So you are looking at getting windows 7 eh? Thinking this new fangled piece of operating is something that is worth shoving on ya computer box thing?
Well in short, if you are running Windows Vista, then yes I would highly recommend upgrading to Windows 7. It will increase the operating performance of your computer by a noticeable bit. The underlying code has been changed a bit here and a bit there to make it run smoothly on less capable machines.
The requirements for it are thus
• 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor (If your computer still functions, it probably has this)
• 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit) (You may need to upgrade ram on older systems)
• 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit) (again if you computer still works it probably has a big enough hard disk, if not they are cheap enough to replace)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver (hmmm I think the oldest dx9 card are about 5~7 years old now, so again highly likely you have this already)
So first thing to notice is that it requires about the same as vista, well everything above the “Home Basic” edition. So if you’re running vista you can run windows 7. Good news eh?
Now we have got a small part of the hardware requirements out of the way, let’s look at the actual operating system. It looks pretty much as the same as vista on the initial launch, the start button is still rounded and pokes a bit above the task bar for no reason other than to annoy people.
The task bar after a bit more interrogation is a bit different then previous window’s task bars. Tasks can be dragged to re-order them, instead of having to tactfully opening the windows in a specific order if you want them that way, which has always bugged me. Also when you right click an icon you get contextual commands. For example with msn, you can change your status to away, or start a new conversation or sign out. This only works with a select few programs, the windows stuff is a given, but also chrome does this. Skype, steam, filezilla, googletalk, pidgin and the others I have tried do not. I suspect it is up to the developer whether to bother with this.
So after the taskbar, what do you see? Well the desktop I suppose is the next step on this rambling review. You can change the wallpaper, set it to a cycle, and change the transparent colour of windows and the task bar. Not a lot of stuff to say about that then its okay I suppose. If you want to see something strange, look at the pre-loaded wallpapers. Some of them are a bit strange.
The new aero interface is well a lot more helpful than the eye candy affair of vista. You can drag a window to the side and it will fill that half of the screen, to the top to maximise it or shake it to make the others minimise. The auto-sizing to fill half the screen is really handy sometimes. Especially if you want to keep an eye on multiple things.
My Desktop
One of the random features I like is “snipping tool”, with this you can capture a space on your desktop. Either an entire window, a bit of text, the full desktop into a image. This is quite handy and also replaces alt+prnt scrn since it allows more control of what you’re capturing. As you don’t have to open paint just to save the image captured by print screen.
Home group
That was taken with the snipping tool and brings us onto Homegroups, aka public folder sharing utility over networked computers. You can share music, pictures, videos and work over the network you are on to other computers. For example if you have all your holiday computers on pc A and your sibling wanted to grab a few. You don’t want him/her coming in with a pen drive or to give her/him access to shared folder. So you create a link to the home group and then s/he can access them. This has been around for ages, but it now simpler to share stuff over a network. Some of the stuff on Windows 7 does seem to make it easier to do stuff to the novice user. Which I can see merit in, also some parts bring up the question of why make it like that? x.x;
With my wireless card it had the correct drivers for it and not a lot had to be changed for that. For my dvd drive, it detected what it was without any fuss. My 2nd monitor plugged in a worked straight off the bat. Even tho it suggests installing the monitor’s drivers I have never had reason to do so in the past. I have encountered some issues with my graphics driver falling over from time to time, but that is probably nvidia’s doing and not a lot to do with windows. I also read some time ago that windows 7 will be able to spoof a secondary wireless card. So you can connect to 2 wirelesses at the same time.
Other issues are well, it doesn’t like non-roman input so far. For example Japanese kana, tho this could be due to a option that I have overlooked but it is a bit irritating trying to type something out when in notepad and it coming up as unknown character icons. 私ま学生です＝Ｄ
Overall windows 7 does have some issues, especially with driver support like vista did. Tho it is on a far less scale then the madness vista instigated with it’s launch. On the upside, it is speedy, quick and has some handy features. Thank you for reading this brief review 
I am running windows 7 64 bit professional edition, off the MSDN:AA scheme.
If you have any questions or want more screen shots then please post a comment. I think I will take some videos of some of the features in the near future to give you people a better understanding of what windows 7 offers.
