The I.T Massive!

The IT Massive team have had a look at the new Windows 7 Release Candidate and here is what we think of it.

The new features of Windows 7

Windows 7 has several new features including Libraries, Device Stage, Home Groups and Windows Touch. There has also been several improvements to existing programs such as Word Pad, Paint and the Calculator as well as features added to the Aero interface such as Aero Snap, Aero Peek and Aero Shake. Businesses have not been left out either with features such as App Locker, Branch Cache and Direct Access.

Changes between the beta and RC

There has been several changes between the beta and the RC. Some big changes include Virtual Windows XP Mode (this is not included and has to be downloaded separately), Windows Peek now works with ALT+TAB, there are more themes and sound schemes, Windows Media Player 12 now has a new feature called RMS (Remote Media Streaming) and also supports the QuickTime MOV file format.

Smaller changes include, improved Jumplist functionality for some programs such as the Control Panel and Remote Desktop, there have been tweaks to Explorer and Libraries such as improving the way artists are sorted for music. Performance improvements have also been made such as trimming the WAV files of the logoff and shutdown sounds to save 400ms on shutdown. The footprint of the Operating System has been reduced, the pagefile pre-allocation size has been reduced and the reserved system partition used for features such as the Widows Recovery Environment and Bit Locker has been cut in half from 200MB to 100MB. As you can see some of these improvements are small tweaks but these changes just show you how Microsoft are paying attention to every single detail.

If you would like to see more changes and the thoughts of the developers on them check out Microsoft's Engineering Windows 7 blog here and here.

Graham's Thoughts.

I've been using the 64 bit version of Windows 7 as I don't see the point in using a 32 bit OS nowadays. This was my first install of a 64 bit windows and I've not had any driver issues that I was dreading. I've been running GPU folding and using it for general use, no stability problems or blue screens encountered.

In IE8 it shows the download progress in the program icon which is a nice touch. However this only works well with one download at a time since it can only display the progress of one download in the icon. It does get a little unclear what progress is being displayed when there is more than one download.

In my testing of Windows 7 when using a Java broadband speed testing program IE8 displayed an aero error. I do hope that this is fixed by the RTM release because it is very annoying.

The Taskbar is now an Apple Dock like system for managing applications and open windows. Simply by hovering over the running application icon in the windows bar it shows the windows belonging to that application which doesn't clutter the bar by adding minimised windows to the end of the bar like on the Dock in OS X.

Hovering over the each window in the pop up bar shows them at the front which allows you to search for windows with minimal clutter. Overall the Application and window management works well.

The default display driver included with Windows 7 RC doesn't support CUDA, so I had to install the Nvidia driver. No problems where encountered with the installation of the Nvidia driver (185.85/Win7-64 bit). Installation with Nvidia driver (with CUDA support) encountered no problems running 2x cards with a bit of custom setup.

The default power settings on my installation set the computer to go to sleep after 30 minutes. This took me by surprise as i like to run Folding @ Home and this is not what I expected to happen, a quick change turned this functionality off. This is probably a move to be more energy efficient but I see this move annoying many people.

Unlike a lot of people I'm one of those strange guys that likes UAC, I'm a sudo *nix geek after all. This article on Ars Technica sums it up pretty well. I'm really not happy about the way UAC works in Windows 7 allowing a silent bypass of the prompts and letting processes gain Admin privileges, really that's not cool. Making what is a security feature and making it less effective than it was before by default is not progress. I'm not impressed, lets hope its fixed and stays fixed for general release. For now you can improve UAC security by putting UAC to the highest setting or run as limited user account if you require high security.

Andreios' Thoughts

I agree with Graham that the new Taskbar is great. I like the icon based system like the OSX dock, in fact I think it's better than the dock. One feature that I like is the Jumplists, they contain all sorts of useful options, for example you can pin documents to the Word Pad Jumplist and see the most frequent sites you visit in the Internet Explorer Jumplist.

Another cool feature I noticed is that when a new program is installed it's icon pops up in the left hand side of the start menu, the icon stays there for a while and then goes away after a while. I did notice than when you install Firefox that the icon that appears is the Firefox Safe Mode icon, hopefully this can be ironed out in the future.

Speaking of Firefox it runs quite well under Windows 7, it does lack Jumplist options and also lacks the progress of a download in the icon in the task bar, hopefully these can be implemented by the Firefox team in the future.

As you can see above there are no additional features in the Firefox Jumplist. As you can see below Firefox does not have the progress of a download in the icon in the Taskbar like Internet Explorer does.

The last feature that I would like to cover is the Windows XP Mode. This is a great idea for people that are worried that their applications will not work with Windows 7.

As shown in the above screenshot, you get a full version of Windows XP in the virtualized environment. You just simply use and install application into it as normal. I am using Internet Explorer 6 here as an example.

You can also have application you have in Virtual Windows XP run in Windows 7. As you can see here I am running Internet Explorer 6. Virtual Windows XP is used to virtualize the application, all you see is the application window and not the entire XP operating system.

Security

Overall the security in Windows 7 has been improved over Vista. In this article we are focusing more on the general user features rather than the security, some of the security features will be covered in future articles. If you would like a good overview of the security features in Windows 7 then we would highly recommend listening to the May 21st Episode of Security Now, Security Now 197: Windows 7 Security, you can find this episode here. For people that don't know what Security Now is, it's a fantastic security podcast with Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson about all aspects of computer security.

System Requirements

These specifications are pretty much the same as Windows Vista but while most Vista based computers that are close to the minimum specifications struggled, Windows 7 based computers on the other hand perform much better. The system specifications are a 1GHz processor, 1GB of RAM for the 32-bit version and 2GB of RAM for the 64-bit version, Microsoft recommends 16GB of available disk space for the 32-bit version and 20GB of available disk space for the 64-bit version, lastly you need a DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver.

Conclusion

For most people its not really a matter of if you will use Windows 7, its when you will use it. We feel that Windows 7 this is what Microsoft wanted Vista to be and its like Vista but much better. The Release Candidate is better than the Beta, it has more features, better reliability and it feels a bit more polished. Yes there are bugs here and there but from the way Microsoft has been listening to feed back so far we are hopeful that these will be ironed out.