Windows 7 Beta First Impressions

Microsoft released the beta for Windows 7 over the weekend, the latest version of their ubiquitous operating system. Windows 7 is being built on the same architecture that is in Vista, albeit improved for greater security, performance, and support. Next week we will have a more in-depth performance preview of 7, but for now we thought we’d give you some rough impressions of what we’ve noticed so far.

Here fishy, fishy, fishy...

Default Desktop. Notice the new task bar and system tray

Default Start Menu

We’ve actually installed it on two different systems of somewhat disparate architecture; a high-end Core i7 965 PC and a more mid-range Athlon X2 5000+ PC. Installation on both systems went fairly fast, averaging roughly 30-40 minutes between the two. We were surprised by the almost complete lack of prompts; in fact, Windows 7 only prompts you for information 5 times, depending on your setup. This makes installation a breeze and we had no problems getting both our systems up and running with minimal interaction. The final installation footprint at this time is roughly 18GB’s, so that makes it just a little bit larger than the default of Vista Ultimate.

Once we got to the desktop, we did the traditional thing of checking the device manager to see what still needed drivers and, much to our surprise, every hardware device was already installed! Even on Vista you would be expected to install drivers for a sound card, but the Windows 7 beta apparently has a decently sized driver database that accommodates a lot of the current hardware out there. We still updated our drivers if possible to the latest beta releases from NVIDIA and ATI, but it’s reassuring to know that our internet worked out of the box.

Windows 7 still groups similar control panels

Control Panels ungrouped

The New Windows Explorer

Another thing we noticed right off the bat is the UAC, or lack of it we should say. If you’ve used Vista, you know that the UAC prompts you for everything from installing programs to changing networking settings. Anything that involves changing a system setting, regardless of whether it is minor or major, usually warrants a corresponding prompt from the UAC. It’s like your parents calling your dorm room every 10 minutes after dropping you off at college, even though they’re barely off campus. Look, Microsoft, we understand you want to help, but we don’t think changing our homepage requires 2 prompts and a confirmation; you have to trust us at least a little bit.

As in Vista, the UAC can be disabled fairly simply and most users ended up doing just that. Still, it nice to know that Microsoft has listened to consumer complaints and toned down its pervasiveness a bit. It’s important to remember that the idea behind the UAC is a good one, to keep uninformed users from accidently installing malware on their systems. It’s just that its implementation needed some work and has apparently got it this time around.

Floppies are so 1999

The networking panel has been cleaned up and streamlined

When no connection is detected...

Windows networking has been re-worked somewhat too and now includes a troubleshooting tool to help detect network connectivity problems. Now, when you change any network settings, Windows will automatically run the utility which we assume runs a series of basic ping and DNS tests to determine that everything is functioning properly. This should help alleviate the need for command prompts running ping requests and Internet Explorer windows when attempting to troubleshoot a networking problem.