On The Ars Technica Review of Windows 7

I sat down on this nice and quiet Saturday, with the sun streaming through the trees (and my window), to take a read through my long list of unread articles in NetNewsWire. It was then I realized that I hadn’t had a chance, or thought, to read through my selected news feeds in many weeks! I missed the articles on Droid, Apple’s new hardware (although I had already read about them on Apple.com), the subsequently ‘fixed’ uproar over the Atom processor support in Snow Leopard, and perhaps most importantly, the launch of Windows 7.

I worked at Future Shop the AM of the Windows 7 launch, so although I didn’t miss the launch itself, I missed the long-form news reports on the topic, along with the always-excellent review from Ars Technica. So I sat down today to read through the many page review and quickly realized there were going to be many parallels between the reviewer, Peter Bright’s opinions, and my own. As with all reviews, there will also be things I disagree with.

Since my memory is not always the best and since I love summaries, I thought I would take the opportunity to include some of Peter’s writing here – the parts I find most interesting, whether it be sections I agree with wholeheartedly, or pieces that I disagree with.
I’d like to start with this paragraph on the first page

Although Windows Vista may have caused vendors and users alike some amount of pain, it was all for a good reason. To take advantage of modern video cards, Windows needed a new graphics stack; to withstand the increasing malware onslaught, Windows needed to tighten security and make running as a regular user more comfortable. These changes were not made lightly; the break with the past was necessary to put the operating system on the same footing as its competition and to address long-standing, legitimate criticisms of the platform. Microsoft was never going to revert to a more XP-like operating system, no matter how desperately some cling to the old OS.

Amen to that. Despite my frustration with customers, friends, and everyone else I talked to who insisted that Windows XP was the best, that Vista was terrible, that they would never upgrade, I’m confident that they all wound up upgrading eventually. The best part? I bet they loved Vista once they gave it a shot. In the end, the true problem was the quasi-enthusiasts – the people that didn’t really know why Vista was a necessary step, that didn’t actually try it (or if they did it was a short try-out), and that stood in a position where people asked them their opinions on software, hardware, and anything IT. They abused their position of power by not giving Vista a true chance and went around proclaiming how bad it was and how everyone should stick with XP. It was the company’s ‘IT guy’ or the computer-savvy nephew that I was constantly having to shoot down in order to get the facts through to those that asked.

And the paragraph right after I agree with completely – it’s amazing how such a seemingly simple feature becomes so important to your daily flow.

I have way too many icons in my Start menu and way too many documents on my PC for hunting through hierarchies to ever be an effective way of finding, well, anything. Hitting the Windows key and then just typing what I’m looking for beats browsing hierarchies hands-down. And it’s like crack; I was hooked from the first time I ever did it, and using Windows XP (with its dumb old-fashioned Start menu) feels like stepping back into the 1980s. People put up with that? And for so long?! Unbelievable. But I digress.

Last sentence of the first page speaks the truth.

Third parties could, and should, have done better, but they have at least caught up now.

Along with the following tidbit on the different version of Windows 7.

Starter Edition is worthless; it’s crippled (it omits most of the user-visible features that make Vista and Windows 7 worthwhile), only available for 32-bit systems, only available as an OEM pre-install, and really should never have seen the light of day

Internet Explorer 8 can be removed?

One thing that has people excited—especially legislators—is the ability to remove Internet Explorer 8. If IE8 is unticked, then Windows removes all user-visible ways of invoking the Web browser. The “working” parts of the browser are unaffected because so many applications (including the OS itself) embed them for various reasons, so the rendering engine is still present and still important, but as an actual Web browser, IE8 can now be fully removed.

I’m well aware of the European release requiring a browser selection (which we don’t get in North America), but I wasn’t aware of the fact that IE8 can be completely removed. Although I support the browser selection concept and I believe it should have been implemented in all releases of Windows 7, I don’t see a real benefit to having IE 8 removable entirely. Despite this, at least it should mean that Microsoft applications that once ignored your default browser setting, and loaded IE instead, should no longer be able to do so since IE will now be modular – if it doesn’t exist on the system, what would those apps do?

Post install, Bright describes the default wallpaper as irredeemably ugly and horrid.

Once up and running, after briefly admiring the new startup logo, you’re presented with probably the ugliest default wallpaper of any current OS; even the fecal brown of Ubuntu is more aesthetically pleasing. The Windows 7 betas had an amusing fish as their wallpaper (a betta fish; betta, beta, geddit?). The fish has unfortunately had his chips and is gone, replaced by a frankly gross Windows logo overlaid with silhouettes of trees, butterflies, and random dots. The styling is inconsistent with the visual cues in the rest of the operating system (it doesn’t follow from the theming of either the new startup screen or the logo on the Start orb, or anywhere else that the logo is used), it’s inconsistent with the Aero Glass appearance that 7 inherits from Vista. And, most importantly, it’s just irredeemably ugly and horrid.

Here is where my first disagreement comes in to play. I very much enjoy the default wallpaper – it embodies many characteristics which I love for wallpapers. First, the majority of the wallpaper is subtle gradients which make it simple and easy to look at without being distracting from your actual windows and icons. The centerpiece is not just the Windows flag, but a version of it that feels fresh and new – exciting. It has little patterned images representing summer or spring and evokes feelings that we only get 5 months out of the year here in Halifax NS. I love it.

Bright’s intriguing comments on Internet Explorer vs. Windows Explorer UI.

And OK, it’s being picky, but why oh why do Explorer and Internet Explorer look different? They are meant to look the same. An attempt has clearly been made to give them the same styling and appearance. Yet they’re gratuitously different. Not terribly different, but different all the same. The spacings are different, and the address bars are different heights. It’s just haphazard and random. The widgets have been plopped down onto a window and someone’s just said “yeah, that looks close enough”, even though it’s wrong. Fit and finish matters. As the new UI guidelines say: Pay attention to detail, and make sure everything is polished. Don’t assume that users won’t notice small things. They will.

While I agree, I had not noticed this, despite my usual uncanny ability to notice 1 pixel differences in margins and padding on websites and applications. This is likely due to my use of Google Chrome the majority of the time and very rare use of Internet Explorer.

On the topic of taskbar features.

The big problem is that the number of applications offering this level of integration is currently low. Even within Windows itself, most of the built-in applications offer either no customization at all, or they drop back to the default automatic Jump List that is available to any application that uses the built-in Most Recently Used feature. This makes the experience quite hit-and-miss, which rather detracts from it. Granted, Windows 7 is brand new, and so it will be quite some time before software is updated to take advantage of these new capabilities; and we’re already beginning to see third party software add Jump List items (for example, Chrome adds entries for recently closed tabs and opening incognito windows, and iTunes has playback controls in its thumbnail and adds tasks for visiting and searching the iTunes Store).

This exactly represents my feelings on the topic, although I wouldn’t be so quick to shrug it off as “Windows 7 is new, so we’ll see what happens.” Windows 7 has been available for free in Beta form for quite a few months. It wouldn’t have killed application developers to have put support for this into their apps, and yet we have next to nothing. When new functions become available to app developers for the iPhone or OS X, it’s like a race to see who can put them in first, but when it comes to Windows the developers just don’t care? That’s not a very good attitude to take regarding something as neat and useful as this (as well as other features now provided to developers by the OS).

Note: Back at PDC last year, we talked to Steve Sinofsky about this; Windows adds UI capabilities and then Microsoft software fails to use it properly, resulting in an inconsistent experience and leading one to question why Microsoft even bothers adding new features and guidelines if they’re not going to be used. He told us at the time that the reason for this is that within Microsoft, the software that sets the UI standard isn’t Windows, but rather Office; if the Office team’s UI rules don’t match up with Windows’ UI rules, then the Office team prevails. He did tell us that the Office team was involved in the new UI features of Windows 7, and so I hope that in the future there will be closer alignment between what Microsoft says you should do, and what it actually does. I’m not going to hold my breath, though, because interface consistency is not something the company has ever been good at.

Wow, that is not just interesting and shocking to me, but also sounds quite backwards. I’m not going to pretend I know very much about the topic, but why should the Office team get this much power? I realize they develop the most profitable software Microsoft publishes, but it’s Microsoft’s job to ensure the two get along so well that the experience between the two is seamless – not to battle it out over who gets to use what features and what should be where.

If you’re coming from XP, or if you disabled the new Start menu in Vista, then you might be in for a shock, as the new Start menu is now mandatory.

They should have done this in Vista. Those that refused to switch by then should have just crawled under a rock and given up on using computers – these new features and designs are provided for a reason. They allow for more efficient use of the computer through quicker access to the things you need and now the lack of being able to change back means the operating system will finally have start menu consistency. Finally. The Office team got to remove menus entirely from 2007, so why didn’t the Vista team get the same thing? It got so bad, that when I saw a machine with the classic start menu I would refuse to work on it without changing it back. The ability to use the classic start menu destroyed the entire experience of the operating system for me.

The Virtual WiFi architecture even permits a WiFi connection to be shared by WiFi, with the same adapter both connected to an access point, and acting as an AP. The feature currently lacks any kind of user interface; configuration is all performed through the netsh command.

Whoah, that is pretty neat! Too bad there’s no UI for it yet…

Windows Vista came with lots of bundled applications; Windows Media Player, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Mail, Windows Media Center, and Windows Movie Maker. Windows 7 has scrapped Mail, Photo Gallery, and Movie Maker moving these applications into an add-on pack called the Windows Live Essentials. Microsoft has decoupled them from Windows so that they have their own release cycle and sidestep bundling and anti-trust concerns. The company hopes that OEMs will preinstall the Essentials, but apart from a download link, the company does not otherwise promote them within the OS.

The funny part is that I’m pretty confident that none of the OEMs that we sell at Future Shop have included the Live Essentials. (It’s possible I didn’t notice it installed on some). This includes Sony, Toshiba, HP (and Compaq), MSI, Acer (and Gateway/eMachines), LG, Dell, and perhaps a couple others I’m forgetting. Although we install the Live Essentials pack as part of our paid set-up routine, we also install Mozilla Thunderbird – giving the user the choice. Similarly we install Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox to provide the user a choice of browser.

Finally we get built in codec support – this officially beats Apple’s support out of the box… does this mean Windows users don’t need codec packs anymore? I doubt it – as the article says, the built in codecs are slow, plus I would be willing to bet there’s still some missing, such as MKV support.

The big changes are WMP’s new codecs, and the ability to stream media to other devices. Windows now ships with built-in support for, among others, MPEG2, MPEG4 (which covers DivX and similar widely-used implementations), and H.264 video, along with AAC audio. The support seems to work well enough; the codecs aren’t the fastest ones around, which can be a problem especially with H.264, but a large proportion of downloaded video will now play in WMP without requiring the use of third-party codecs.

WMP11 would use embedded album art in preference to the hidden JPEG images stored in each album’s directory (the hidden folder.jpg and randomly-named friends that are readily visible on any WMP-managed directories). The hidden files would still only be the small images that WMP downloads, but within the program itself it would display the large embedded image. With WMP12 that’s no longer the case. The hidden JPEG files are the only thing that WMP will display. Make the Now Playing window anything other than tiny, and it looks stupid.

That’s unfortunate. I find album art has become an increasingly more important part of our music libraries over the past 10 years to the extent that it now annoys me when there isn’t album artwork for a song. This is especially true when playing back from my iPhone – it just looks so much nicer when the artwork is there. Thankfully iTunes does a better job of this, so I don’t have to worry about it on my phone.

Conclusions on Windows Media center:

The look and feel has been refreshed, and overall feels quite a bit quicker. I might be imagining things, but MC on Vista always felt quite sluggish; my main Windows 7 machine is a lot slower than my main Vista PC, but Media Center certainly feels far snappier.

This makes me a bit sad that I sold my media center PC. While I always loved the provided features in Vista Media Center, I had two overarching problems with it. First, network hard drives would cause the spinner to just lock up the software. This would then lead to an ‘end task’ and re-launch where it would then tell me that my tuner was in use already (frustrating). My second problem was that QAM support was for cable-card devices only which was ridiculous. Microsoft reps said this was to be fixed for SP2 on thegreenbutton.com, but nope, never came. It’s frustrating that I would have had to upgrade to 7 just to make these things work properly, but at the same time I kinda wish I still had that PC just to try it out.

On a related note, I switched to AppleTV many months ago and I’m quite dissatisfied with it. It’s only saving grace is that I have installed XBMC, allowing it to be used for bigger and better things.

It has become a popular pastime amongst government employees to load as much sensitive data as possible onto a laptop and then deposit that laptop in a public place so that someone can find it. This hobby has likely spread to the private sector too, although it attracts less attention there. There are many spoilsports out there who regard this as a poor use of resources; they argue that sensitive data should be kept out of the hands of thieves. To appease these meanies, Windows Vista’s BitLocker feature enabled encryption of whole partitions, requiring a PIN or suitable USB key to decrypt them.

Hahaha, very much enjoyed the first sentence. It refers to articles describing lost laptops by the FBI and other government officials. One might think this happens rarely, but this article helps put it in perspective.

The Problem Steps Recorder should be a boon for helpdesks everywhere. This simple tool lets you make a recording of the steps required to reproduce a problem (yeah, I guess the clue was in the name). The recording includes screenshots, system information, and optional annotations as necessary, and should do a good job of taking the guesswork out of supporting end-user problems.

Very cool. As someone who is constantly trying to reproduce problems with computers at Future Shop along with bug reports for Adium, this type of logging/tracking system would be extremely beneficial.

Hitting Win+P provides a neat little tool for choosing how to handle an externally connected monitor on laptop systems; all four options (laptop only, mirroring, extending the desktop, external only) are available at the click of a button. This certainly beats messing around with Fn-key combinations and trying to decipher the consistently unclear icons on my keyboard.

Love this feature.

If this isn’t enough to fix the problem app, it’s time for virtualization, in Windows XP Mode. It’s not really a “mode”—it’s an XP SP3 VM running in the new Windows 7 version of Virtual PC—but it should provide a solution to most remaining compatibility issues.

I’m not going to go into it in much detail now; the final RTM version of Virtual PC and the Windows XP Mode system image weren’t available at the time of writing (though they are out now), so a follow-up article will cover XP Mode in more detail. But in brief: the virtual machine is somewhat integrated into the host environment, so that programs installed in the compatibility environment can be invoked from the Start menu or launched via file extension associations, and moving data between the VM and the host environment is mostly seamless.

First: it sounds like VPC finally is getting support like VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop does for OS X.

Second: there’s one catch to the ‘new’ version of Virtual PC that is used by XP Mode. It ONLY works with processors that have VT-X (and of course a motherboard that allows it to be enabled). I had a customer with one of those few Core 2 Duo processors that didn’t have the VT-X extension and he was not pleased that it didn’t work. It should be mentioned that running Windows in virtualization without VT-X is doable and even usable, just not quite as fast. This does NOT mean that it’s not fast enough to work well, which is why I was surprised that they made VT-X an absolute requirement.

One last thing about this. When I installed XP Mode (and couldn’t run it on that customer’s notebook), I discovered that it places the WinXP activation code in the XP Mode ‘application’ folder in C:\Windows\Program Files … so if you want a free XP license, just get someone who bought Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate for a computer without VT-X and you’re all set!

Overall, it’s pretty clear that Windows 7 is “Vista R2.” Hell, the branding of the server counterpart is a dead giveaway here. Windows Server 2008 RTM was exactly Vista SP1; Windows Server 2008 R2 is exactly Windows 7. Why does one retain its branding but not the other? Because the Windows Server 2008 branding is popular and successful (the OS was, quite rightly, very well-received) in a way that the Vista branding is not. If Vista had gotten the reception it actually deserved, and become a brand worth keeping, it seems highly likely that the name would have been retained. And Microsoft knows it, which is why internally, Windows 7 is only version 6.1. Sure, the company has made specious claims that this is to avoid breaking applications with bad version checks, but the logic doesn’t really hold; many of those applications are just as broken by “6” as they would be by “7,” and if that were such a concern then the minor version wouldn’t change either.

But at the end of the day, that doesn’t really matter. Windows 7 is, overall, a fantastic OS. It builds on a solid platform, and just makes it even better.

Very intriguing parallels drawn between Vista and 7 and Win Server 2008 and its R2 release. The conclusion is something I agree with and, as I’ve written before, I’m a supported of Windows 7 and use it often on my HP Mini Netbook.

This summary has helped me gather my thoughts on some of the key features of Windows 7 as presented by Peter Bright over at Ars Technica, and I hope some of my comments and additions might come in handy for others as well.