First Look: Windows 7 RC

 

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Posted on 26 May 2009 at 11:39

With Windows 7 likely to be out by the end of the year, we downloaded the final beta version - Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) - to see what's in store for us. If you'd like to give the Ultimate version of the new operating system a try, you can download the RC for yourself from www.microsoft.com/windows7. This free download will enable you to use Windows 7 for free until June 1 2010, although from Mark 1 2010 your computer will reboot every two hours.

To test Windows 7 we decided to install it on PC with a Pentium 4 3.8GHz processor and 512MB of RAM. This is fairly under-powered by today's standards, but we wanted to see if the operating system, which is supposed to more efficient than Windows Vista, coped. We were pleasantly surprised. Boot times were quicker than for XP and the OS was responsive and easy to use. The memory was the only limitation and we recommend that you have at least 1GB of RAM (as does Microsoft), although 2GB would be preferable.

NEW LOOK

Windows 7 looks like a slightly nicer version of Windows Vista and some neat tweaks have been made to the user interface to make it easier to use. For starters, the Task Bar has had its first major overhaul in years. Rather than using rectangular buttons that display each open application's Title Bar, each application has just an icon. Hover the mouse over an icon and a pop-up appears with thumbnail views of all the copies of that application you're currently running. Running the mouse over each thumbnail brings that Window into focus, so you can quickly see which Window you want to switch to.

With Internet Explorer 8, each tab appears as a separate thumbnail, so you've got a visual way of managing tabs as well as applications. However, this feature doesn't currently work with other browsers, such as FireFox, although we expect applications to be updated to work with Windows 7's new features.

The icons on the Start Menu aren't don't just display currently-running applications: you can pin application shortcuts to the Task Bar (just right-click an application and select the option from the menu). This creates a quick-launch icon for an application and replaces the Quick Launch area from previous versions of Windows.

Microsoft has also made it easier to manage your Windows. Grab any Window and move it to either side of the screen and it will be automatically resized to fill half of the screen. This makes it easy to compare two documents. Maximising a Window is just as easy: drag one to the top of the screen.

If you want the focus to be on one Window, all you have to do is grab the title bar with the cursor and shake the mouse; doing the same thing again brings all of the other Windows back. Once you've got loads of open Windows it can be hard to see what's going on, but with Windows 7 it's easy. Move the mouse to the bottom-right of the screen and all Windows turn into outlines, so you can see the desktop. Click the left mouse button and all Windows are minimised.

Finally, most of Microsoft's built-in applications, including WordPad and Paint, have had their interfaces updated to use the Ribbon that was introduced with Office 2007. It's a little confusing at first, but once you get used to it the organisation of the Ribbon makes more sense than standard menus.

All-in-all the tweaks and improvements to the interface make Windows 7 considerably easier to use, although it's shame there's no feature to tile all open applications on screen, as with Apple's Expose in OSX.