Individual Eleven – The World's Cyberbrain

This is an overview of the interface in Windows 7, and the new things they have introduced. Microsoft has said this is close to the final release, so what we see here will be fairly close to the real thing. Let’s take a look shall we?


Install
It took slightly less than an hour or so to install, nothing too speedy. As per Vista, it will detect SATA drives from the get go but you may need drivers for additional RAID support. Fairly standard and straight forward, the file extracting seemed to take a long time and it may sit at 0% for a while before it springs to life. It takes up 8.7gb of your hard disk space, yikes.

Interface
If you were looking for something radically different then think again, because it looks almost exactly like Vista. Aero is still there, I tried to get it to work in VMWare but had no joy. You need to make an amendment to the .vmx file by adding a couple of lines, to enable Direct3D:

mks.enable3d = “TRUE”
svga.vramSize = “16708800″

Unfortunately Aero still did not work, probably because of the limitations of the VMWare graphics driver. There is not much to see anyway as it is looks like the Aero in Vista. By the way, make sure only a single monitor is enabled in the VM settings or else Direct3D auto disables itself.

They have done away with the sidebar and all gadgets will float on your desktop with no docking. The taskbar looks slightly different, with larger icons which are moveable left/right so you can sort all shortcuts/open programs. It has been noted that this is one of the highlights of the new operating system, when you open a program, an icon will sit on the taskbar as per normal. However, you can right click to pin it, creating a shortcut on the taskbar. Also right clicking brings up a dynamic context menu, which gives you additional options for the program. By default, it is set to icon only which can be grouped together like a deck of cards. You can however change this to get the old style. Microsoft mentioned this is to take away the differentiation between shortcuts and running programs, to create a more fluid experience. I do like this, it creates less clutter on the taskbar, as a shortcut instance is “reused” so that you can click on the same icon to control the opened program such as close window etc.

I really don’t like how Control Panel looks now, the classic view is gone and the only thing close to it is to view all Control Panel items which has a different layout. For media content, everything is called “Libraries” where all your videos and pictures are held. Even if you have multiple folders for your content, you can add multiple locations in the library so that you can access them from one place. The Switch Between Windows function in Vista also seems to be absent in 7, I hardly used it myself so no loss there. There are also some additional icon animations when you mouse over, which look aesthetically pleasing.

Features and Functionality
I had a poke around firstly with the Windows Firewall. It looks much better now and gives the user more control for opening ports for incoming and outgoing. Actually, Inbound and Outbound rules did exist in Vista… it’s just that you had to run Local Security Policy (secpol.msc) to get to it, and the average Joe Bloggs isn’t going to know about that. Now it is easily accessible and gives you wider control, about time too. The file system is still the same, WinFS was thrown around as a replacement for NTFS when Vista was first introduced but later dropped. I assume Microsoft is no longer pursuing this for the time being, as it is still NTFS.

In Control Panel, there are additional options available. Most notably, the support for Biometric Devices is available which can be used for things like fingerprint recognition to log onto Windows. As with many Windows iterations, Microsoft likes to change the name of things. Security Center is now called Action Center, something that doesn’t change however is the obligatory nagging that you do not have Windows Updates setup, or if you do not have an antivirus program installed. Thank you Big Brother. User Access Control (UAC) is also still there, extremely annoying and for someone like myself that knows what they are doing I would turn this off. HomeGroup is similar to creating a workgroup within your home network, for sharing files etc with other computers.

The Network Access Protection agent is still here, I first saw this built in Vista and they have carried this across. It’s a way to check against remote users or for example users connected wirelessly, to see if they have full compliance such as an up to date AV software install, a software firewall enabled etc. If the check fails, then the client can be placed in a quarantine area so that they do not connect to the network until they are fully compliant. I’m not sure how widely adopted this is, if you VPN into a corporate network a group policy is generally enforced anyway plus all the other security lockdowns you can implement without touching NAP.

So, is it worth upgrading?
It really depends on what they have to offer over Vista. Only time will tell whether this is more stable or if they can provide good enough backward compatibility for software. To be honest, what is the point? People are still clinging onto XP and Microsoft is trying their utmost to tear them away from it. I am not sure whether this is the answer though, they should have skipped Vista altogether and came out with this in the first place. I would need to use this more to see whether I would like it, also I need to do some benchmarking which I will post over the next few days. But so far, this effort from Microsoft isn’t as revolutionary as it should be.

Here are some screenshots:

Moto Tech Microsoft, Windows 7 beta