Windows 7: Our Long National Vista Nightmare Is Over
You're not going to have Windows Vista to kick around anymore; on Thursday, its successor Windows 7 debuts.
As I write in today's column, 7 has issues of its own. You shouldn't mistake Microsoft's new release for some transcendental reinvention of Windows, or even an advance on the order of going from, say, Windows Millennium Edition to Windows XP. It's a good upgrade -- especially over the snakebit Vista -- but not a fantastic one.
In that piece, I emphasize features that would be used most often in a single-computer, single-use situation -- the likely state of affairs in many homes. As a result, I had to save some other features and details for this post. To wit:
* An in-place (i.e., non-destructive) install of Windows 7 Ultimate isn't something to do if you're in a hurry. That took two hours on a Hewlett-Packard dv3t laptop, one and a half on a Dell Inspiron 14 (yes, these are the laptops I reviewed in August). But a "custom install" over Windows XP took only half an hour on a Dell borrowed from the Post's IT department (my notes read: "install begun 4:05. done 4:35. Wow!").
* About the testing of Windows 7 Ultimate instead of the far more common Home Premium edition: That's what Microsoft's PR agency gave me, but the folks there assure me that the performance of Ultimate and Home Premium, in terms of things like bootup time and memory use, is the same. I ignored Ultimate-only features in my review.
* I also ignored the HomeGroup feature of Windows 7, a new, simplified home-networking and file-sharing option that only works between computers already running Windows 7. In that context, it can work quite well ... but I'd like it better if HomeGroup didn't first assign let you write your own one-time setup password instead of assigning a randomly chosen, 10-character alphanumeric password before letting you write your own.
* The old HP printer/scanner that Apple's new Snow Leopard release of Mac OS X supports so poorly worked correctly, without any driver downloads, in Windows 7. (But I should note that recent versions of Linux have also recognized this printer and scanner on its own.)
* Since so many of you have been asking about keeping your e-mail intact in a migration from XP or Vista to 7, here's my advice on how to do it: Go to Microsoft's Windows Live download site now -- before you upgrade Windows -- download the installer and add only Windows Live Mail, not any of the other Live applications. That new program should automatically pick up your old Outlook Express or Windows Mail messages, address book and settings. You can do this later -- Windows Live Mail brought in a set of Outlook Express mail accounts after 7's installer had wiped out Outlook Express and all of Windows XP -- but by taking care of things upfront, you get one worry out of the way.
* About that tricky XP-to-7 migration: My concern here isn't about the Easy Transfer utility -- itself notably improved over what shipped with Vista -- missing some of your files, it's about reinstalled programs not finding the files that Easy Transfer moves back in after a 7 install. For example, Mozilla Firefox recovered all of its settings, but iTunes defaulted back to its standard CD-rip options and then wound up importing a second copy of every song in my library as part of its usual first-run sequence. Google's Picasa had to find my photos all over again and lost the album I'd earlier created in it. Extra-cost, third-party migration tools will attempt to bring over installed programs as well as data; the Wall Street Journal's Katherine Boehret tried out one earlier this week but didn't rave about it.
* Windows 7's control panel looks much like Vista's, but it has enough small differences -- for instance, it lacks Vista's "Check for updates" link on its default screen -- I'm nervous about having to write three different sets of directions in my Help File column, on top of the two already necessary to cover XP and Vista.
* Microsoft has already shipped some initial bug fixes for Windows 7; if it sticks to its customary practice, you'll see a much broader Service Pack update six to nine months from now.
You shouldn't take just my word for Windows 7. You should also consider what some of my competitors have written on this release.
* In the WSJ, Walt Mossberg covered Windows 7 in his column last week; he goes into much more detail about some new window-management tricks.
* BusinessWeek's Steve Wildstrom is positive overall about 7, writing that "it has been a long wait for something truly better, but I think we have arrived."
* At ZDNet, Ed Bott shares his notes on how 7 performed on 10 different computers.
As you can see, my evaluation of 7 is a little more negative than those of many of my peers. I'm prepared to be proven wrong in that assessment. Then again, I was more optimistic about Vista than that release justified.
How optimistic are you for Windows 7? What other questions do you have about it? Post your thoughts in the comments now, or talk to me in real time during my Web chat, from noon to 1 p.m. today.
var entrycat = 'Windows'By Rob Pegoraro | October 16, 2009; 10:49 AM ET Categories: Windows Share This: E-Mail | Technorati | Del.icio.us | Digg | Stumble Previous: Microsoft Says It Can Recover 'Most' Sidekick Data
Source: Washington Post
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