Whoo hoo! I’m typing this on my new Windows 7 test machine! I’m here to tell y’all that I’ve tested out Windows 7 to some extent. Now before I start giving my opinion, let me give you some facts first. First off, the minimum system requirements of Windows 7 (according to Microsoft) are as follows:
*1GHz processor (32- or 64-bit)
*1GB of main memory
*16GB of available disk space
*Support for DX9 graphics with 128MB of memory (for the Aero interface)
The specs of my test machine are as follows:
*3.2ghz HT P4 Processor (Now I know the clock speed seems a little high, but remember this is a P4 people!)
*1gb DDR2 533mhz ram
*250gb ATA Hard Drive
*256mb Graphics Memory
According to Windows 7, I have a rating of 3.3. That’s huge compared to what I would have gotten if I were running Vista. Right now, one of my Vista laptops has a rating of only 3.1 and it has the following specs:
*1.86ghz Pentium Dual Core Processor
*3gb DDR2 667mhz ram
*200gb SATA Hard Drive
*368mb Graphics Memory
My laptop blows this test machine out of the water, but it has a much lower rating. Okay. Now that you’ve got all the facts, let me give you my personal views and opinions.
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First off, let me just say that Windows 7 Blew me away. I’m not too much into eye candy, but even I couldn’t resist the temptation to just think “Oh my f***ing god, I love it!” right off the bat. The first thing you’ll notice is that they’ve gotten over the 256 color limit for a boot screen (s*** that was a surprise, let me tell ya). Trying to push my first impressions aside, I decided to actually try it out. Once I got to the desktop, I was a little shocked. The taskbar is this sort of transparent square and I didn’t like the color one bit, so I thought “Okay. I guess I’ll have to see what other hideous colors they allow you to choose”.
Right clicking on the desktop to get to the “personalize” menu like in Vista, the first thing I notice is this option that says “Gadgets”. Resisting the temptation to click on it, I continue on and click the personalize option. That’s when it really threw me for a curve ball. S*** I don’t even know if I can describe how awesome the theme selection menu is. You can choose between like 5 different glass themes with different backgrounds that relatively match. Yeah, that was cool but then I noticed something that said something about taskbar and window color. I click that and I’m just delighted.
Not only can you choose any color under the sun for your taskbar, you can choose the amount of opacity, shade, and features of it as well! I’m just blown away by it all….but then I look up at the taskbar and actually realize something. WTF??? Instead of long rectangle boxes to show what windows are open, you have these cool-looking square thingy’s. I right click on one and there’s a “Pin to Taskbar” option which will make it a permanent part of the taskbar. Holy s*** I love it! Clicking on the start menu, you can see that not a whole lot has changed aside from the ability to click the internet explorer icon on the side and see your most recent web sites you’ve visited.
Now on to the sidebar. Apparently, it wasn’t that popular of a thing ëcuz MS has taken it out. All the gadgets still exist though. You can get to them by right clicking the desktop and going to “gadgets”. Instead of being restricted to a sidebar, you can now move them around anywhere and they’ll stay. Now all this visual stuff is just blowing me away and I love it….but can it do anything? Is it a usable operating system?
F*** you’d better believe it! It didn’t seem to like IE at all. It was totally lagging and acting like crap. Once I installed firefox though, it was a whole different story. After firefox I installed Photoshop CS3 Extended. I must say that it starts up and installs a crapload faster than both Vista AND XP.
There were a few glitches with the visual stuff. It froze a bit when trying to open IE (I really had problems with IE for some reason. Maybe it got messed up during installation or something.). I must say that my test machine was having a hard time with some of the closing windows visual style effects.
Some things have to be considered though. First off, this is a BETA version of Windows 7. Second, it did just install. Drive indexing, initial updates, and setup processes do take some time…Even days in some cases. I’ll know a lot more over the course of several weeks.
Bottom line: It’s 5-6 times faster than Vista and about 1.5 times faster than XP. The eye candy makes me drool and it doesn’t seem to lag the machine too much. The one thing that’s bad about both Vista and Windows 7 is the huge graphics requirements. XP would run on even 32mb of graphics memory, but realistically I wouldn’t run Windows 7 or Windows Vista on any less than 256mb of graphics memory. That’s the only bad part.
Obviously MS put a lot of work into Windows 7’s themes because there’s not even an option to go back to Windows Vista, XP, or Windows Basic themes. I suppose MS thinks it’s best not to encourage a step backward and sense their theme takes up so little anyways and themes like windows basic would look like total crap with all the other eye candy, there really is no point for having the older themes as an option.
Overall setup was extremely fast. It took exactly 28 minutes from popping the disk in to get a USABLE desktop (meaning you can click on the start button, go to the internet…).
Things I dislike include: Not having the option of a sidebar, the horrific looking display options in the control panel, glitchiness (I know it’ll be fixed in time. Hell, Windows 7 isn’t scheduled for release until mid 2010), The logon screen look (I prefer the vista logon screen look. The windows 7 screen look looks….incomplete. Maybe they’ll add onto it in time.)
All in all, so long as MS doesn’t add a whole bunch of crap that slows it down, this will be the Operating System we’ve all been waiting for. This is what I call an improvement from Windows XP. I might finally be able to put that 8-year-old Operating System to rest. Through the years I’ve totally customized XP in an attempt to do Microsoft’s job, but I’m sick of it! I sure hope this will be my main operating system in the future.
EDIT: SNAPSHOTS:
First off, here's a picture of the desktop:
http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa146/t...m/desktop-2.jpgThere's finally a place for UAC settings!
http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa146/t...uacsettings.jpgHere's the theme selection menu:
http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa146/t...eselections.jpgThis is what the start menu looks like:
http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa146/t...m/startmenu.jpgHere's the window preview capability I was talking about:
http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa146/t...bum/preview.jpgThey've FINALLY came out with a new version of paint:
http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa146/t...album/paint.jpgMedia Center now has a windowed option (thank god):
http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa146/t...mediacenter.jpgThe display settings control center is pretty nice:
http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa146/t...bum/display.jpgI don't like the design of the new control panel very much:
http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa146/t...ontrolpanel.jpgThey have a new version of calculator:
http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa146/t.../calculator.jpgThis is action center. I like it a lot:
http://i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa146/t...ctioncenter.jpg
