| A Short Windows 7 Review, with a shock to the reviewer! |
[Sep. 10th, 2009|11:35 am] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Home, the Office | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  impressed | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Millencolin, "Kemp" | ] |
In short: I'm impressed. Quick disclaimer, this is not going to be "OMFGBBQ Windows 7 is so awesome you must go and buy it so that when the rapture comes you won't be refused entry into heaven" type of review. I'm a confirmed Linux user (Ubuntu FTW) and have been for well over a decade. However, the fact is that my work requires that I sometimes use Windows, and my family's media PC is a Windows machine for the simple reason that it's the easiest way to get Games running. Yes, many games run under Linux using WINE, but not all. Besides, if you look at Windows as a gaming/media platform then what's the difference between it and an XBox or PS3? So yes, while this is a Windows 7 review, I'm actually using Linux to type it. Also, I cannot compare Windows 7 to Vista, because I haven't used Vista enough to compare.
The biggest change that I see is the way the taskbar works. Applications minimized to the taskbar have just an icon, much like the OSX dock. Hovering over an open program's icon brings up thumbnails of those windows (if the Aero interface is off, you only get the window titles). The quicklaunch icons act in the same way, doubling as their respective application's location on the taskbar.
The start menu has a nice textual search, so rather than going through several menus you can simply type the app and go right to it. The start menu reminds me a lot of the KDE 4 start menu, but I forget if that was also a feature in Vista.
Windows 7 is very clean, at least a fresh install without any OEM crap. Since I'm running the release candidate on my work, gaming, and Macbook, I don't have any OEM crap installed on them. The first machine to get the Windows treatment was the Macbook, and that was a pleasant experience. Aside from having incomplete drivers (thanks for nothing Apple), the hardware video and wireless worked out of the box. Battery life isn't as good as in OSX, but I'm not sure how much worse as the Mac's battery is old & decrepit, and I don't have a full set of working drivers. Vista drivers work for Windows 7, but Apple does not provide Vista drivers for download, you must obtain them with Leopard (and I assume/hope Snow Leopard as well). However, the Aero interface and the overall use of the Macbook was excellent under Windows 7, even though it was a first-generation Macbook with only 2 Gigs of RAM.
The 2nd machine to get Win 7 was the media PC. I threw an old 20G drive in for the install, so that if it sucks we can go right back to XP. Despite the old drive, Windows 7 is fairly fast. All the hardware was supported out of the box, sound & video included. The machine is fast and responsive, even with Folding@Home running on the videocard. I haven't been able to try and hardcore gaming on it yet (due to the limited drive size), but DVD and video playback has been quite good. It's faster than XP, but our XP install is also 3 years old and is well overdue for a cleansing. With fire.
The last install I did was Windows 7 on my work machine. This was more of a test, since I didn't install it natively, instead installing it in a Virtual Box virtual machine. My work machine is (and will continue to be) a Linux machine, and so I've been using Windows XP in a virtual machine for those times when I'm required to use Windows. I had installed the Win 7 beta in a virtual machine, with less than stellar performance, but I decided to try again as betas often have additional code for testing that can slow them down.
A bit about my Linux machine. It's a 2ghz AMD 64-bit dual-core processor, with 2 gigs of RAM. The Linux boot drive is a 40G drive, the /home drive is a 250G drive. the OS is a stock Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope (32-bit version) desktop install. The caveat: The motherboard & processor were given to me, as there is an incompatibility between the two. The machine is not stable with updated firmware, and is only stable with the stock firmware which does not detect both cores. So I'm really running a single core system.
Due to a couple other light virtual servers I run for work (1 webserver and 1 FreeNAS server) on the same machine, I only gave Windows 7 512 megabytes of RAM. It installed and ran fairly well. It is a bit slower due to the way I chose to set up the virtual hard drive, but that was to be expected. However, I was much impressed with the performance. It runs at least as well if not better than the Windows XP virtual machine I had previously installed with 512M of RAM alloted to it. I don't get Aero graphics, but it is still a fairly attractive interface.
As a joke, I lowered the RAM to 256M. The virtual machine took a little longer to boot, but it ran fine. I don't have sound working in the VM yet (I think I'm missing a setting in Virtual Box, because Windows 7 detects a sound device) but Youtube videos played smooth. OpenOffice installed and ran fine.
I through down the gauntlet and lowered the RAM to 128 megabytes. Yes, a number so low as to be laughable. I did laugh. I laughed even more when on boot Windows black-screened and said something had gone wrong, did I want to try again? I laughed, and told it to boot again. I'm thorough in torture, especially in Microsoft product testing :D
It booted to the desktop. It ran applications. It was usable. Slow, and you had to wait for things to load up, but it was more than usable for web surfing and word processing, keeping in mind that OpenOffice is known to be a resource hog.
My conclusion is that Microsoft is taking the netbook market very seriously. If their newest operating system is usable with less RAM than my bargain-priced laptop had in 2002, they worked hard to prune and optimize the operating system.
One last disclaimer: I didn't have any antivirus or anti-spyware running during the test, which may have lowered performance a lot. But still, Windows 7 can be used with 128M of RAM! This is good, hopefully it will drive Linux developers to pare down their offerings... I've used some distributions which were very slow on 128M of RAM.
I'm not going to say go and buy Windows 7 the day it comes out, but if you're sick of Vista it might be something to look into, and if you're buying a new system and want Windows on it, Windows 7 should not be a bad choice. I will definitely be dual booting my next laptop (netbook I hope) with Windows 7 and Linux. Though after seeing how well it performs with low RAM in a VM, I might just install it in a VM on the netbook too. |
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