Sometimes I wonder if Windows Seven (7) is a by product of Bill Gates’ turning philosophical after looking at his empire. It has all the makings of the Seven cardinal Sins that MS has always been guilty of. 7 signifies MS’ Greed for money, their Pride at having dominated the Operating Software (OS) market for so long, the Wrath they have incurred against Windows (Vista in particular), their sloth in taking feedback and seriously trying to improve Windows, the Gluttony of Windows when it comes to usurping Bandwidth, the Envy of OSes like Leopard and last but not the least, the longlasting Lust displayed by Windows in screwing up your system at every available opportunity.
But should you still be interested in learning how good or "less bad" 7 is compared to its predecessors (XP & Vista), read on. These observations were made while using a 7 Home Premium 64 bit edition and the comparisons (wherever subjective) with XP/Vista have been based on my own experience while using these OSes. Lets first look at the pluses.
(1) Support for sophisticated/state of the art hardware – Whether it is a touchscreen monitor or high-performance Graphic Cards, 7 has support, often intrinsic, for the most demanding hardwares. While XP will not recognize more than 3 GB RAM (most of it being 32 bit), the 64 bit 7 really helps you ramp up your RAM to mindblowing levels of 8/16 GB. Similarly while XP does not support DirectX 11, its default in 7 !! What all this does is help you scale up your system and make a monster out of it. So now you can replace that monitor of yours at just 11-12 k and convert your machine in touchscreen !!
(2) Driver Updates & Installations - With hardware getting extremely complex and exacting every passing day, perhaps the biggest merit of 7 lies in its ability to automatically detect, download and install drivers for all your components. Well, most of the time if not always. For a change you can take a coffee break while 7 does the slogging for you.
(3) Graphics/Games - If you are into state of the art gameplay/graphics, 7 may just be the answer. Not only does it support advanced graphics/cards/multiplayer modes, etc, it does so with the minimum of effort from your side.
(4) Recovery - Thanks to a shift from kernel based architecture, 7 is more crash-resistant or shall we say crash-prepared than its predecessors. It allows you to backup your HDD, enabling you to even choose which file formats to backup !! Of course this is useful only if you are naïve enough to try to backup with the help of your OS !
(5) Windows Media Player 12, the default one in 7 supports aac and h264 formats too. Yes you heard it right. MS seems to be finally waking up to the truth that very little, if any media is written in its proprietary wma/wmv format.
(6) Experience Index – Benchmarks your PC against others using 7/Vista and identifies the bottlenecks/areas of improvement to enable you to bolster its performance. Of course the other thing it invariably does is give you a feeling that your hardware is underpowered but we wont speak about that here.
(7) Network efficiency - If downloading is a regular evil with you, 7 is the way to go. Downloading/uploading is much nippier compared to Vista. Even to XP. This improvement alone can seriously help you realise “Bang for your Buck”.
That said, lets now quickly run through the list of shortfalls. I assure you I have tried to curtail this section to the best of my ability :-P
(1) Hogs on Space/Resources - XP typically takes 2-3 GB of space for installation and keeps stretching this to 4-5 GB. With 7, Windows break all records. It takes 12-15 GB of space to install and gallops fast towards the 30 GB mark if you are not careful. For many this is the entire HD space :-P Funny thing with 7 is, your free space remains the same no matter how many GBs of crap you delete. It just gets re-allocated to the OS. Blame it on MS’s obsession with storing multi-point System Restore data.
(2) Needs Regular Updates - Even if the world gets destroyed, Windows will ask for an update, just in case some alien wants to use it ! Somebody should try telling MS that other than being plain annoying to the user, updates require an Internet connection and this is not yet "Free" in India.
(3) Help Module - True to its reputation, 7 doesnt disappoint. Its Help module remains as helpless as ever !! Wish MS had given us the option of not installing it and saving on disk space just like they have given the option of not installing Movie Maker, another zilch of a software.
(4) Software Compatibility - Quite a lot of software is being re-released to make it 7 compatible but there may still be a lot of useful freeware that wont be compatible with 7. And if you are using the 64 bit version, god save you.
(5) Virus - If you are expecting a Virus free OS like the Leopard, 7 is streets behind.
(6) Aero – If you are wondering how come I havent yet spoken about the talk of the town feature in 7 viz., the “Aero” dynamic interface, here’s just why. The Aero makes 7 look like a Mac but sadly doesnt make it perform like one. The see-through glass lookalike task bars, the Jump List for toggling between favorite applications, or dragging windows for maximizing/minimizing them is all very amusing for a 12 year old but offers very little practical utility. I swear I’m still in love with the pixellated, large-font but easy-to-read interface of Windows 98. 98 was the closest that Windows got to perfection. Which is why they stopped selling it I guess.
Actually this Review is not as much about how good 7 is as it is about "whether you should upgrade to 7 if you are using XP/Vista currently". And the verdict is unless you plan to use XP-incompatible hardware/software, touchscreen features, and/or RAM intensive applications, just dont bother.
(PS – Unless otherwise stated, for