You may have read that Microsoft is taking a new approach with the release of Windows 7 then they have done with any of their other operating systems. Microsoft has opened their beta program, and allowed the public to download and use Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 for free until June 1, 2010. The version that they allow you to test is the Ultimate version of Windows 7, which will have all the bells and whistles of the operating system. The only “drawback” for this test is that starting on March first of 2010, your computer will shut down after being on for two hours, but you will be warned about this two weeks before it happens. Here is a hands-on review of Windows 7 RC1.

Before we get into the review, let’s talk about some changes that Windows 7 has compared to Windows Vista.

DirectX 11

Yes, you read that correctly. Microsoft has updated DirectX again when designing Windows 7. DX 11 is suppose to be an improvement on the DX10, which was released with Vista. DirectX 11, has been designed to improve performance issues compared to 10, and there are rumors that DX9 graphic cards can support the new version which wasn’t possible with DX10. Other than this there has been little information released on how DX11 will effect the end user. Most of the information that has been released has been directed toward developers.

Aero Peek

Aero is a whole new graphic engine that controls Windows, and was released with Vista. With Windows 7, Microsoft added the Aero Peek feature. This feature allows you to “peek” at windows which you have open on your screen. If you hover over an application in the task bar, a smaller preview window will open up. If you hover your mouse over the preview window, then all the other windows become invisible, leaving only that window on your screen. To get the full idea of what Aero Peek is, you can view this Youtube video.

User Account Control

This is one feature in Windows Vista that everyone hated, and wish Microsoft wouldn’t have added. Even with my limited experience with Vista, I have grown to loath the UAC. The UAC in Windows 7 has been tweaked to allow the user to have greater control over this feature. In Windows Vista, there were ways to turn off the UAC by turning off by using hacks, which may have compromised the security the UAC was intended to create. In Windows 7, you now have the option to disable the prompts without hacks.

Since we now know some of major changes to Windows 7, let’s get into the review itself.

I had grown fond of Windows XP, one of the reasons I choose not to upgrade to Vista, so making the jump to Windows 7 was something that I was skeptical to do at first.  I had heard about the beta program about a week before it was actually released, and during this time I was debating if I should take the leap and install Windows 7.  I have a friend who was in the closed beta and was praising Windows 7 as the second coming of Windows XP.  He also was like myself and doubted that Microsoft could release an OS better than XP, so I was surprised that he liked Windows 7 so much.  When it came time for the public beta program to be open, I took a gamble to install 7 and see what the big hype was.  In the back of my mind, I was thinking that I would be returning to XP soon, so it really wasn’t a big loss.

The installation process was a lot easier, and better than what I expected.  Since I skipped Windows Vista, I was use to the XP install process.  I was expecting to see a blue screen with white text, and a green progress bar during the install but instead I was greeted with a refreshing light blue background, which had a tree design on the left and more colorful install prompts.   The installation was fast which isn’t what I expected.  The installer had detected my three partitions, two of which were for my Ubuntu installation, and one for my Windows XP installation.  The partition, and formating was a breeze.  The graphically based partition process was a big improvement to the XP text based process. About 30 minutes after partitioning my drive, I was welcomed by the Windows 7 desktop for the first time.  The first thing I noticed was that Aero was enabled.  I found this strange since to enable Aero in Vista, I had heard you needed a DX10 graphic card.  My graphic card only supported DX9, but I still had the Aero blurring effect behind the application’s title bar, and the task bar.

At this point, I am dreading trying to find drivers for all of my hardware.  I did notice that Windows didn’t install the drivers for my sound card, so I put that on my mental check list of things to do.  I also had to install my keyboard, mouse, and video drivers, so that I can use some of the advance features the driver software provides, such as my keyboard’s LCD screen.   Other than these three devices it seemed like Windows detected and installed my other hardware drivers.  It even detected that I had two monitors connected, and configured them to span the desktop.  I started up Internet Explorer to download all of the needed drivers.  My sound card manufacture, Creative, actually had a beta driver for Windows 7, which I was surprised.  Although my keyboard and mouse manufacture, Logitech, didn’t have Windows 7 drivers, and along with my video card manufacture, Nvidia.  Knowing that Windows 7 and Vista used the same kernel version, I took a risk and installed the Vista drivers, which worked fine.  During the process of installing drivers,  I encountered the User Account Control a few times.  It was enough to slow down the installation a little, since I had to confirm that I wanted to install the software that I just downloaded, but at this time it was something I thought I could deal with.  Now it was time to reboot for the first time.

Windows 7 shut down quicker then I expected, and I was looking at my BIOS information during the boot up process, and I am directly taken into Windows 7.  This is a little disappointing for me, since it shows that Microsoft has again chosen to ignore any other operating systems that you may have installed on your computer.   This is something that I would like Microsoft to fix, since there are people who are dual booting.  Hopefully Microsoft will take a hint before the official release and start over writing the master boot record every time Windows is installed.  I will have to fix this “issue” later, but right now I want to continue to setting up the new installation.

I start installing my anti-virus software of choice, Avast!.  Again the UAC pops-up, I click continue and finish the install.  I then head over to Adobe’s site and install Flash.  Once again, I am slowed down by the UAC, and I can start to see how frustrating it could be with other users.   I continue configuring and adjusting other software, when the UAC keeps popping up.  Now that it seems like everything is installed, I head over to the Control Panel to look into configuring my display options.   As soon as the Control Panel opens, I notice that there isn’t an option to view the Control Panel in “classic” mode.  Even in Windows XP, I preferred the 9x Control Panel over the XP Control Panel design since the 9x design give you access to such things as Administrator Tools.  I closed the Control Panel, and then choose to use Nvidia’s Control Panel to adjust my display options.  The UAC was there to greet me when I ran Nvidia’s Control Panel for the first time.  At this point I feel the UAC has overstepped it’s boundaries, so I started searching for ways to keep it quiet.  I know that Windows Haxor has an article here, but I want to see the “official” way to turn it off.   The UAC again raises it’s ugly head, as I am looking for solutions.  Instead of just clicking Allow right away, I read over the entire window.  That is when I saw the option to adjust the UAC level.  I click the option, and I am presented with another window which has a vertical slider to adjust the UAC level.  I chose the second to last option, which I thought should keep the UAC quiet.   I then head back adjust the video settings, when the UAC pops up again.  Thinking I took care of it last time, I am a little confused and starting to get a little frustrated. I open the preference again, and set the option to the lowest setting.  At first I didn’t want to resort to this option, but since the last setting didn’t work, I was forced to do so.    Since changing the option to the lowest setting I haven’t had any issues out of the UAC.

Conquering the UAC, I chose to play around with Windows 7 itself now. Not knowing what to look at first, I checked out the games that Windows chose to install with this version, looks like they have gone beyond Mindsweeper, Solitaire, and Spider Solitaire and other games which was included in Windows XP.  A chess game and Majhogg based game are included also.  I also checked out the search feature in 7.  I knew about it in Vista, and I personally was indifferent to it.  I felt like Microsoft was trying to copy Apple’s Quick Finder feature, which I had found beneficial in OS X. Feeling like Microsoft would screw up even this basic feature I then type some of the more common “Run commands” that I used in XP,  like CMD.  I was actually surprised at the speed as it updated the list of applications in the Start menu as I typed in each letter, and was even more surprised that the command prompt opened when I pressed enter.  I checked out the All Programs part of the Start Menu.  Going out of my way with Windows XP was group my applications into separate folders based on the type of application they were.  I would put applications such as web browser, or FTP clients into a Internet sub-folder, or media players into their own Media sub-folder.  I sort of have an OCD like issue where if there is more than one column of applications listed when All Programs has expanded, I feel unorganized, and somewhat overwhelmed.  I was glad to see that the programs didn’t expand into a different column, but all stayed in the one column.  Looks like I won’t have to customize my Start Menu after all.

After checking out some of the basic features, I wanted to looking into Aero a little more.  Especially Aero Peek, since I was hearing such great reviews about it.  I had experienced Aero Peek feature when installing drivers, and configuring 7, but now I really got to play with it. Over the week, I have grown to both love and loath the feature. I really like the option to jump directly to a window that I want, and be able to preview the window to make for sure it is the correct window.  This feature itself was a lot better then the grouping feature which was introduced in Windows XP.  I also like the ability to close a window from the Peek, rather than having to switch to the open window then close it.  The first few days, I thought that Aero Peek was the perfect way to handle multiple windows at once, but the more I used it the more I started to loath other aspects of the feature.  Since I use Internet Explorer as my primary browser, I have multiple tabs open at one time.  When browsing news sites, I may have up to 10 tabs open at once, and this makes Peek seem bulky when this happens since it treats every tab as it’s own window.  I also hated how Peek treated Google Talk, which I use as my primary IM client.   In XP, when I minimized my friends list it was minimized to the Google Talk icon next to the clock.  In Windows 7, the friends list is minimized to the task bar.  This means that when I use Peek, I now have to see my friends list in the preview windows when I don’t want to see it. One feature which Peek has, and I really like, that isn’t mentioned in most of the information about the feature, is when you download something in IE, the task bar icon can also tell you the percentage of that has downloaded.  The background behind the IE logo, will work as a percentage bar. So the higher the percentage of the file you have downloaded, that percentage of the background is green, instead of the normal color.

Another feature that I wanted to explore more in depth was the gadgets.  I had used OS X’s version called widgets, and found them very useful.  You can get a lot of information quickly just at a glance.  The standard gadgets which were included were clocks, sticky notes, performance monitors, RSS Feeder, and a currency converter.  Desktop Gadget, which is the application which displays all the gadgets you have installed and is used to enable the gadgets, had the option to look for additional gadgets submitted to Microsoft’s website. I choose to look at the additional gadgets there., most of them were basic, or redesigned of the standard ones.  There were different network and performance monitors, a few different styles of clocks, even a few social media gadgets.   The developer side of me was itching to create my own gadget, which I found was very easy to do if you have a little XML, JavaScript, and HTML knowledge.  At one point when searching the gadgets, I had about 10 gadgets running and I didn’t see a big performance change.

Speaking of performance, I am shocked at how smooth Windows 7 runs.  I heard the nightmares that Vista was slow even when running the least process intensive applications.  I also heard that the performance of Vista was not up to the performance of XP.  A friend told me that his computer would have performance issues if he had Aero turned on, but had to disable Aero because of how it slowed down his computer.   The computers that I used, which were designed for Vista, had also ran slow.  I know that Service Pack 1 was suppose to improve Vista’s performance alot, but there weren’t any reports on how much of an improvement it made.  Even with this information, I was expecting Windows 7 to slow down my computer compared to XP.  I have to say that I think that my computer is actually running quicker with 7.  Microsoft has done a very good job at optimizing the code from Vista.  I have been reading reports that people are getting 7 to run on netbooks, which wasn’t possible with Vista.

After a week of Windows 7, I would have to recommend it to anyone.  If you gave up on Microsoft because of Vista, I challenge you to give them another shot.   People say that Vista is ME version 2.0. If that is the case,  I say that Windows 7 is XP version 2.0.  Microsoft has been able to change and improve the features which drove people away from Vista.  The features which drew people to Vista, Microsoft has also been able to improve.  I just can’t wait until the official release comes out, I will be standing in line waiting for it.