I’ve been testing the Windows 7 beta on my home computer for a couple of weeks now, and right away I have to say I’m very impressed. Having skipped Windows Vista as my primary operating system, the jump from XP to 7 is pretty significant. It’s very obvious that Microsoft has put a lot of thought into how their new operating system should function, but I wouldn’t call it perfect yet. There are still some inconsistencies in the user interface that have been been in use since the early days of Windows, while some other bugs are simply unexplainable. But this is a beta after all, which means anything I talk about here could change at any time.

Installing

After configuring my partitions for the beta (something the average user wouldn’t have to even think about), I proceeded to install it. This process was pretty easy; there were a half-dozen or so prompts to step through, and it took care of the rest. I went to the store, came back, and it was finished. No complaints here; it’s as easy as it should be.

Using Windows 7 for the First Time

Once everything is up and running, you’re presented with the desktop, with a picture of a betta fish on it (get it? beta?). My first instinct when it comes to new gadgets or programs is to start messing with everything, but I held back to see what it would do. Windows soon popped up a balloon letting me know that I didn’t have an anti-virus program installed, and offered to let me find one online. Only three solutions are currently offered, but the page says more are on the way.

Otherwise everything was pretty clean. The desktop only had two icons, one of which won’t be there in the final retail version, and three default pinned programs on the taskbar: Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, and Windows Media Player 12.

Taskbar

One of the most apparent and controversial changes to Windows is how the taskbar now looks. Instead of a skinny bar along the bottom of the screen with long buttons representing each running program, the bar is now slightly taller with large, rectangular icons replacing the long “bar buttons” everyone is used to, and running programs intermingle with those that aren’t. The best equivalent to this new paradigm is the Mac OS X Dock, where a button acts as both an application launcher (if the program is not open yet), and an application switcher (if it’s already running). However, there are some pretty important user interface differences.

The icons as seen above will appear differently depending on what’s going on with the program at any given time. The first icon, Internet Explorer, is pinned to the taskbar, but isn’t running. Every other program in this shot is running, as indicated by a glass frame around the icon. Next, the currently active program is “lit” – in this case, it’s Firefox. Programs that have more than one window open are automatically collapsed into the same icon, and you can tell it has more than one thing going on by the “stacked” look of the tiles, such as with Windows Explorer and Messenger above.

Hovering the cursor over any running program will load up a preview pane, like with Vista, but it goes a step further by having a live thumbnail of each window or document of that program, and the thumbnail itself becomes a button to switch over to that program. In Internet Explorer, each browser tab becomes a separate thumbnail here, too. You can even close unneeded windows or tabs straight from here; it works extremely well.

In previous versions of Windows, you could optionally attach a Quick Launch toolbar next to the Start button that would contain copies of shortcuts found in the Start Menu. In Windows 7, however, it’s either in one location or the other. For example, if you drag the shortcut for Notepad from the Start Menu onto the taskbar, it will disappear from the Start Menu. In other words, you’re moving that program shortcut into a permanent new position on your taskbar. (The All Programs sub-menu is different – this keeps an instance of each program no matter what.)

This is important from a usability standpoint, because people have a much easier time remembering where a program shortcut is if they specifically put it there themselves. Starting with Windows XP, Windows had a bad habit of constantly rearranging the Start Menu based on which programs you used most frequently. If a program wasn’t used for a while, it would eventually drop off that list, requiring a dive into the All Programs sub-menu if it needed to be located again. But this was countered with the ability to “pin” desired programs to the top of the list, where they would stay put (and not move around, thankfully). The result was a weird mash-up of stationary and shifting programs that ended up being more confusing to the average user than it should have been.

Windows 7 changes this by associating clearer functions to each of these two locations: the taskbar is for pinned programs as well as running programs, and the Start Menu is now a full list of the most accessed programs that aren’t already pinned to the taskbar. This makes your commonly-used programs only a single click away instead of two, which doesn’t sound like a big deal, but in the end is a change for the better.

One other feature about the new taskbar that I really like are Jump Lists – a replacement for the old right-click menu that offers very helpful, program-specific shortcuts in place of the old window-management links like maximize, close, etc.

On my widescreen monitor, I could open 23 programs before it had to add scrollbars to the taskbar. Even with that many programs open (albeit they were smaller programs like Calculator and Notepad), it didn’t slow down at all. Which leads me to…

Performance

Performance is very impressive in Windows 7, and it marks the first time in Windows’ release history where a version didn’t have higher system requirements than its predecessor. Although I haven’t tested this for myself, a number of reports around the Internet claim that Windows 7 is even able to run reasonably well on netbooks and other less-powerful computers. This is great news, which means a lot of the bloat found in Vista has been trimmed back, while maintaining the pieces of functionality that actually mattered. In addition, Microsoft has said that the underlying architecture for drivers is not changing much between Vista and Windows 7, which means that people shouldn’t have any of the frustrations that they had when upgrading from XP to Vista. If these improvements could be kept solid all the way up to launch, I think a lot of people would be very happy.

Final Thoughts

Windows is by far the most commonly used operating system in the world, and to see improvements to the interface like the ones seen here is really a change for the better. Vista was all about making some radical changes to the way Windows was built in order to prepare it for the future, while Windows 7 takes that, adds genuinely useful functionality while trimming away excess, and delivers an OS that I’m actually looking forward to using later this year. While no official release date has been set, 2009 sounds likely to a lot of people, including myself, and I hope they can deliver on that.

For additional reading, I direct you to the Windows 7 section on the excellent SuperSite for Windows.