Windows 7 After Three Months
Posted on Mon, Jun 07, 2010
By Brian Whalley
For the last three months, I have made Windows 7 my primary operating system. This wasn't easy to do - I've been a die-hard Mac user for over 20 years. That made much of this psychological. A month later, I'm still using Windows 7 daily though for most basic stuff... at least until I get a new Mac.
There's a lot of great stuff in Windows 7 though. You can rearrange and pin icons to the system menubar at the bottom - A big pet peeve of mine for years in older versions of Windows. It makes it a lot more like an OS X Dock ripoff, but I'm very okay with that. Some applications will also give you more options when you right-click on their icons - Such as a list of recent documents, one-click tasks (think previous/pause/next in iTunes), or other tools. I find in general this saves a lot of clicking around inside the application. Being able to start a closed application from there is great as well - Better than digging through the Start menu and trying to remember where something was placed and where that item fell in the list.
Speaking of the Start Menu, let's talk about that for a minute. It is without a doubt the most quintessential part of using Windows. They made some very good and big changes here. You can easily pin and order items in the menu just by dragging and dropping, or right clicking to delete an item you want. In the end, you can get the Start menu that you really want with much less digging and struggling and Googling for answers. I really like that. The other great change in my mind is the Search bar at the bottom left. Its primary search works on items in your start menu, so you don't need to remember where or in what folder an item was sorted to. I can type in "gimp" and Gimp comes up without any digging or thinking about "where is this on my computer". You can't ask for better than that.
The new "Library" system works in a similar way. Instead of thinking about specifically where on your computer files are, you now have libraries inside of your personal user folder that works much like if every Documents folder in your account spit out its contents into one larger folder. You don't need to think about navigation or where those files are inside of your personal folder anymore. They're just listed with their folders there, and you can copy, delete, open, and act on them in any way like you were at the actual file. I think this is an example of Microsoft taking a big cue from Apple's iPhone/iPad strategy of no direct file system. You do have files but you don't think about their location ever. The OS manages all of that for you and you can just operate on them easily.
There are still a couple nits that I have though. I've somehow wound up with at least two Downloads folders, in different locations. I think this is a result of the Libraries system, where depending on the item things can be downloaded to what is really my Desktop, or ~/Downloads, or ~/Documents/Downloads. I'm not sure what the rhyme or reason is to the different locations at different times, and so I can't fix it right now. That is frustrating.
Overall, this is definitely a real competitor to the modern Mac OS now and passes this flop of Vista by far. It's up to Microsoft now to get people to replace the "Good Enough" Windows XP that people are still using ten years later. Microsoft's battle is not to build a better OS than XP - It's to convince people that they need a new computer and OS from the XP that they're used to.
