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Many of my friends and readers adamantly refused to make the switch to Windows Vista when it came out. Some who bought new machines with Vista installed immediately “downgraded” the OS. A few proclaimed that they would give up XP only when you pried it from their cold, dead hands. But even in the last category, many of them are impressed with what they’ve seen in the Windows 7 beta.
While some tech pundits are saying 7 isn’t really all that different from Vista -- and indeed, one of the attractions for Vista users is that 7 can generally use the same drivers and run the same apps as Vista -- the consensus among anti-Vista folks I know who’ve tried the 7 beta seems to be that the new operating system is “Vista done right.”
Here’s why I think you’ll see many of the XP diehards happily embracing Windows 7 when it’s released.
1: UAC has mellowed out
User Account Control in Vista is like living with an overprotective mother -- when you’re 30. It's constantly popping up to warn you of impending danger, even when you're just trying to take a look at Device Manager or perform some other innocent task. It hovers over you and nags you constantly: “Are you sure you want to do that?” Like Mom, UAC has our best interests in mind, but it can drive you nuts in the name of “security” -- especially when you consider that it doesn’t really define a security boundary. (For more on that, see Mark Russinovich’s TechNet Magazine article "Inside Windows Vista User Account Control ."
Windows 7 doesn’t do away with UAC, but it does give users options regarding its behavior. By reducing the number of unnecessary and redundant UAC dialogs, making the prompts more informative, and providing users with more control over UAC, Windows 7 maintains many of the benefits of the feature without intruding on users’ computing lives so much that they turn the whole thing off in frustration.
2: Explorer is no longer a pane in the behind
In a misguided attempt to alleviate the need for horizontal scrolling, Vista made the left navigation pane in Windows Explorer a constantly moving target. As you move your mouse, it will automatically scroll back and forth. My husband calls this auto-scrolling feature the “whack a mole” phenomenon because of the way the contents of the pane seem to dodge back and forth.
You can avoid the auto-scrolling by dragging the pane to make it wide enough to accommodate the entire tree, but that isn’t a good option on a small screen, such as the one on my compact VAIO notebook.
In Windows 7, the navigation pane stays still, so you no longer risk getting seasick from all the swaying back and forth.
3: Graphics cards coexist peacefully once more
In XP, we could use pretty much whatever graphics cards we wanted for multiple monitors. I had a machine with three cards installed: an NVidia, an ATI, and a Matrox. XP would stretch my desktop across all three monitors attached to those cards. When I upgraded that machine to Vista, I found that I no longer had multiple monitors. Some research revealed that to use multiple graphics cards, they would have to all use the same driver. That meant I couldn’t use cards from different vendors together. I had to shell out a few bucks to get more ATI cards before I could use all my monitors again.
According to reports, Windows 7 has added support for multiple heterogeneous graphics cards from different vendors. Now this probably doesn’t mean you can combine ATI and NVIDIA cards in an SLI-configuration, but it sounds as if we can have our multi-vendor multi-monitor setups back.
4: Clutter and bloat is reduced
Vista was perhaps the culmination of Microsoft’s efforts to be all things to all users. Along with the built-in applications we got with XP, Vista added a contacts program, a calendaring program, a photo editing program, and so forth. While some users appreciate all these free applications, many others have been annoyed by the “extras” they don't need or use. If you're planning to install Office with Outlook, there's no need for Contacts and Calendar. And if you have your own favorite and more powerful graphics applications, such as PhotoShop, there's no need for Photo Gallery. The extras just clutter up your Programs menu and take up space on the hard disk.
With Windows 7, Microsoft has removed a number of the extra programs and now offers them as free downloads from the Windows Live Web site. This way, those who want them can have them, and those who don’t won’t have to deal with removing them.
5.Boot performance is better
Another common complaint about Vista has been the inordinate amount of time it can take to boot up. This might not be an issue for those who leave their systems on all the time, but if you turn off your computer every night, waiting around forever for it to get started in the morning can turn into a major annoyance.
A Microsoft spokesperson indicated that the company’s goal for Windows 7 is a 15-second boot time, whereas three quarters of Vista users report boot times of more than 30 seconds. Although the beta of Win7 may not have achieved that 15-second mark yet for most users, the majority of beta testers I’m hearing from say it’s substantially quicker than Vista on the same hardware. That’s been my personal experience, as well. Since it is still a beta, it’s not unrealistic to hope that continued tweaking will get that time down further before the final release.
6: Notifications can be fine-tuned
In XP and Vista, you can disable the balloon notifications in the system tray, but what if you’d like to continue to get notifications from some applications but not from others? Windows 7 allows you to customize the behavior by simply clicking the little arrow next to the tray and selecting Customize. In the dialog box, choose which icons you want to appear in the tray. For each application, you can select whether you want to display notifications or hide them, as shown in Figure A.
7: Security messages are consolidated
In Vista, you have several security-related icons in the system tray, and you might have notifications popping up from each one. To make changes to security settings, you may have to open several applications. In Windows 7, all the security messages have been consolidated into one icon. When you click it, you’ll see all messages related to firewall, Windows Defender, Windows Update settings, and so forth, as shown in Figure B.
By clicking the Open Action Center link in the message box, you can make the changes that are recommended or (for example, in the case where you have an antivirus program installed but Windows doesn’t recognize it), you can select the option to turn off messages regarding that application, as shown in Figure C.
8: Side-by-side windows auto-size
Most of the monitors sold today come in a wide aspect ratio that’s better for watching movies, which is also handy for displaying two documents side by side on the screen. With Vista, though, you have to manually size those docs. Windows 7 has a cool new feature by which you can drag windows to each side of the screen and they will automatically size themselves to each take up half the screen when you let go of the cursor.
By Debra Littlejohn Shinder, MVP (Enterprise Security)
Windows 7 hasn’t even been released yet, but many people (yes, I’m one of them) are already running it on their production computers despite Microsoft’s advice not to do that with beta software. Regardless of Windows 7's incomplete status, many techies will tell you that it’s more stable and reliable than Vista. According to a recent ZDNet poll of IT pros , they are four times more likely to be happy with the new OS than early users of Vista.
Still, as good as Windows 7 is, it’s not perfect out of the box. Here are a few tweaks and tricks you can use to make this excellent OS even better.
1: Get Quick Launch back
I liked the new Windows 7 taskbar a lot -- but something was missing. Yes, you can pin programs to the Start menu now, and I do. But I also liked the Quick Launch bar, where I could put icons for programs I use a little less frequently but often enough that I don’t want to have to open the Start menu to get to them. Quick Launch is missing in Windows 7, but there is a way to bring it back. You’ll find step by step instructions with screenshots in this tutorial . Once you have the Quick Launch bar on your taskbar, you can drag programs to it as you did in Vista.
2: Bring back the Vista taskbar look and behavior
Even though I like the new taskbar, I know some people don’t. They’d prefer to have the old Vista/XP look and behavior, where the taskbar uses less screen space. If you’re in that camp, it’s easy to change the taskbar so it will be similar to the old look:
1. Right click the Start button and select Properties.
2. Click the taskbar tab.
3. Check the box that says “Use small icons” and click Apply.
If you don’t like the way Windows 7 combines icons for all instances of an application, you can change that, too. On the same tab, click the down arrow on the Taskbar Buttons box and select Combine When Taskbar Is Full.
This dialog box also allows you to select the taskbar location on the screen (bottom, top, left, or right), customize which icons appear in the notification area (system tray), and decide whether to temporarily minimize all open windows when you place your mouse on the far end (or bottom) of the taskbar (Desktop Preview).
3: Put different wallpapers on multiple monitors
If you’re using Windows 7 with two or more monitors, you’ll be pleased to find that multi-monitor support has been improved. One thing I really like about Windows 7 is that when I connect to it via Remote Desktop from another computer, it doesn’t rearrange all my icons as Vista often did with multiple monitors. However, one thing Microsoft didn’t build into Win 7 that some of us were hoping for is the ability to set different wallpapers on different monitors.
In XP and Vista, I used UltraMon to do that, but it costs $40. In a tough economy, many people don’t want to spend that much for a program of that kind. Besides, based on what I read in the forums, it doesn’t yet work reliably on Windows 7. Luckily, I was able to hunt down another application called DisplayFusion . The free version gives you multiple wallpaper support, and the paid version, which costs $20 less than UltraMon, gives you multiple taskbars and window management features. I’ve installed it on two Windows 7 computers and it works great. As you can see in Figure A, you can configure a variety of settings.
4: Turn off Aero Snap
A new feature in Windows 7 is Aero Snap, which causes your application windows to automatically snap into a preconfigured place when you move them to the edges of the screen. Drag a window to the far right, and it will size itself to fill exactly half the screen. Drag it to the top corner and it will maximize to fill the whole screen. This can be handy, but it can also be annoying if you prefer that your windows stay the size you made them. Luckily, you can easily turn Snap off. Here’s how:
1. Click Start and select Control Panel.
2. Click Ease of Access Center.
3. Click Make the Mouse Easier to Use.
4. Select the Prevent Windows From Being Automatically Arranged When Moved To The Edge Of The Screen check box.
5. Click OK.
5: Display Control Panel applets with small icons
By default, the Windows 7 Control Panel shows the Category view (Figure B), similar to the default in Windows Vista.
Figure A
Figure B
You can easily change to a more classic view by clicking All Control Panel Items at the bottom of the categories list, but that gives you a list of the items represented by large icons, as shown in Figure C.
What if you’d like to display the items with small icons so more of them will fit in the same space? Your first thought might be to click the View menu on the taskbar, but at least in the public beta (build 7000), the icon size choices are all grayed out. However, there’s a little trick: Right-click on an empty space in the window, and you’ll get a context menu from which you can pick View Small Icons. Selecting this command will allow you to display many more items in the same size window, as shown in Figure D.
6: Format the text in sticky notes
Another new feature in Windows 7 is the built-in Sticky Notes application. You’ll find it on the Start menu. You’ve probably already discovered that you can change the color of notes by right-clicking and selecting a new color. You may also have figured out that you can use the Ctrl + B and Ctrl + I shortcuts to format the text as bold or italic. But did you know that you can make bulleted and numbered lists in your sticky notes, and increase or decrease the text size? Here are some more handy keyboard shortcuts that work within sticky notes:
• Ctrl + Shift + L (once): Bulleted list
• Ctrl + Shift + L (twice): Numbered list
• Ctrl + Shift + >: Increase text size
• Ctrl + Shift + <: Decrease text size
• Ctrl + U: Underline
• Ctrl + T: Strikethrough
Figure C
Figure D Figure D
Figure E shows an example of how the shortcuts can be used to format text in sticky notes.
7: Turn off Windows features
Microsoft gives you much more flexibility with Windows 7, allowing you to turn off Windows components -- such as Internet Explorer, Windows Search, the Gadget platform, and media features -- that you couldn’t disable in earlier versions of Windows. Here’s how:
1. Click Start | Control Panel and select Programs And Features.
2. In the left pane, click Turn Windows Features On Or Off.
3. Simply select or deselect the check boxes to enable or disable the various Windows features, as shown in Figure F, then click OK.
8: Make Adobe Reader display PDFs properly
If you’ve installed Adobe Reader in Windows 7, you may notice that sometimes when you try to open a PDF file, you get an error message and the file doesn’t open. It seems Adobe doesn’t play well with IE 8 in Windows 7 and won’t open the files (or at least won’t open some of them) in the browser.
If you set Adobe not to display PDFs in the browser, it will open them without any problems. Here’s how to configure that:
1. Open Adobe Reader.
2. Click Edit | Preferences.
3. Click Internet in the left Categories pane.
4. Under Web Browser Options, deselect the Display PDF In Browser check box and click OK.
9: Start Windows 7 with multiple cores
If you have a dual- or quad-core processor (or if you’re really lucky and have dual quad-core processors), you can configure Windows 7 to boot using more than one core for faster startup. Here’s how:
1. Click Start and type msconfig.exe in the Search box.
2. Click it in the list to open it.
3. In the System Configuration dialog box, click the Boot tab.
4. Click the Advanced Options button.
5. Select the Number of processors check box and choose the number of processors you want to use, as shown in Figure G.
6. Click OK in both dialog boxes to close them.
Figure E
Figure F
10: Install Windows 7 from a USB thumb drive
If you’re so impressed with Windows 7 on your desktop computer that you want to install it on your laptop, what do you do if the laptop is an ultra compact that doesn’t have a DVD drive? Of course, you could connect a USB DVD drive, if you have one. Or you could put the installation files on a network drive and connect to it over the network.
But here's another option that works surprisingly well: Copy the contents of the Windows 7 ISO image to a 4 GB or larger USB thumb drive (or a flash memory card, if the laptop has a built-in reader). Installing the OS this way is likely to be faster than using a DVD.
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