Official Help for Microsoft [Product Name Here] for Windows Vista and Windows 7

Disclaimer:

These instructions have been purposely and maliciously obfuscated as to barely resemble their original form. While the original form of this document was found to be incredibly useful and helpful to the majority of focus groups, it has been obfuscated for security reasons.

Here at Microsoft, our definition of “Security” may or may not resemble your definitions of “insanity” or “unusable”.

By crippling our mostly used products with soul-stealing technology as homegroups, libraries, required indexing, DRM and much more, we are securing them so that the bad guys out there are as confused and as dumbfounded as you are.

The way we did things and made products for 20 years was mostly the same. Our users gained too much knowledge of the software and as a result, some users used their powers for evil. Now that we have applied the same confusing development framework as we used in the development of .NET to our mostly used software, the playing field is now level. (You’re welcome n00bs.)

Installation:

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My Impressions of the Windows 7 Ultimate Beta

I recently got my hands on the Public Beta of the 32-bit version Windows 7. I installed it in a Virtual PC VM due to my lack of DVD media. I think I would have had a better experience had I installed the OS on a dedicated physical box but that just wasn't doable in my case. Here are my thoughts on the whole shebang.

Installation

The installation process was much like installing Windows Vista: very boring and rather quick (~30 minutes on my system). When you think about DVD media versus CD media and the volume of information that can be stored on each of them respectively, one might think that an operating system installed from a DVD would take longer. Not the case here; which is why I found the speed of a clean install of Windows 7 to be impressive.

Another aspect that blew me away was the incredibly small footprint of the bare installation. I gave the VM a 16GB slice of my hard drive thinking that it may be too small. But with only a 6GB footprint (image right), that was more than enough.

Startup

They did away with the scrolling bar that I've become comfortable with in favor of a throbbing Windows logo. It is actually quite visibly pleasing.

Login

The login screen is exactly like Vista: good if you're running the machine as a standalone, terrible if you have your machine on a domain.

Networking

While the folks in Redmond kept the somewhat annoying Network and Sharing Center from Vista, they have made improvements to it.

I can now change my IP/DNS settings rather easily without the frustration of having to do it twice. The reason for this is that Microsoft included a utility that runs after configuration changes have been made to a network adapter that validates all settings to make sure that everything just plain works without issue (image left). The utility itself is rather buggy but it didn't crash and… it's still a beta.

Joining my domain that I have set-up here at the house was as boring and uneventful as doing the same in Vista. The folders that I had specified in Active Directory (My Documents, My Desktop) redirected just fine (image right).

Performance

I can't accurately say how well Windows 7 performs considering I have it running in a VM with somewhat limited resources. But what I will say is that Vista wasn't nearly this quick when I gave it the same resources for a VM a year or so ago. Perhaps I should get my cheap ass out of this chair and go buy some DVDs?

UI

The desktop appearance was very visually pleasing and simple. It is almost as if they modified the K Desktop Environment from *nix to follow the logic of a Windows system (image left).

Navigation of folders in Windows 7 is far more intuitive and time-saving than in Vista AND XP. The new Common Tasks sidebar in Explorer (image right), makes navigating from point A to point B drop dead simple.

Also, while I'm talking about navigation, I am very impressed with how coherent the logic has become with navigating the Control Panel. I didn't have to go online to get help to do the most mundane system configuration changes as I had with Vista. Everything is intuitive and seems like it should be where it is.

Running in a VM, I wasn't able to have the "Aero Experience". That's OK. This eye candy I have regarded as unnecessary fluff from the beginning that serves no purpose other than to rob resources from processes that are getting real work done.

Security

One huge difference over Vista that I can see so far is that the security features are far more transparent. UAC is not as annoying in Windows 7 as it is in Vista. For that reason, I have chosen to not disable it as I have done in Vista. It acts more like the run-as-root thing in Linux: only bothering the user when they are doing something of risk to the system.

Windows Firewall has gotten more advanced for home users and those who are paranoid about network security on their desktop. Settings for both private and public networks can be configured easily (see image). As this has been quite the snake in the grass in the past with making network apps not work without warning, I'm waiting for further testing to see if anything has really improved.

Final Thoughts

It is quirky and it does have its faults. It's a beta! But considering the development time that this operating system has had in relation to Vista, I am very surprised with the stability and usability of it. At this point in Vista's lifespan it was still in the Alpha stage and very unstable.

As I've heard from several other bloggers: This actually feels like a real upgrade! I can't wait to see what happens in the future with the Release Candidates and the Final Product.