It’s funny, I wrote an article about Windows 7 about 2 weeks ago now, and reflecting upon the article, I really do think I may have been a little hasty with some of my criticism. I mean, considering that there were a seeming myriad updates in the first week alone, I was a little quick with the harsh hack-up of the poor OS: driver issues have been (for the most part) mended, stability problems have been mostly resolved, and the OS seems better with every consecutive update.

 

I decided to install Windows 7 as a guinea pig on my Aspire One so that I could give it a thorough test drive while out at the coffee shop, since that’s where I do most of my writing. To my pleasant surprise, most of the hardware in my system was immediately recognized and installed – the wifi adapter, the touch pad, the Bluetooth dongle I purchased this afternoon, as well as the mouse accompanying the Bluetooth adapter. A few devices remain flagged in Device Manager, but that’s a small shortcoming for an OS as early into its beta stages as Windows is.

There are a couple of neat new little tricks that Microsoft has added, such as a rather intelligently designed Start Menu, in which the context changes, depending on what is highlighted. In the picture, I’ve moused over the Writer application (which I’m testing for this blog post), and it reveals recent entries. Pretty neat, and Writer even integrates seamlessly with WordPress. I like that.

 

Another thing that impresses me greatly is the astounding performance I’m seeing. Even on a netbook like the Aspire One, Windows 7 takes up a modest 65% of my resources under typical load (MSN Messenger, Writer and Internet Explorer all running simultaneously). This is leaps and bounds ahead in the way of performance vs. Windows Vista, which I tried installing on my Aspire One, and was nothing short of an absolute debacle. The result was bloated, unresponsive, and on the whole, nigh on unusable. Windows 7 seems to have corrected that – despite a much more sophisticated looking interface in my opinion, it has also slimmed down resource consumption considerably, which leads me to believe that Windows 7 will be a viable option for the UMPC market in future.

Another thing that has really impressed me is the remarkably quick boot/shutdown time of the Windows 7 beta. Now, I understand that I don’t have the machine inundated with programs that sink their teeth into the Startup folder, Services list and registry as of yet, but the stock boot time of Windows 7 on my Aspire One is 35 seconds. That, to me, is remarkable on a machine with such limited processing power and resources. The whole “Windows 7 on netbooks” vision just may be something that Microsoft will make good on.

Sadly, my affair with Windows 7 hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows. One recurring thing that really isn’t getting better with time is the increasingly imposing “I know better than you do” attitude of Windows. I can understand Microsoft’s attempt to move in the direction of user-friendly computing, but there are some things that I just really don’t need Windows’ help with, such as power management. I’ve yet to find a way in Windows 7 options, to allow Windows to simply run my battery into the ground. I gotta say, if it’s there, it’s completely unintuitive as to where it would be located. I couldn’t even find it in the advanced options. Instead, Windows tries to be helpful by automatically hibernating at 5% remaining battery life with the option of sleep mode instead. You have to pick one or the other, with no option of saying, “Hey, leave it alone.” Sometimes there’s help that you didn’t ask for, and you just don’t want.

Another thing noticeably absent from Windows 7 is Windows Mail, Windows Movie Maker and Photo Gallery, which are now incorporated as part of the Windows Live suite of downloadable content. I’m not sure if this is because of the flurry of antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft for their questionable (and to some, objectionable) practice of bundling Internet Explorer and Outlook Express as somewhat mandatory staples in the Windows operating environment. I can’t really say I much agree with all of the criticism that Microsoft receives for doing so, since Apple has no problem bundling Safari and iTunes, and both KDE and GNOME come with Konqueror or Firefox as part of the stock OS.

I digress.

At any rate, it’s a welcome change to see some Windows software offered on an opt-in basis, with the option of not having it loaded at all. This is surely a benefit that I can foresee making many people who just want a bare-bones operating system that they can install their own software on very happy.