going to try not to bore myself too much with recap. Google “Windows 7” and the first ten results (I don’t know, I’m not checking, but I bet I’m right) will say all of these facts and rarely much more.
- It’s like Vista, but it’s good. Everyone loves to bag on Vista.
- It got leaked after some Developer’s Conference last fall. I forget the name. I wanna say PDC (I am not looking it up, either). The build was 6801. It was on Torrent sites.
- Every site makes some lame joke about how they don’t condone piracy and you shouldn’t go to your favorite torrent download site and check it out, maybe even namedropping pirate bay or rarely isohunt or mininova.
- Sometimes they mention that MS Paint and Word Pad have Office 07-style “ribbon” menu bars now. Pretty often they will fuck up and say “note pad,” which hasn’t changed at all. That’s the point of note pad. That’s why they have two.
- They will also sometimes mention that calculator got an upgrade. It did. You can switch between a couple of modes. scientific, graphic, regular, that kinda thing. And you can turn on a pretty useful tape-style history.
- The task bar is all glassy and different!
- Now there’s a Beta out which is totally the bees knees. It’s build 7000.
- Microsoft is giving away the beta to the first 2.5 million interested folks to test for them. Ballmer just said this at the GDC. This was like a week ago.
- The day it was supposed to come out, way more people showed up than microsoft expected (or so they’d have you think, more on that in a second) and made their servers cry, limiting their ability to distribute their shit.
- To make up for it, like two days ago, MS got their shit together and put the file back out to anyone who wanted it saying sorry, their servers were better now and they’d up the limit from 2.5 million to whoever wants it for the next two weeks, no limit (indeed, I have four keys myself).
So that’s what we know, and that ended up being longer than I wanted to spend on it, but whatever. Now everyone supposedly has the software and yeah it’s only been a couple of days but I really thought that more people would be talking about what it’s actually, you know, like. I read a lot of RSS feeds and it seems like the kinda shit people would be all over, especially since so many people showed up to sign up that it crashed big bad microsoft’s servers.
But they’re all just parroting the above facts. Maybe they’re preparing some kinda professional “here’s what it’s like after a week” but whatever. How about I write about what it’s really like and someone can copy me. Ok? Here goes.
Windows 7 is really great. Not that I have a choice in the matter. Windows is how I was brought up. It’s like how I love Budweiser even though I am given to understand that budweiser is actually not so good. It’s just how I was raised. Here’s why it’s great!
No wait, I forgot, I have to recap some stuff about vista. Read any given blog post about Vista and this is what we know about the outgoing operating system, Vista.
- It sucks.
- It uses too much resources.
- Microsoft is unfair and won’t let us use XP anymore.
- It looks kinda cool, but you can make XP look like it (no you can’t, okay? No you can’t.)
- Sidebar is stupid
- turn off indexing, it’s bad!
Okay, I really like Vista. I think I’ve said that here before. Every OS Microsoft has come out with up to Vista including XP looked straight up stupid. I’m looking over at my torrent box running XP. It looks stupid. Look at it over there, with it’s dopey ass looking windows. Fucking turn that shit off and make it look like Win2k. Snappy. Whatever, I’m not talking about XP. XP was fine.
Also, Vista’s like way more secure. IE is still a bucket full of holes, you still need to get you some Firefox, but Firefox is rad, so why NOT do that?
Vista’s got a bunch of other neat crap too. Like it’s got drive encryption. That thing everyone says they care about but nobody actually cares enough about it to use it? yeah, windows just DOES that now. To be fair I think you might need the ultimate version for bitlocker, but shut up. you don’t even know what bitlocker is.
Also I have to use Vista on my tablet. It’s just a bajillion times better for inking. Don’t bother with that XP Tablet Edition.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m not really here to sell you on Vista, but I’m just showing you where I’m coming from. I admit I’m becoming something of an MS fanbot, (I meant to write fanboy, but fanbot turned out to be fine) but they’re giving me great reasons.
If you watch TV, you’re aware that Microsoft’s been trying to change Vista’s image. First with a disastrous campaign with Seinfeld (which I thought was funny as hell. When ARE they going to come out with computers that are moist and chewy like cakes?), then with the Ok “I’m a PC” campaign, and then with the interesting Mojave campaign.
Mojave is of course the campaign where they show some people with negative conceptions of Vista.. Vista, but they call it Mojave. The people walk out thinking it’s really cool and with changed perceptions of Vista when they tell them the truth.
Well, Windows 7 is Mojave 2. There’s not a LOT different about Windows 7 (although what IS different I’m getting to, I promise!), just a refining of Vista. Sort of the 98se of this generation. Sucks that you gotta buy it, but better is better and I DIDN’T pay for it :).
Here’s how I feel they came up with Windows 7. They took some people, gave them Windows Vista, and watched what they did with it over, say, a month or two.
They looked at what sort of programs they installed, how they modified the start menu, what they were googling (ha!) for as far as 3rd party programs, paid a LOT of attention to what pre-installed stuff they were hiding or deleting, noted what sorts of programs they were comfortable with downloading from the web vs what they expected to already be there and then they just did that, tried to discern what decisions they were comfortable with making vs what they wanted to be made for them, and added it to all the stability and UI improvements for- I dunno, let’s say Vista SP3. Then they decided to charge you for it, which is fine because, again, you didn’t buy Vista, ya jerks!
Here’s what I mean. Finally!
First and foremost (and maybe best!) is the taskbar. It makes programs like rocketdock, object dock, any kinda weird launcher kinda pointless. It takes the best concept from rocket dock, minimizing the running program to the icon, makes it native, combines it with the quick launch bar AND the task bar and sexifies it by a lot. Example:
Say you’ve got a mail program. I use the surprisingly usable Windows Live Mail. You put its icon on the task bar. Now when you click the icon, the icon gets.. uh.. shinier and the window comes open. You minimize the app and no new taskbar entry is created, the icon simply REMAINS SHINY to signify that it is still open, just minimized. If you open a program that you haven’t got on your task bar, a new icon is added only while the program is open. If you minimize, it behaves the same way as a permanent icon, but if you close it, the entry goes away. Permanent icons remain even if their window is closed (they just get un-shiny).
It works way better than the task bar used to. It takes a fair amount from rocketdock and I guess the mac OS launcher, but it works in a beautiful way. Oh, ALSO, with the mail program, when I get a new email, the icon gets a little envelope added to it to say I’ve got email. I don’t know if this will work with any non-MS mail program, but it’s a neat feature and worked even when I changed the icon from the regular windows live one!
They clearly noticed that the first thing anyone does in a windows install is delete the dumb “show desktop” icon. It’s not that hiding the desktop is bad in theory, but you don’t use it too often and icon space on that tiny XP taskbar is precious!
Well worry not. The show desktop icon remains, but it’s pushed all the way over to the right of the clock now, it’s about a third the size of a regular icon, it’s just a translucent rectangle. Hovering over it makes all the windows on your desktop completely transparent (allowing you to see your wallpaper or gadgets if you have any) while you’re you’re hovering. Move the mouse and all returns to normal.
It preserves (and adds) functionality, takes up a bare minimum of screen space and no longer looks dumb. It’s a minor improvement but really a microcosm for the sorts of improvements we’ve got here.
You get a lot more room on the 7 Taskbar, not just cause it’s bigger by default, but because everything is iconized. Running programs don’t have their names by them, just an icon. Right clicking the icon gives you the name, (all the instances of the program, for instance each firefox tab is listed seperately so you can select which you want!) as well as some other options, like pin/unpin from taskbar and the cool thing that is the last bit I will gush about the task bar..
jumplists. Nothing really uses these yet, because the OS isn’t out yet, but I imagine these will become ubiquitous moments after release. Fortunately, some programs work with them in a generic way, so I can give you good examples.
Say with firefox, you use gmail a lot. you don’t want to have to open firefox, open your bookmarks and go to gmail every time you want to open gmail, but you have some other kinda snappy homepage, so you’re not switching that, right? So the old way, you’d make yourself a gmail shortcut and put it on your desktop or your quick launch bar. Or maybe if you were extra clever you’d use prism or chrome to make a little webapp for it.
NOW all you have to do is drag a url shortcut up to the firefox icon on your taskbar and you get a little tooltop that says “pin to mozilla firefox.” now to get to gmail, just rightclick the firefox icon and bam- you’ve got gmail, first thing on the jump list. You can add more than one. I dunno how many. maybe a lot. And again- this works with FIREFOX, not just IE (but presumably it, too!)
You can do this also with people you email a lot. Drag a mailto: shortcut up to your mailer program and you get them added to your jumplist. rightclick, select their name, and you’re emailing them.
I gotta assume this can be worked into various programs a bunch of ways, these are just the ones I’ve stumbled on in the last two days.
Enough about the task bar. phew. anyway, now I’m not sure I can go back. Which is too bad, because there are some crazy incompatibilities. Right now Google Chrome (ha!), Daemon Tools (boo!) and.. weirdly enough, Microsoft Live Mesh just don’t work right. Chrome opens but displays no webpage, daemon tools won’t install (but I was able to find a nice also-free alternative in Virtual Clonedrive that works. Laaame icon, though.)
Live Mesh is a crazy matter. First because it’s a microsoft program, but since both mesh and 7 are betas, I’ll let that slide. Second in HOW it screws things up. It installs just fine (although my OS install was an upgrade, and it already had mesh on it I reinstalled mesh just to check), but it messes up the UI transparency somehow! you still HAVE Aero, it’s not the weak aero that gets turned on in low-power systems. You still get flip and peek and all the other aero stuff, but all the menu bars and task bars turn a nontransparent but weirdly shiny gray which sometimes glitches out and becomes solid black.
If you don’t know, Mesh has NOTHING to do with graphics AT ALL! It’s for syncing files over the internet! But that was definitely the culprit! uninstalled, it was fine, reinstalled, fucked up again. Damnedest thing! I love Live Mesh! Obviously this is gonna get fixed, but it sucks not having it right now.
Strangely, when I installed 7 as an upgrade, it told me daemon tools wasn’t gonna work before I even installed and suggested I uninstall it before upgrading. It didn’t mention chrome until I tried USE chrome and NEVER said that Live Mesh was a problem at all, I only deduced the problem after googling around for “gray taskbar.”
Ok, back to something about the task bar. forgot to mention peek! peek is LIKE jump lists. if you hover your mouse over an open but minimized program, it shows you a small preview of the window. This feature was in vista, but they made it much better in 7. Now if you hover over something with multiple instances (again, like firefox with many tabs), it gives you a preview of EVERY open tab, not just the “top” one, and you can select individually. The peeks are also now large enough to actually see properly and make an informed decision! Also, if you hover-over, but don’t click the peek, it makes all the other windows on your desktop transparent and lets you see the full-size window, but returns to normal when you move your mouse, so if you’re just, say, quickly checking to see if that phone number was 231-6641 or 231-6441, but you don’t want to minimize wikipedia, you can just check real quick with NO CLICKS, just hover over the icon, then hover over the peek.
Oh, actually I just checked and the multiple-tab peeks only seems to work in IE8, not Firefox as I thought. I imagine this will be fixed (on FF’s side no doubt) darned soon. You can still “peek” the top tab on FF, though.
They also made the “notification area” of the taskbar less of a fuckstory, with granular control of every program and whether it only shows notifications, always shows is icon, or never shows up on the taskbar. You can do this with everything, even windows components.
They also combined all the windows icons that nag you like windows defender, UAC and Windows Update into one nag icon which you can turn on or off and tell it what to alert you about.
Hmm.. non-taskbar stuff.. Ah yes!
if you move any window to the left or right of the screen, they automatically “dock” there and take up exactly half of your screen, so you can move, say, your browser to the left and your mail program to the right and they will resize and stick to either side of the screen. Extra cool is that if you already have something docked somewhere, like say winamp is already docked to the top half of your screen, the program will just take up half the remaining space on the bottom half of your screen. There doesn’t appear to be a way to dock a screen to the top or bottom on purpose, just left or right- only programs with native settings to do so like winamp seem to be able to do this, but nice to know windows will behave correctly around them. Dragging a window to the top of the screen completely maximizes it, dragging to the bottom does nothing that I can see.
Minimize a docked window and it will still be docked when you bring it back. if you undock it by grabbing the menu bar and pulling it out, it will return to the size it was before you docked it. REAL handy.
You can now burn iso images to optical discs from the OS by right clicking on them. No burning software required. you’ve been able to do data and music cds for a while, but adding iso is a welcome addition. No iso MOUNTING solution, though. Bummer. Hope that’s next.
Another thing that DOESN’T seem to work right is gadgets! Though they worked fine in the VM I first tested 7 out on, when I upgraded my desktop, a few of them glitched out and after a few reboots, I just never saw them again. On the tablet, which got a clean 7 install, I don’t think I ever saw gadgets. I certainly expect this to be a quirk of the beta. Gadgets are good. I can’t imagine they’ll let them stay broken or remove them.
There’s other stuff as well that perhaps I’ll get in to later, but nothing springs to mind really. There’s Media Player 11 and IE8, but I already said I’m a winamp and firefox man (like any American should be)!
Final thoughts are- it’s a MUST for a lower powered PC that needs vista for whatever reason (like my tablet). It has no trouble with a 1.1GHZ system with 1GB of Ram, which Vista struggled on. It snappier, boots faster, consumes less resources and is generally a nicer experience despite having the same system requirements. It even works fine with the notoriously flaky wacom digitizer driver. You can even turn off the window themes and make it look like win2k but preserve all the functionality of the taskbar and such for better resource management (except for 3d effects like peek and flip which are aero-related)!
The improvements are less profound on the desktop, since it doesn’t benefit much performance-wise (it’s something of a beast), but there is less RAM used at any given time, which I consider a plus. Not that I was in danger of running out, but I always felt that the utilization was just too high. Still, though, I love it. The taskbar, the snapping, docking windows, the granular control over the nagging, the jumplists, it’s all just the bees knees. And SEXY to look at if you’re into transparent stuff.
I do not, however, suggest you perform an upgrade install. MS still hasn’t figured out how to make those work right it seems, and I’ll probable redo my desktop with a clean install like the tablet. Upgrade installs take like HOURS and seem to have little quirks where windows can’t find stuff properly.
And yes, I really did replace (not dual-boot) the OSes on both my primary and secondary machine. Vista has a handy little tool called complete PC backup that you’ve probably never heard of which allows me to take my computer back to the better days of last week if I so decide that I just liked Vista better.
If you can’t tell, though, I got a fever, and the only cure is more taskbar. I like Vista, but I don’t like Vista better.
There’s one last bit I want to talk about, but since it isn’t pre-installed with 7 (it’s a “recommended download,” not sure if they’ll remain that way or ship with the RTM version of 7) I’ll save it for another post, as this is already quite long. Windows Live Essentials. I mentioned Live Mail earlier, and I also use Live Writer and Live Photo Gallery which replace their frankly pretty useless vista cousins. I DON’T use live calendar because MS wised up and realized that web-based calendars are the way to go (yeah, windows live calendar is now totally web-based!), but I already use google calendar for that, so no review. I would have reviewed a client based one to see if it synced with gcal, but I totally get their reasons for discontinuing. That’s cool.
So anyway, the beta keys and downloads are free until Jan 24th after which you’ll have to go back to a torrent site to get it. The beta’s good until August sometime, by which time I assume it’ll be replaced with Win7 Release candidate. Expect me to have plenty to say about that as well.
So hopefully I won’t wait six months to post again. You never know.
Blog on, N-words!
(you like that as a catch phrase? I don’t)
Read on..
Not a true bagel slot, eh? (band name: BagelSlot). As a person who eats bagels, a bagel eater, this is good to know. I can picture myself now, staring sadly at my two toasters, untoasted bagels in hand, and naught to be done but weep. I don't know toaster mechanics. I don't know if there's a reason why your standard slot doesn't accomodate a bagel. It seems like an afront to bagelites. On the other hand, if these bad boys can make short work of a Toaster Struedel, as leslie14 clearly implies, then I may have to give serious consideration to a purchase. At the moment, I have a toaster oven, which isn't quite a toaster, not nearly an oven. I fits all manner of toastables, but it is slow. The wait for a toaster-waffle is often agonizing.
