Failing Forward

Let me “pull a Tarentino” on this post.

Conclusion: While just as imperfect as any other modern Operating System, Windows 7 (more accurately Windows NT 6.1, but effectively Windows Vista SP3) is smooth, surprisingly efficient, and overall provides a solid and well-engineered user experience, in my humble opinion.

The Good: Microsoft opted to re-use the Aero theme in Windows 7, but not before a thorough debugging.  Features like the 3-D flip,

3D Flip

live taskbar thumbnails,

Live Taskbar Thumbnail

and glassy window borders

Glassy Borders

were all wonderful concepts in Vista.  Now, they’re actually wonderful (read: well-oiled) features.  In addition to the live taskbar thumbnails, however, Windows 7 takes it up a notch.  Now, when you have multiple windows open from the same application, you not only see live thumbnails of each window, but hovering over a given thumbnail will cause all other visible windows to become entirely transparent, allowing you to quickly check the state of an application in the background without actually switching to it.

Also admirable is the new Task Manager… rather, an extension of the traditional Task Manager you’re used to.  A new button appears labeled “Resource Monitor” (center bottom)

Task Manager

which leads to this fairly glorious little widget

Resource Monitor

Very cool.  The Gnome project has sported one of these for some time now, but it seems like Windows is finally appealing to power users who want the real low-down on system resource usage, per process, by the second.

On the note of system resource usage, Windows 7 shows a vast improvement in resource utilization over previous incarnations.  I’ve left the machine on for days on end, with no noticeable negative performance impact.  The system refused to slow down as I opened all of: Microsoft {Internet Explorer,Word,Excel,Powerpoint,Access,Visual Studio 2008,MSDN Library}, Adobe {Acrobat,Bridge,Photoshop,Illustrator,Soundbooth}, Google Chrome (with Gmail, Google Wave, and Facebook – three of the heaviest sites I could think of at the time), Firefox, iTunes, Notepad++, WinSCP, mintty, PuTTY, KeePass.  While running a full AVG system scan on full speed.  The system used just a hair over 2GB of RAM, and every app ran just as smoothly as if it were all alone on the process list.

Another bonus point goes to Windows 7 for not forcing me to reboot after every software update.  In fact, in the flurry of [8+] rounds of updates I applied just after the fresh install, only 2 required a reboot.

The Bad: I’m a command line junkie, and the windows command line just can’t hold a candle to bash.  And it probably never will, which is a pity… but at least there are products like Cygwin and MinGW.  This incarnation is also not as reverse-compatible as Microsoft will have you believe.  Several applications I’ve attempted to use installed just fine (or so I thought) but were useless, if they executed at all (such as Cisco NAC, Neverwinter Nights, and EasyCleaner, for instance, which all worked wonderfully under XP).  A buddy of mine also had some issues installing drivers for a USB Ethernet adapter.

The Ugly: Anyone who used Vista had to have seen this one coming: UAC.  While a fantastic concept, it’s still the major Vista-esque component of Windows 7 that hasn’t yet been sufficiently reengineered.  My main issue is that you have no [native] means to create a whitelist of applications that you want to run elevated (that’s Vista-speak for “run with admin privileges”).  So, every time you boot the application in question, you have to go through the extra mouse click.  Prime example for a web developer: Notepad++.  Without elevation, Notepad++ will give you problems saving some kinds of files; also, the FTP_synchronize plugin is useless.

UAC prompt

Premise: Before switching to Windows 7, I used Fedora as my primary operating system for about 4 years (following nearly every major release from 5 through 11) while keeping Windows XP on a minimal partition just for iTunes.