Windows 7: First Impressions
Wed, February 4th 2009 at 02:16am
After the complete disappointment I felt after buying Windows Vista a while back, and then again after installing SP1 I was a little skeptical about all the good first impressions I have been reading of Windows 7 Beta. So this weekend I decided to dust off an old 120GB hard drive and take the Windows 7 Beta for a spin.
After using Windows 7 for just a few hours I am starting to feel that Microsoft has finally started to do something right. I say “something” because I can not quite put my finger on what it is, it’s many little things that make up an intangible feeling of “rightness.”
When I first installed Vista everything just felt wrong. It was just a little off, the speed that windows opened, the way the start menu worked, the way the shutdown button did not shutdown the computer. Things were just a little off and it kept annoying me.
Windows 7 Beta is the other way around, even with the new Taskbar and Window previews I just feel at ease using it. Everything is more intuitive to use, and does what you think it should.
Personally I think that Vista was too much like Windows XP’s interface. The start button, the the taskbar, etc all looked very similar to XP, but then Microsoft changed the placement of hundreds of little things. When things looks similar to something we automatically expect them to work in the same way.
With Windows 7 the taskbar is different enough that when I see it I have fewer assumptions about how things “should” work just by looking at the desktop. I am more willing to learn how this new interface works. This combined with the fact that Microsoft have done a good job so far with making an intuitive interface lead to the enjoyable experience of learning of this new iteration of Windows works.
Hopefully development/polishing continues on schedule and we have a really solid upgrade to Windows XP before 2010.
