View Profile
View Forum Posts
Private Message
View Blog Entries
Windows 7 Professional Review
Unfortunately, my laptop which runs Windows 7 Professional is not available to me right now, so I don't have any screenshots and will instead post a generic screenshot.
If you haven't heard my bragging by now, you should know that I am a Microsoft Partner. One of my perks of being a Microsoft Partner as that if you subscribe to an additional service known as the Microsoft Action Pack Subscription, you get 10 licenses of most Microsoft client software and 1 license of most server software. As such, partners also get early release dates for such software. As such, my benefits released Windows 7 Professional into my hot sweaty hooves at the end of August.
I don't have any screenshots of Windows 7 setup, however installation was very easy. It is a tad long timewise, but still shorter than Windows Vista. Once I finished installation, I was greeted with the loading page for Windows 7. It is pretty simple and includes an animation of the Windows logo. Then once Windows boots up to the Welcome page, right away you detect significant similarities to Windows Vista. The appearance is similar, but that can't be said about the performance. Performance is very quick and efficient.
I type in my password and login to see a desktop layout similar to Vista except that the taskbar has been changed significantly. Instead of buttons that showed the open applications, it very similarly resembles the Apple Dock. You see an icon that resembles the program. If you have more than one instance of that application open, it will automatically group them together and by clicking the icon in the taskbar, you will see a submenu with all the different instances of the application.
During the driver installation process, as long as there was a Vista driver available, I really did not run into any driver issues for any devices. The theme with Windows 7 is if it works with Vista, it will work with Windows 7.
I got all drivers installed and proceeded to install Firefox. Installation was painless and quick. Also, while installing Firefox I got a glimpse of Internet Explorer 8. The Windows 7 release of IE8 isn't as bad as the Vista release in my opinion, but that won't change my opinion as I'm downloading Firefox.
Although Windows 7 Professional has distinct similarities to Windows Vista, one place where you don't see a similarity is in performance. Upon my review of the software without official benchmarking, performance is comparable to Windows XP. Battery life on my laptop with an extended battery exceeds 8 hours, compared to 4 with Windows Vista.
A couple of other things I noticed is that Paint and WordPad received facelifts so now they exhibit the same ribbon design as the Office 2007 suite. The Start Menu is very similar to Vista's menu. The notification area is kept very neat and orderly on the taskbar, with volume, network status, battery, and system status inside the notification area with a pop-up window containing the other icons that normally plague the notification area. The sidebar is a thing of the past and now Gadgets can be placed anywhere on the Desktop to suit the taste of the user.
Overall, I'm very happy to see the release of Windows 7 Professional, so I rate it a 5 out of 5. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on Office 2010 before long and look forward to writing a review for that as well.
Reply With Quote
