Little pass-through….. by John

by John
(Vinkovci,Croatia,Europe)

Windows 7 resolves the major problem with version fragmentation by making more expensive versions proper supersets of the cheaper versions.

This makes the product line-up much simpler; pay more money and you get more features.

There’s no longer a need to make trade-offs between the different versions, you simply get the cheapest version that has everything you need.

Nonetheless, Windows 7 still has a plenty of versions. From worst to best, these are: Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate.

In practice, though, there are only three versions that matter.

Starter Edition is worthless; it’s crippled (it omits most of the user-visible features that make Vista and Windows 7 worthwhile), only available for 32-bit systems, only available as an OEM pre-install, and really should never have seen the light of day.

Its only purpose is to allow Microsoft to have a dirt-cheap OS to offer to netbook makers as an alternative to Linux, but frankly you’d be better off with a pocket calculator.

Home Basic is restricted to emerging markets; though less limited than Starter edition, it too lacks most of the features that make Windows 7 attractive to consumers.

Enterprise and Ultimate can be taken together; they’re identical except for their licensing; Enterprise is for volume license customers, Ultimate is available through retail and OEM channels.

Even with the new feature line-up, not everything makes sense. Remote Desktop support is only available in Professional and higher; Home Premium users don’t get the ability to remotely view their PC’s desktop.

Unless, that is, they install the (free) Live Mesh beta, which provides remote desktop support for all.

One might suggest that perhaps the left hand is not so familiar with what the right hand is doing; if remote desktop support is a feature that we can have for a free download, on any supported version of Windows, why not let us use the (technically superior) built-in facility?

With Windows 7, the install medium itself is no longer restricted to optical media; though boxed copies will all be DVD (Vista included a 5-CD option, but that’s now gone), Windows 7 can be installed from USB key or hard disk, which makes for much faster installs, not to mention much less frustration when trying to customize the process.

One thing that has people is the ability to remove Internet Explorer 8. If IE8 is unticked, then Windows removes all user-visible ways of invoking the Web browser.

The “working” parts of the browser are unaffected because so many applications (including the OS itself) embed them for various reasons, so the rendering engine is still present and still important, but as an actual Web browser, IE8 can now be fully removed.

And OK, it’s being picky, but why oh why do Explorer and Internet Explorer look different? They are meant to look the same. An attempt has clearly been made to give them the same styling and appearance.

Yet they’re gratuitously different. Not terribly different, but different all the same. The spacings are different, and the address bars are different heights.

It’s just haphazard and random. The widgets have been plopped down onto a window and someone’s just said “yeah, that looks close enough”, even though it’s wrong. Fit and finish matters.

As the new UI guidelines say: Pay attention to detail, and make sure everything is polished. Don’t assume that users won’t notice small things. They will.

With Windows 7, most (if not all) connected devices, both USB and Bluetooth, now appear in the single Devices and Printers control panel.

If the device is supported by Device Stage, it has a pretty little icon that looks like what it is; everything else gets generic icons that range from tolerable (printers, Bluetooth dongles) to downright confusing (network adapters).

Most of the devices I have (and I would expect most of the devices that most people have, at least for the time being) don’t have any special support.

Their context menus have some appropriate options (viewing the print queue, adjusting properties of network adapters, etc.), providing quick access to a range of settings, but nothing that wasn’t possible before.

Less obviously useful is Aero Shake; waggle a window by its title bar, and every other window will minimize.

Waggle it again, and the other windows all reappear. This apparently makes sense in touch scenarios; with the mouse it’s downright absurd. The keyboard shortcut for this one is Win+Home.

Windows can be moved between monitors with Win+shift+Left or Right. There’s also a handy accessibility feature; holding down the Windows key and + zooms in the entire desktop; Windows key and – zooms back out.

Though this isn’t anywhere near as fluid as the same capability on MacOS X, it’s certainly better than nothing. It also doesn’t seem entirely reliable.

I don’t know why, I assume it’s the Intel graphics driver on my laptop, but every time I try it in docked mode (which puts a strip along the edge of the screen that shows a zoomed in view of the area surrounding the cursor) the magnifier crashes DWM, and DWM doesn’t then restart properly (restarting the Desktop Window Manager Session Manager, UxSMS, restores DWM, but it should surely restart on its own).

This is particularly annoying, as switching out of docked mode requires DWM to be enabled, meaning that the only option is to fiddle with the registry.

That is all what I have to say about 7.Am I satisfied?Thrilled?Don`t know.But for now that is best OS from Microsoft since Windows 95!