Alec Saunders SquawkBox

This morning I’m glad I don’t live in the EU.  Apparently caught between their desire to ship Windows 7 by October of this year, and the EU’s intractable stance on including the browser in the operating system, Microsoft has decided to ship European specific Windows 7 SKU’s with no browser whatsoever.  Computer manufacturers will be free to pre-install whatever browser they wish on the PC.  Consumers will be free to do the same.  In fact, they will have to, since Windows 7 won’t come with any browser.  Microsoft plans to make IE available via CDs in stores, as well as through FTP file transfers. 

Ugh. Imagine being the family tech support guy or gal when the new version of Windows arrives with NO browser.  Get your thumb drives out boys and girls.  Better make sure you’ve got a browser available before you start the upgrade.

EU officials had been demanding that the OS ship with competitors products installed, allowing users to make a choice.  This would have been great for small browser companies like Opera. Opera CTO Hakon Wium Lie has been the most vocal figure at the EU, sensing a chance to gain free distribution at Microsoft’s expense.  What a fabulous opportunity – work a few eurocrats into a lather over the unfairness of Microsoft’s OS monopoly (again) and garner instant access to millions and millions of consumers.  Microsoft’s choice, however, is not good for Opera at all.  Although it theoretically could result in a bidding war for the position of default browser on desktop PCs, the only vendor that might pay to be on the desktop is Google.  Firefox is Open Source, Microsoft will likely not touch paying for distribution lest they be accused of further anti-competitive acts, Opera doesn’t have the money to bid, and Apple probably doesn’t really care.

The irony? IE share is already cratering worldwide no thanks to the EU. 

At 6:00 AM yesterday morning I started downloading the Windows 7 x64 release. By 9:30 AM I was installing it.  Yes, I admit it, I’m a keener. I’ve used every Windows beta since Windows 3.1 in 1992, and I still find it a thrill to be on the bleeding edge of new technologies.  I also grabbed the x86 version, just in case, before Microsoft closes off the downloads (now extended to January 24th). 

My first impressions of Windows 7 are pretty positive. 

I installed the software in a separate disk partition on a desktop PC at my home.  This PC is an Acer M5620 desktop with the Intel Q6600 Core2 Quad processor, four gigabytes of memory, 500G SATA hard disk and a dual-head ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro graphics card.  The Windows 7 installer is nearly identical to the Windows Vista installer, which means that the process is pretty painless.  You can start it, and go have coffee or a run, which is what I did.

The installation missed a few key drivers. 

• It failed to detect my HP Color Laserjet CLJ1600 printer. The Windows Vista x64 driver for the CLJ1600 worked just fine, however.
• It had no drivers for the Intel ICH9 family of host controllers, which meant that the system management bus had no driver whatsoever.  Sevenforums.com, however, had a link to a full set of Intel SM bus drivers for Windows 7. 
• It misidentified my Samson C01-U condenser microphone as an “other” device.  Interestingly, although Skype can see the C01-U as a microphone, Windows 7 provides no volume input controls for it. 

Beta performance is really no better than Windows Vista, and perhaps a little worse. However, this is beta code.  Microsoft has a history of delaying optimization of the code until just before release. 

• Windows Experience Index score under Windows Vista is 5.1 for this hardware, but just 2.9 under Windows 7.  The offending score is hard disk performance.  I assume that Windows 7 is simply missing an optimized version of a low level system driver such as a bus driver or hard disk controller.
• Boot times were noticeably poorer under Windows 7 compared to Windows Vista, despite Microsoft’s claims to have optimized this aspect of the experience.  I timed both Windows 7 and Vista from the point of pressing the enter key at the dual-boot screen to the login screen, and from the entry of a password into the login screen to the point that the Start button became active.  Windows 7 scored 52 seconds from cold start to the login screen, and 17 seconds from the login screen to the start button active.  On Vista, however, the times were 34 seconds and 12 seconds. 

Visually, Windows 7 is very similar to Vista, with some small improvements.  For example:

• The task bar and system tray have been optimized.  Gone are the text labels in the task bar. Each icon on the bar represents a single application, and if an application has multiple tabs, the pop-up preview for that application shows all the tabs. Right clicking on the icon produces a “jump list” which has all of the recently accessed documents for that application.  Support for these features must be implemented by the application, which means that few of the applications you use on a day to day basis will benefit immediately.

Display tabs opened in IE 8

Jump list for the file manager.

• The system tray now has a small pop-up so that all of the items that run as background processes, but aren’t required day to day, can be hidden on a menu out of site.  An on the right side of the system tray, beside the clock, is a small vertical bar that can be used to minimize all windows, or if you hover the mouse pointer over it, it will turn the Windows transparent so the desktop itself is visible.

System tray with pop-up.

• And why would you want to make the Windows transparent?  To see your gadgets.  Gone is the Windows Vista sidebar.  Now gadgets can be installed anywhere on the screen in their minimized or maximized forms.
• Windows that are opened now have some new behaviours.  When you drag a window to the left or right, eventually it will snap to the side, consuming exactly 50% of the desktop.  If you drag it up to the top of the screen it will maximize.  Dragging it down will make it minimize.  If those new behaviours seem superfluous, it’s probably because you’re still using a mouse.  Windows 7 includes support for touch screens, and these new Window gestures are clearly targeted at the finger-pointing crowd. 

There are lots of other small changes throughout.  Suffice it to say, if you’re a Windows Vista user, Windows 7 isn’t going to feel like a radical change.  Rather, it will seem to be a logical and useful refinement. 

Software compatibility seems to be quite good.  I installed Office 2007, Windows Live Sync, Live Mesh, Skype, Tweetdeck (plus Adobe Air), iTunes, Safari, and Firefox and experienced no problems.  The major problems I encountered were:

• Google Chrome (my preferred browser these days) just flat out doesn’t work.  Windows 7 warns of compatibility problems, and indeed there are.  Chrome doesn’t display any web pages, at all.  Period.
• Browsing to Google Analytics with the IE 8 beta included in Windows 7 caused IE 8 to crash.  The black bar in the image below is IE 8’s attempt to render the performance graph.  The same page was easily rendered in Firefox and Safari however.

IE 8 failure to render Google Analytics page.

• In general, IE 8 beta has intermittent compatibility problems with web sites under Windows 7.  For example, it renders several of the pages in our own Calliflower conference call service incorrectly.  Users of Windows 7 will want to use IE 8 as the primary browser in order to use the tabbed display of open sites in the task bar, but have a backup like Firefox or Safari (but unfortunately not Chrome).

Some of the built-in Windows applets and features also get updates.  For example:

• Paint now sports a ribbon interface reminiscent of Office 2007.  This is a welcome update.  Paint hasn’t fundamentally changed since Windows 3.1.
• The printers window has now been rechristened as the “Device Deck” and shows all of the devices attached to the computer. 
• Windows Media Center has an updated look and feel as well, with an apparently more internet-centric focus. 

There are some new applets as well:

• A handy snip tool that lets you quickly capture images from the screen.  This is way more convenient that shift-print-screen, paste into paint, followed by select / copy, which is the way most people do this.
• A handy ISO burner.  If you download an ISO file (for example, the Windows 7 beta DVD!) you can now burn it directly to media without needing to buy a copy of Nero or some other DVD burning tool.
• A sticky note tool that lets you tack notes to yourself on the screen.  Again, way handier than opening notepad, which is what I do now.

Power management improvements seem to be on the way with Windows 7 also.  Although the Acer has the hardware to support sleep states, Windows Vista never supported it well.  I would regularly find the PC hung over night and need to reboot it in the morning, unable to return it from the sleep state. I was pleasantly surprised this morning to find that Windows 7 has no such problems.

Security is also apparently a focus.  The new “Action Center” consolidates UI for security and trouble shooting into one system tray icon.  When clicked it produces a window enumerating all of the fixes and issues that it has found. 

Note that Microsoft is working with Kaspersky, AVG, and Norton to provide anti-virus support for Windows 7 users.

So should you install Windows 7 beta?  If you’re a savvy PC user, comfortable with searching for drivers that may not be in the current release, and don’t mind dealing with a few small bugs, by all means.  It’s stable, compatible with the software that most people use on a day to day basis, and provides some nice enhancements to the Windows Vista experience.  Do, however, install it in a separate partition if you can.  Don’t start off by upgrading a Vista PC.  And back-up before you do anything. 

There’s a small history lession in all this.  If you can remember back to the dark ages of the PC industry, in 1990 Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0.  A technically ambitious product for its time, it was the first version of Windows to incorporate protected mode memory management.  Needless to say, it wasn’t perfect.  Not until Windows 3.1 – the “dot” release — shipped in the spring of 1992 were the complaints about 3.0 were finally put to bed.  Windows 3.1 introduced some minor user interface changes, but fundamentally it was the release that fixed the Windows 3.0 problems. 

Sound familiar? 

Based on what I’ve seen in the last 24 hours, when Windows 7 eventually ships it should put to bed the complaints about Windows Vista once and for all. Windows 7 is the “dot” release to Windows Vista.

One of the monitors on my desk at the office has been logged in, via remote desktop, to my home PC all day long.  Why?  Well, at home we have a nice fat internet pipe, and I’ve been waiting for my chance to download the Windows 7 beta.  Unfortunately, Microsoft appears to have been caught flat footed by the interest.  Earlier in the day, for example, I tried to go to the Technet site and discovered that the servers there had been flattened by the load.  And at this point in time, the official public download has still to make it’s appearance… over 3 hours after it was supposed to.

I’m a little disappointed, but not surprised.  Clearly PC enthusiasts, having snubbed Windows Vista, are dying to give Windows 7 a test drive.  The last time I recall Microsoft servers being flattened due to demand created by interest in an operating system was… Windows 95.  Yup.  It has been a long time since I’ve seen this level of interest in a new OS.

Good luck to the folks in Redmond.  It looks like That Ol’ Black Magic might be back.

I was up at 5 AM this morning to check and see if the download of the Windows 7 beta was available yet.  A more careful read of the Windows 7 blog site shows that the download won’t be available until this afternoon.  Pacific time!  That’ll be Miller Time here on the east coast.

This despite Sam Diaz’ caution.  Diaz is spreading a little FUD that because the beta runs out in August you’re going to be stuck downgrading to your previous OS and lose your precious data in the process.  Not once in Microsoft’s history have they left beta users high and dry in that way.  Not once.

The other interesting meme spreading is that Microsoft has given up on Windows Vista.  Even CNN has picked up on the story!  Maybe they have, or maybe they haven’t.  From where I sit, running Windows Vista on every PC I own (except the HP Mini, and an old laptop running Ubuntu) Vista is pretty darn good now.  I’m not sure why they’d “abandon” it.  More to the point, perhaps, is that Windows 7 looks like a return to the good old days of timely OS updates.  Windows XP to Vista took over 5 years, but most prior updates were on an 18 to 30 month cycle. 

To me, this looks like the rebirth of the Windows marketing machine, which has been somnolent for some time.  Frankly, that’s a good thing. 

Now where can I get one of those cool “I’m a PC” stickers that are in the “Windows guru” videos?

Image via Wikipedia

Microsoft sent mail to Foldershare users late in November to let them know that an upgrade was finally coming.  Foldershare is the folder synchronization tool acquired from ByteTaxi in 2005, and except for minor updates, it has remained mostly unchanged since then.  In December, however, it will be renamed Windows Live Sync, and finally integrated with the rest of the Windows Live universe.

Frankly, I’m confused, and I’m not alone. I’m currently using both Foldershare and Live Mesh and have been actively working toward a complete cut over of my Foldershare installation to Mesh.  Mesh is a complete superset of the Foldershare functionality, with the added ability for users to access PC’s remotely, store files in the cloud and a set of platform APIs.

Can someone shed some light on Microsoft’s confusing synchronization story, please?

Related articles by Zemanta

• FolderShare becomes Windows Live Sync. So what about Live Mesh?
• Microsoft to replace FolderShare with Windows Live Sync
• Live Mesh upgrades for Mac, Mobile and Desktop