First Look: Windows 7 RC

 

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Posted on 26 May 2009 at 11:39

INSPECTOR GADGET

Windows Vista introduced the Sidebar to house Gadgets, which are a little utilities to do simple jobs, such as a clock, currency convertor and slideshow. These Gadgets could also be dragged on to the desktop; with Windows 7 you can only put Gadgets on the desktop. However, the ability to show the Desktop with a mouse movement makes them easier to find and see, although we'd like to see the Sidebar as an option, as we find it useful on large monitors with high resolutions.

MONITORS

One of the new features we like in Windows 7 is the Detect button in the Screen Resolution dialog box. This forces Windows to detect the monitors that are connected to your computer without having to restart your computer, as with previous versions of Windows. This is brilliant for anyone that's plugged in a second monitor and then found out that they have to restart their PC for Windows to recognise it.

REPAIR ME

In recent years Microsoft has been persuading computer manufacturers to only provide recovery disks with their PCs rather than full Windows discs. The major downside of this method is that the Windows disc can also be used to repair faults. With only a recovery disc these repair options aren't available.

With Windows 7 the Create a system repair disc utility lets you create a bootable CD or DVD that can be used to fix faults. It can repair boot problems, scan memory for errors and has a DOS mode, so that you can run some command line tools to fix problems. The only problem with this system is that the command prompt only lets you run certain DOS commands, not other programs you download. So, for example, you can't use the disc that you create to run to perform a BIOS upgrade, which seems like a missed opportunity to us. We'd also like to see this utility be able to create a bootable USB disk or memory card for use in computers that don't have optical drives, such as netbooks.

EXPLORING THE INTERNET

A version of Windows 7 is available without Internet Explorer or Windows Media Player installed, in order for Microsoft to meet its anti-competition requirements. For the majority of us, though, we'll get Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 8 installed. This is mostly a big improvement over the previous versions, but we found that the current version was incredibly unreliable on two of our test machines. On these we'd repeatedly get the errror message: "Internet Explorer has encountered a validation error". We improved the situation, but didn't fix it, by turning off Data Execution Prevention (DEP), which is designed to stop code running from memory marked as non-executable. Typically programs that try and do that are malicious. To turn of DEP get a command prompt up in Administrator mode and type bcdedit /set {current} nx AlwaysOff. Typing the same command but using AlwaysOn will turn it back on. You'll need to reboot to apply the changes.

UAC

One of the big annoyances about Windows Vista was User Access Control (UAC). This feature was designed to stop malicious applications installing on your computer or making system changes without your knowledge. However, it would typically pop up meaningless messages for the simplest of tasks, leaving most people no option but to turn it off. With Windows 7 UAC is still there, but there's more control over it.

Now there are four levels of control, with the default set to only warn you if applications try to make changes to your PC, but not when you make Windows changes yourself. The highest setting apes Windows Vista's controls while the lowest setting turns it off completely.