The “Break it Down” Blog

Introduction

It is no mystery that I’ve been part of the parade yelling “Vista Sucks!” since it’s inception – I’ve even taken the time to review Vista’s shortcomings for everyone willing to read it by only taking a look at changes in one program as an example of the half-assed decisions made throughout the entire OS.

The problem with Vista was that it was a collection of half-done idea, some bad ideas and some good idea sprinkled in there leaving the all-to-common feeling of “This is what I waited 6 years for?”

It’s more or less accepted across the web-ter-net-i-sphere that Microsoft released Vista and immediately set to work on what was suppose to be Vista in the first place and later got to known as Windows 7.

This review are my thoughts on running Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) after 3 days.

NOTE: To get an idea of other top-level changes and features coming in Windows 7, check our our screenshot tour.

The New Taskbar

I think it’s a lack of innovation combined with brain-atrophy settling in, but when the concept of a “Taskbar” comes into my mind, I literally think of the Windows XP taskbar. You boot into an Ubuntu desktop running GNOME and you see more or less a copy of the idea there as well. One of the most notable places you see nothing like the Windows XP taskbar is Mac — it has this concept of a bar thingie… it sure looks like a bar, but it behaves very differently:

It combines multiple ideas like showing if an app is running or not running (via the little blue light bulb under the icon), it also includes alter-notification behavior by bouncing the icon around (Windows colors the taskbar item orange and/or blinks it).

Windows hasn’t really had this concept of a feature-full taskbar until Windows 7, and my impressions of it working with it are generally excellent — I really like the new approach.:

The new Windows 7 Taskbar removes the idea of the Quick Launch Bar and the separation of shortcut buttons and running apps like Windows XP had:

The entire Taskbar can be thought of as a single display area. There is a concept of “pinned” shortcuts that will stay on the taskbar after the application has closed and the concept of “unpinned” shortcuts that represent a running application and will disappear right after the applications closes:

What this gives you is a more functional version of the Mac OSX application bar. You can choose to treat it like the Mac OSX application bar by “pinning” everything you want to it, and have icons fill the entire taskbar. Then you’ll be able to tell running applications from non-running applications by way of the shaded highlight box that is rendered around those icons and non-running apps won’t have that effect rendered around them.

In addition to application state and event-notification, Windows 7’s new taskbar also integrates with actual window-management in a much more intuitive way than the grouping behavior was that was introduced in Windows XP.

When an application has multiple windows open (as seen in the previous screenshots) the icon on the taskbar gets a “stack of cards” effect to indicate multiple windows available. Mousing-over or clicking the icon on the taskbar brings up a grouped preview display of all the windows:

You can then hover over the window preview you think you might want and Windows will actually make all other windows transparent while bringing that window (belonging to the preview) to the foreground so you can see exactly which window you are about to focus. If you mouse-out of the preview box and do nothing, nothing happens — if you click, that window will become focused.

One nice small touch to this process is that the wait-time of mouse-over that must occur before the preview is shown or window highlighted is very small, like 250ms, so you don’t get the false impression that you have to click anything. It just does what you want it to do before you get fed up waiting.

So far I have liked using the new taskbar much like an expanded Windows XP Quick Launch Bar, in that I only pin the applications I use constantly and launch the rest from the awesome Windows-Key/Search/Enter series of keystrokes that become possible in Windows Vista with the new immediate-start-search:

Performance

Overall excellent so far, definitely feeling like a step-up from Windows Vista. I’m noticing a lot less disk thrashing and faster load times even after long developer sessions.

One thing pointed out by Grant Gochnauer is how insanely aggressive Windows 7 caches recently-used programs in the Standby area of memory that it manages. This allows you to get markedly better performance with the more RAM you throw in your machine.

An example of the Resource Monitor application on my machine:

Notice the reported 0 MB of free RAM? But also notice the 1.5 GB of Standby RAM used up — even if I fire up my development Java IDE there is no disk thrashing as Windows pulls (most of) it from RAM as it’s one of my most-used apps.

As an example of taking this to an extreme is Grant’s desktop:

… yes, that’s 12 GB of total RAM with a Standby cache of 8.8 GB. Grant does report “insanely fast load times” with his IDE, application servers and other huge applications that would normally take quite a while if spinning them off the disk.

Given how freaking cheap good DDR3 (and DDR2) RAM is now-adays, you can easily get SSD-esque performance out of a machine by dropping many gigs of RAM into it instead of sinking a small fortune into a performant SSD.

In every-day use, the performance boost in Windows 7 has been a welcome addition. It basically takes your Vista machine and makes it feel like Windows XP again — minus all the disk thrashing and horrible memory management… so in cases where you have a machine with a ton of RAM, it absolutely will be a huge performance boost for you.

Overall Impressions

Summing everything up and helping you decide if you should replace your Windows XP or Vista install, here’s the scoop:

• In the most general sense, Windows 7 is a functional, feature-complete, stable and performant version of Vista that actually works.
• New taskbar behavior is excellent. From a Window’s-user perspective, it’s a more familiar design than directly copying the Mac with some nice touches.
• Window management has some nice touches making it a bit easier to layout multiple windows on your desktop easily.
• Performance of Windows 7 64-bit on a machine with 4GB or more of RAM generally feels “great”, the more RAM, the snappier the feeling to the point of 8GB+ setups offering “SSD-feeling performance” out of a normal computer.
• UI performance seems snappier, less lag with heavy UI effects on.
• Noticably less disk-thrashing noticed on other versions of Windows on the same hardware. Most notable with Windows XP, but also notable in Windows Vista, after long periods of inactivity, Windows was more than happy to page items in-memory to disk even though it didn’t need the ram, leading to long reload/slow repaint artifacting as you tried to refocus those windows and use those apps after a long period of inactivity.
• UAC has been calmed down to not occur so often, and when it does, the screen doesn’t do the whole “go black and repaint momentarily” thing anymore that Vista did.
• New “Library” concept, while mostly superficial, gives a nice organized “feeling” to the desktop.
• Native Windows XP Emulation support is a ridiculously huge win for folks needing backward compatibility.
• Unfortunately focus-management is still as frustrating as it was in Windows XP. It’s still entirely possible be typing text into a chat box just to have IE (or any other app) focus itself and steal the keyboard input from you mid-sentence and if there is a default focused button on that dialog, the next time you hit “Space” you make that choice… it’s already happened to me once in the 3 days I’ve been on W7… by holy christ god in heaven, Microsoft please solve this problem. Hell, just copy Mac.

Final Impression: Great Upgrade to Windows XP and Vista. I’m back on the Windows bandwagon and eagerly awaiting polish in all areas for Windows 8 in 2012.