Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft
Disclaimer 2: Parts of the group that I work for are responsible for some components in Windows

I work at a group at Microsoft that is responsible for delivering several components of the next version of Windows, so having heard about and seen glimpses of the new OS I have long planned to try it out and with Windows 7 Beta being made available to the public this week, I decided to give it a shot. Microsoft prides itself of eating its own dogfood (perhaps with varying degrees of success from instance to instance, but nonetheless) and installing Windows 7 Beta can be done over the network boot like you would any other OS you may need for work.

I use a Dell XPS M1330 laptop for work and it’s a great Vista machine that is light weight and has great Dell battery life (I am saying this having experience battery “life” according to HP and Toshiba in the past which primarily involves reviving your battery back to life by plugging it in). The laptop is equipped with 4 Gigs of RAM and a dedicated NVidia 8400M GS video card. To date I was running Server 2008 x64 on it in order to take advantage of some of the server features that aren’t available on Vista but I decided that an excellent way to truly try out Win 7 would be on my day-to-day machine. I have kept it purposely free of development related things in order to keep performance up.

So I opted to burn a bootable image of Win7 and wipe the machine clean with anew install. Win 7 is based on Vista’s sources and at the moment shares the same set of SKUs with its predecessor. I ended up with Win7 Enterprise Edition which as of the Beta build has all the features of Ultimate (Games are included but need to be added post-install through the Programs and Features item in Control Panel). The installation experience was very much like Vista except for some minor changes in theming such as the background of the installer and some window coloring. This is actually a good thing since Vista’s installation process is fast and straightforward. One notable difference was in the portion of the installation that happens upon the first time the system boots up. Win7, having detected my wireless card, prompted me to pick which network to connect to.

Below is a list of my first impressions with the new OS.

Hardware and Software Support

Hardware works. Win7 detected all of the hardware on my system except for the fingerprint reader, driver for which was available from Dell. This is a contrast from Vista x64 install that required me downloading quite a few drivers from Dell. This is expected, however, since the driver model is mostly unchanged from Vista and has been around long enough for the manufacturers to catch up.

Most applications simply work with no issues. So far I haven’t found an application that refused to run with a minor exception of Skype where only the 4.0 Beta would work, but similar issues exist with version 3 on Vista as well. Win 7 is developed with Application Compatibility (AppCompat for short) as one of the top pillars and so far it has been great. Google Chrome runs but the rendering engine doesn’t work so it’s not really usable. Live Mesh has an issue where it keeps turning transparency off on Windows and the taskbar – it’s rather annoying actually…

Windows Experience Index (WEI)

WEI measures performance of 5 key areas of every computer on a uniform scale: Calculations per second (Processor), Memory operations per second (Memory), Desktop Performance for Windows Aero (Graphics), 3D gaming and business graphics performance (Gaming Graphics) and Disk Data Transfer Rate (Primary Hard Disk). In Vista, the rating went from 1.0 (poor) to 5.9 (excellent). In Win 7 the scale can go up to 7.9 to account for newer and faster hardware. Of course having the same hardware as before, my score hasn’t really changed since I’ve had Vista installed. While these scores can be mildly affected by installing newer, updated drivers from hardware manufacturers that squeeze as much performance as possible from your existing hardware, the way to really kick them up a notch is to upgrade the hardware. The overall system score is determined by the lowest number and as such I am limited at 2.9 by the laptop-grade hard-drive that the system came with (and will remain with as well…).

Taskbar Redesign

In my opinion the taskbar is getting it’s first major update in Windows 7 since it was introduced in Windows 95. While it’s not a complete re-imagining of how we use Windows, it’s a different enough take on how the Windows taskbar works.

The quick Launch toolbar has been replaced by an ability to Pin applications to the taskbar. When an application is pinned, it’s icon will always be displayed in the Taskbar

Taskbar buttons are now rearrangeable. It is finally possible to move buttons for various running applications on the taskbar. It’s a small but a very welcome change.

Right clicking on the task bar buttons now brings up a menu of actions that are application specific. Gone is the familiar and standard, yet of limited usefulness Minimize/Maximize/etc. menu. Here’s an example of what right-clicking on Windows Live Messenger brings up.

Since the Quick Launch toolbar is gone, the Desktop Preview button is now a tiny bar in the bottom right corner of the screen (given that your taskbar is on the bottom of course). Hovering over the button will make all the windows transparent so you can see the desktop, while clicking on it will hide all the windows and show the desktop.

Start Menu updates

The recent applications and recent Items menu has been combined and now an app that has document types associated with it will have an arrow next to it when listed in the Recent Applications view. Clicking the arrow will show recently opened documents.

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This provides an easy shortcut for a fairly frequent scenario (at least for me) whereas I launch Excel to open a document I recently worked on.

Much like the smart right-click menu on the taskbar, the Start menu also displays available actions for a recent application that is already running.

Performance

Shutdown/Start-up is faster. Granted I am running on a fresh OS install, but having already installed Office and Visual Studio, the OS still restarts quickly. Time will tell how fast it will remain since typically windows start-up/shut-down performance deteriorates over time.

Wi-Fi seems to work better. At Microsoft, we have to go between buildings all the time and there are several networks using a variety of authentication flavors around. They all require a certificate to be installed on the machine and Win 7 auto-enrolled with the certificate (when I joined the domain) and has been on wireless ever since.

Desktop

The Desktop now includes an ability to use Rotating Backgrounds. Small feature, but neat. Makes looking at your desktop more interesting every time.

There is now a quick link to Change the screen resolution which eliminates the need to select Personalize –> Display Settings. Now it’s only a right-click on the Desktop away.

There are now some gesture-driven interaction with windows. Dragging a window to the top edge, will maximize it while dragging it to either side will dock it there. This makes placing two windows side-by-side a breeze. An interesting and rather unconventional feature (at least as far as Windows features go) is the window wipe-away. You can grab a window and shake it from side-to-side and thus “wipe away” all the other windows to leave it as the only one that’s not minimized. Do it again and the rest of the windows come back…

Another noticeable change is the lack of the Windows Sidebar. The gadgets are now free floating and can be set to be on top of other windows. It’s an interesting decision and certainly reclaims the space the sidebar could at times take up on lower resolution monitors, but it does make gadgets useful primarily only when the desktop is visible. Features like wipe-away and Desktop Preview should make taking a glance at the gadgets fairly easy, however.

The Beta experience

This being a Beta release of Windows means that bugs may still be present, application issues may come up and features may not have the best polish. To account for all of the above, Win 7 provides a “Send Feedback” on in the title bar of all windows (well, almost all windows). Clicking on the link brings up a really nifty Issue Report tool that allows you to describe your issue in detail as well as record a video reproducing the issue. This makes it easy to submit feedback on anything from bugs to feature suggestions.

Final Thoughts

My first impression of Win 7 is definitely positive. The new UI seems fresh and there are some real usability improvements in some of the core Windows interactions. I was rather skeptical at first of the big-button taskbar wondering if it will not let me manage my windows effectively, but so far it has enabled me to do it quite well. For more information, you should look at the Paul Thurrott's Windows Supersite. It provides a good FAQ on this and other versions of Windows as well as some other Microsoft Technologies.