A first look at Windows 7 in action

Windows 7 will be one of Microsoft's greatest operating systems, if it fulfils the promise shown by the unofficial beta version, according to silicon.com sister site ZDNet Australia's Renai LeMay who has been testing it for the last few days.

Let me preface these quick impressions of Redmond's latest opus by saying that I came to Windows 7 after having happily run the much-maligned Windows Vista on my Intel Core 2 Duo-based PC for the past 18 months.

I found Vista to be a worthy upgrade from Windows XP SP2. Despite its obvious flaws and acknowledging that some of its features need to be disabled by default, Vista at heart is a much more stable and usable operating system than XP, which was first released back in 2001.

The release of Service Pack 1 and gradual driver improvements have built on Microsoft's somewhat shaky Vista beginning.

Coming from this background, I have been pleased to discover over the past several days that Microsoft appears to have built on Vista's strengths and addressed most of its weaknesses with the beta release of Windows 7.

Windows 7 beta was a painless install. Out of the box driver support on our test machine was perfect and it only took half an hour and two quick reboots to begin running a stable desktop environment, although I wondered why Windows 7 created a 200MB partition in addition to its main partition.

Basic desktop performance was strong; the reports that Windows 7 is simply faster than Vista appear to be true. Certainly Windows 7 had no problem simultaneously installing and launching applications, downloading files, web browsing and carrying out other tasks on my modest 2.8GHz Pentium 4, which only has an 80GB IDE hard disk and 512MB of RAM.

Vista's most visible annoyance, User Account Control, has been pared right back on its default setting, and I only encountered it a couple of times throughout a whole morning of installing applications. However, if you feel nostalgic for UAC's old behaviour, you can easily change it back via Windows 7's new Action Center, which now centralises all of the security, update and warning alerts that Windows throws your way.

Windows 7 recommended I installed a third-party antivirus package but its anti-spyware package Defender comes pre-installed. Microsoft appears to have an antivirus package installed under the hood; when downloading new software with Firefox I was told downloads were being scanned for viruses.

I particularly like the new photo-realistic device icons and the overhaul of the way Windows handles and ejects USB storage devices. Microsoft appears to have wiped out a lot of the Windows XP-era interface quirks of Vista; the result is a much more simplistic, unified experience for common tasks.

I also enjoyed the overhaul of the Windows taskbar, especially the slick graphics, but a bug prevented me from being able to use the preview function.

I want to stress that we didn't test Windows 7 beta exhaustively, and business users will need to closely examine deployment software and how the operating system integrates into their existing environments, as well as its ability to work well with third-party software.

But perhaps the most important thing to note about the software is that at first glance it has much more of that nebulous "Windows XP feel" than Vista ever did. Windows 7 didn't thrash the hard disk or feel unresponsive, except when we were installing Apple's iTunes, a notorious pain on Windows systems.

In general, this signals that Microsoft has spent a lot of effort with Windows 7 on delivering a solid operating system that won't "wow" anyone, but will satisfy them on a much deeper level. In other words, just what the doctor, and the customers, ordered.

Original article: Windows 7 beta: We like it from ZDNet Australia