With every new release of Windows, I can not help installing it as soon as I get my hands on it. I have to see what Microsoft has done! Especially after Windows Vista – Vista is pretty and the underlying technology is amazing, but somehow the execution got messed up and Vista was only a pleasure for a short while – then users found Vista to be slow, incompatible with many software, and in fact even irritating to navigate and configure.
Here is what I think of Windows 7. Note that this is a first impression only – I have been working with the Milestone 3 release of Windows 7 for only a couple of days.
- Visuals
Windows looks very much like Vista, but like a polished Vista. The graphics does not have the ‘sluggish’ feel like in Vista. Also, the default Explorer view is a detail view and not those ugly large icons that is not appropriate for normal files. There are some pretty advanced new controls that makes the visuals not only pretty but functional – it is much easier to navigate settings and file structures than in Vista.
- Performance
This is what impressed me most – Windows 7 is fast! After inserting hardware it takes less than a second for it to install. In fact it seems instantaneous – a ‘Installing New Hardware’ balloon pops up, literally immediately followed by a ‘Hardware Installed Successfully’ balloon – and the hardware is ready to use.
Load time, when booting, is about 20 seconds. But most impressive – normal software installation is much faster than in any previous Windows! I don’t know how Microsoft managed this. I installed Visual Studio 2008 in approximately 15 minutes.
Games – well this impressed me! Games run smoother on Windows 7 M3 than on Vista – and amazingly, smoother than on Windows XP.
So – here is my first impression of Windows 7: Windows 7 is going to be what Windows 2000 and XP was compared to Windows 98 – a new paradigm in operating systems. I already like the Milestone 3 release of Windows 7 more than I like any other operating system I have ever used. It is stable, fast, pretty, intuitive to use… I like it!
