By Jin Nan Goto
Microsoft publicly unveiled its new upcoming Operating System, Windows 7, to a cheering crowd at the recent PDC. It promises to be more polished, more efficient, and more reliable than Windows Vista. Regardless of whether all the negative coverage of Vista was deserved or not, Windows 7 is Microsoft’s answer to all of those shortcomings.
From what I saw about Windows 7, it didn’t disappoint. The prebeta build, not surprisingly, is very much like Windows Vista. However after working with Windows 7 for a while I can see that it is very stable and usable for a prebeta release. Also its clear that the Windows 7 team has been paying close attention to small details which shows a level of refinement that was missing from not only Vista, but all versions of Windows(XP included).
Windows 7 brings many new features into windows, and here are five that I’m excited about.
The New Windows 7 Taskbar
Microsoft’s official line is that Windows 7 will be released in early 2010, but It’s speculated that it could come as early as August or September of next year. Now, that’s almost a year from now but it’s inevitable that we will soon hear from Apple fans about how Microsoft has copied yet another Mac Feature by turning the Dock into their new Taskbar. While the philosophy behind the taskbar and the dock are very different, I will admit that there is something very Mac-ish about the Windows 7 Taskbar. For instance you can easily reorder the icons on the taskbar (much like you can with the OSX dock). What I like is, Windows 7 allows a lot of customization of the notification area of the taskbar (the icons in the bottom right corner representing programs running in the background). By default all items are hidden from the notification area and you can specify what you want to show up.
Changes made to User Account Control
Windows 7 is also scaling back Vista’s signature feature, User Account Control. I really like UAC and I appreciate what Microsoft was trying to accomplish with it, but for the majority of the world UAC was the annoying popup that asked permission for every little task. Deserved or not, That was how people saw it and Microsoft responded by allowing greater customization to UAC’s behavior through a slider. You can set it to always notify or to never give notifications. It’s likely but not entirely clear that setting UAC to never notify is more insecure, but it is great that Microsoft is giving its users a choice.
Plugging in a Projector is now Easy
Many will probably see this as minor feature of Windows 7, but It’s a little thing that will save people a lot of grief. If you hold down the Windows Key + P you can select from various settings for external displays. You can choose Extended Desktop for running with dual monitors, or you can choose a mirrored display if you want to connect your computer to a projector. This is a wonderful feature for everyone who’s ever needed to show a Power Point presentation over a projector. It always bugged me that every single computer manufacturer seemed to have their own weird key combination for connecting the computer to a projector. Function + F5 or Function + F3, there was no standard way of doing this. It was incredibly confusing for novice users. This is a really proactive solution by Microsoft to a real problem.
Homegroup Networking
I am really interested in how Windows 7 is going to handle Networking. Windows Vista inherited more of a business centered networking model. While things like Printer sharing was greatly improved, Plainly speaking it was a real pain to set up things like file sharing. Windows 7 introduces a simpler and easier way to network called Homegroup. It allows all computers (presumably running windows 7) on the password protected Homegroup to easily share documents, photos, and music. At the same time it allows a lot of control over what is shared. For example when you bring your Work laptop home and connect it to your homegroup, your work documents are not viewable over the Homegroup. While homegroup is interesting and exciting I’m holding out full judgement of it until I see how it handles a network of non-Windows 7 computers.
Bitlocker on a flash drive
Bitlocker is not a new feature, but Windows 7 allows you to enable bitlocker drive encryption on a portable USB flash drive. Encrypting the drive is now quite easy. Data loss is a serious problem and unfortunately the cheap and abundant flash drives are easily lost. Enabling bitlocker on these drives will greatly mitigate the potential damage of losing a drive with important data. However like Homegroup I want to see that this is compatible for different operating systems or even different versions of Windows 7 (Vista home users could not use Bitlocker). If you encrypt a flash drive with bitlocker you are going to want to be able to recover the data on a Mac or on an older Windows computer otherwise it severely limits it’s usefulness.
From June 26-July 11 Microsoft and retailers such as Best Buy and Amazon will offer pre-orders for Windows 7 with a special upgrade price of $49.99 for Home Premium and $99.99 for Professional.
