Burning Lemons

We know you’ve been holding off finding out about Windows 7. Ignoring the reviews from CNET, The New York Times and others and waiting for the only one that matters. OK, uhmm probably not but given that the Beta download closes in two weeks this seemed line a good time to chuck in the obligatory 2¢/1.45p

Windows 7 is the next release of Microsoft’s inescapable Windows Operating System. It follows on from Windows Vista which (rightly or wrongly) received a lukewarm reception from both the tech and mainstream media which has put many users off upgrading. Indeed many people continue to specify Windows XP (an operating system released 8 years ago. It would be the same as turning down Windows XP in 2003 and demanding Windows 95 instead)

So now we come to version 7. Windows 7 at first glance appears to be a far less radical change as far as The UI goes from Vista as Vista was from XP. However one of the changes made has a huge impact on day to day use of the system. The taskbar now takes an approach to application management not a million miles away from The Mac OS X dock (we’ll leave the fanboys and possibly Bertrand Serlet of Apple to argue over who stole off who.

As a Mac convert I find the change intuitive and easy. It also stops the previous madness whereby applications names in the taskbar would become unreadable if you had more than 5 open. All the change is doing is basically enforcing The Windows XP option where all your windows in one programme were grouped into catagories.

One of the main complaints about Windows Vista was that it was slow even on mid-range hardware and that the glass effects and general UI - while pretty - were overkill for the average user. 7 keeps the effects but somehow tones down the amount of system power used to execute the effects. In my test (a Parallels virtual machine allocated 512MB of RAM on a MacBook with crappy integrated graphics) the virtual machine performed well, only showing strain while running multiple windows including a Windows Media Player visualiser.

So far (other than the usual unnecessary and inexplicable name changes) those are the main changes in Windows 7 however these along with a host of behind the scenes upgrades add up to probably the most stable version of Windows Microsoft has ever produced. While it may not win over Mac users it is certainly Microsoft’s best hope to stem the tide of Mac switching. But we’ll see what Snow Leopard brings…