Windows 7 preview

Even at this early stage, two Windows 7 predictions seem safe.

First, it will be better liked than Windows Vista, which has become a PR disaster for Microsoft thanks to poor early experiences for many users.

Second, naysayers will say that Windows 7 is merely Vista reheated, ­ and they have a case. Even Microsoft says that the core architecture is unchanged, and the pre-beta code reviewed here is suspiciously stable.

The new features are generally low key, and the company is betting that users would rather have an operating system that’s familiar but smoother and less annoying rather than one that rewrites the Windows rules yet again.

When will we get Windows 7? Microsoft has not announced an exact date, though the company says it will be around three years after Vista, which launched in January 2007. That would mean early 2010, but given the pressure on Microsoft to move on from Vista, and the high quality of the current builds, most observers think it will be sooner.

The first feature-complete public beta launched recently and, all going well we could see PCs pre-loaded with Windows 7 on the shelves in autumn 2009. That would mean getting the final code to PC vendors in the summer, which is an accelerated schedule but looks plausible based on what we have seen.

Damage limitation
Windows 7 was unveiled at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles late in 2008. Reviewers got loan machines with a preview build pre-installed.

Some of the new features were not enabled in this build, including the new Taskbar, so we also tried one of Microsoft’s internal builds, which is closer to what will eventually be shipped. Windows 7 includes Internet Explorer 8, but this is not covered in detail below since it is a separate product that will also be available for Windows XP and Vista.

Two factors strongly influence Windows 7. One is the poor reception given to Windows Vista, launched under the slogan ‘The Wow starts now’, but soon criticised for poor performance, low-quality drivers for some devices and an irritating user interface. By the time Service Pack 1 was released in February 2008, Vista was much improved; but its public perception can never fully recover.

Further, the Vista user interface does bear signs of haste. When blogger Long Zheng started a website enabling users to vote on their most hated inconsistencies, it soon filled with complaints about issues such as the way Explorer decides to display the contents of a folder as music, or images, even when most of the files are of a different type, and hiding useful information such as file size and date.

Rush job
The truth is that Vista was indeed rushed, mainly because Microsoft spent years going down the wrong track with a version of Windows built more deeply on the .Net Framework and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), work that had to be undone and reset. Further time was spent trying to improve Windows XP’s security with Service Pack 2, reducing the resources available to build Vista. Vista ended up very late, and one consequence was that third-party vendors did not have enough time to create high-quality drivers.