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I don’t know if it was all the bad press that Vista got; but something seems to have spurred Microsoft into the action in developing the next version of its Windows operating system. Currently called Windows 7 it’s been around in a beta version for a few months now and yours truly has been having a look.
There’s a few changes ‘under the hood’; but to be frank – who cares so long as it works. The main things that the end user are interested in are, in no particular order:
- Does it work efficiently / is it fast
- Is it easy to use
- Does it look pretty
On the first point work has gone into Windows 7 to reduce its memory requirements and improve the boot times. I’ve read of people installing Windows 7 on ‘old’ equipment and getting a reasonable performance out of it. I haven’t been able to try this myself; but if Microsoft have managed to reduce the memory requirements for Windows 7 back down to something similar to XP then they’re be a lot of happy computer users and a lot of upset memory manufacturers.
As far as boot times go I’m not convinced this is something that will benefit the average user. All the PCs I’ve used running Vista boot up reasonably quickly. It’s the time it takes to log in and start running all the programs that get run at start-up that takes the time. I know the answer to this is not to start so much; but improving boot times isn’t going to be of any benefit to me.
There have been some fairly radical changes in the ease of use department, particularly in the area of the task bar. This is now used for both launching and switching between programs and instances of programs, the same icon will be used for both. This may take a bit of getting used to for some users as it looks quite a bit different from the XP / Vista task bar. However once you’ve tried it out a few times you’ll soon get used to going to one place to either launch an application or switch between instances of it.
Another innovation is called Aero Snap-to. This feature is particularly useful if you want to get two programs running side by side for copy / paste or drag and drop operations. Simply drag a program to the left or right edge of the screen and the window will automatically snap to that edge and expand to fill half the screen. Drag the other application to the other edge and it will fill the remainder of the screen. Drag them away from the edge and they’ll revert back to their original size. Very useful.
So that’s just a brief taste of what’s coming in Windows 7. Even though Microsoft will make XP to Windows 7 upgrade licenses available you won’t be able to upgrade directly from XP without having to upgrade to Vista SP1 first. Having said that I can see a lot of XP users deciding that the extra effort will be worth it to get the new features, particularly if it runs on their current platform.
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