I LOVE WINDOWS 7

Finally an operating system that is reliable to upgrade to! Widnows 7 picks up where XP left off and improves that – and much more – a lot! I’m very impressed, especially with compability issues; I use a lot of 3rd party peripherals with outdated drivers, and installing them was easier than XP, and the results… they simply work as they should, which can be quite surprising, if you take into account that win7 is actually a new system “all together” (ok, no entirely, but still). Backwards compability rules! On top of that great improvement, windows 7 is more practical and user oriented – it doesn’t just add fancy graphics to dazzle the audience, but that doesn’t have any real purpose and slows the machine down – it runs actually pretty smoothly and all the new functions add to ease of use. The improved taskbar — well, now that is surely an improvement over the last few versions of the OS. Sure, it was quite a breakthrough from 3.11 to 95, but upon 98’s arrival, it was becoming already a little… well, “old.” Then we had XP with a cosmetic improvement on the start menu and Vista with a little bit more of it, but the taskbar seemed to have staggered in time.

now the taskbar is clean, the usage of space is very smart – the small tabs that show up beside the icon of a program to show multiple windows of it open was really ingenious – and the integration of that annoying “quick bar” with the taskbar itself was a clever move. I mean. Why separate one bar from the other? Very clever. When you want to open a certain program, just click it and its icon will be highlighted, not occupying any extra space on the bar.

the new show desktop buttom, windows shake (it’s amazing, just shake a window to push all the others away) and new hotkeys as well as “drag to resize” with visual cues show a concern for user needs and a better computer experienced with enhanced proctudivity. just these little things have improved in about 20% productivity when typing text, proofreading and applying changes to documents when writing. The new windows explorer also makes it so much easier to handle files, especially graphis, since you can keep track of all your documents with easy to distinguish icons.

so far, i haven’t experienced any system lockups, which is quite surprising, since I’m using some outdated drivers, especially for my tablet and headset. with windows xp i would usually experience odd driver conflict errors, and these are virtually gone from 7. Network setup is absurdly simple, and those annoying screens asking you to allow instalation and changes to the system are not so annoying anymore, and they are actually quite pertinent. It’s very easy to dismiss them or shut them down as well. All in all, it seems that they really took the time to organize tasks and present the user with the most common functions we really use.

the new context menu on certain itens on the taskbar (another great move, i hope many more programs will support it) expand functionality and allow you to manage files (and preferred files) much easier and quicker, with less hassle and less clicks. the search bar integrated on the start menu works wonderfully fast too.

real time thumbnails of programs currently running make it a lot easier for you to find the windows you really want, and to me that was surely one of the best new features of 7, since i work with many windows open. I have to have many word processor windows open for text reference, many folders to get pictures reference, image editors to work on concept images and design, and, of course, web pages for research & further reference. the 3d view is also sweet in that regard. the “highlight” option also is good for you to check contents on each window without actually switching to them, so you only do it when you are sure that is the window you want to have the focus on.

the windows key on the keyboard finally has a good purpose for existing, after all, there were just a few commands you could perform with it on earlier versions that really made you wonder why did they have to create a key especially for that (even though the hotkey for windows explorer has always been priceless to me). you can now manage windows (maximize, restore, minimize, fit it on the right side of the screen or on the left) and quickly access programs you pinned to the taskbar by pressing the windows key plus the number relative to the position of the icon of the program on the bar. For instance, firefox is right beside the start button. if I press windows key + 1, it will open firefox for me.

Another great thing I had the chance to try in this version was speech recognition system. I only had access to Vista in Portuguese, so I couldn’t try it before, on earlier versions, but it is actually soemthing that can be quite useful – and that works pretty well. I must confess I was very skeptical about it in the beginning. I mean, speech recognition sytem? Come on. I would be lucky enough if I said “close” and it closed the window I was in. Thing is, it expands much more than that, and gives you some sort of control that sometimes leaves you baffled. The sweetest aspect of it is that you can open any program by just saying “open” plus the name of the program. You don’t even need to say it entirely, for instance, Mozilla Firefox. If you go on the start menu, you will find Firefox listed like that, but if you say “open firefox” it will already know what you are talking about. the same thing works, for instance, when you are browsing for files on explorer. you can just say “double click” and the name of the file, and there you have it. you can pretty much do anything you could do with a mouse and keyboard by just talking to the computer. and I mean it. even dictation works like magic. You talk and the computer writes – with great precision. I still can’t believe it works so well. And it gets better. It learns from mistake to adapt itself to your voice and way of speaking, so words that sound similar will actually be recognized with better precision in future uses after you use the “correct” command – and it’s all on the go, you don’t need to leave applications or start special procedures to teach the computer how to better understand you… it does it all automatically, silently, as you work and use it. It couldn’t be sweeter.

Of course, there are still many problems with it, and I wouldn’t recommend using it for heavy duty tasks, but it can improve windows experience quite a lot, especially if you have to handle with so many different things at any given moment and keyboard and mouse are not quick enough (switching applications, starting programs, going to certain areas of the screen or reaching for needed elements. The dictation feature is great for english users (my native language is not english, so I still prefer to write it down than speak it out because i have to think a lot before I can make a coherent sentence), too. Writing e-mail and blog posts have never been sweeter. Unfortunately, it eats too much memory, and using it with heavy prograns such as firefox can be quite a painful experience, since it also slows down keyboard response time. so you need to constantly switch off and on if you want to use other input devices. it has also crashed on me once too, when it took too long to give me feedback and I decided to enter the command by keyboard. it didn’t allow me to use the program, so I shut it off manually, which must have caused an exception and the speech program just crashed. Not a big deal, but it is when it starts being practical and starts being annoying. Quite often it wouldn’t understand what I said and would say “what was that?” which was annoying, specially when I was saying the command out loud, in a clear voice and with good pronunciation. Sometimes you don’t know if a certain program supports the command you want to use, and instead of saying that, it keeps saying “what was that?” when I said the command. Sometimes, when there are text fields, it also writes down the command instead of executing it, and that was what actually made me decide to use it only in very specific tasks that made the use of keyboard very uncomfortable: you say the command, the computer recognizesit, but it STILL writes it down instead of performing it!

another annoying aspect is that windows explorer actually changes its name to the name of the folder you’re in, and sometimes there were so many different folders open that I couldn’t remember the name of them, and it wouldn’t simply switch to any of them or show me the list with all available options (which is usually what it does when there is more than one option to something with the same name). If I said “switch to windows explorer” with would answer me with “what was that?”

but it’s actually pretty good. you can press keyboard keys – any of them – and you can also control the mouse by bringing up “mousegrid”command, and telling where the cursor should go and what sould it do. if you want to click image buttons or things you don’t know the name of, you can tell it to “show numbers” and it will fill your screen with numbers and you can then tell it the number of what you want to click. it is really that easy.

back to win7 features, the new gadgets are great too, you can now put them anywhere on the screen (more practical this way) the customization options are a little better too, but I’m not much into that kind of stuff anyway, and integration with other microfost products (msn, sitcky notes, windows media player, etc) enhance the experience. the best things about the new system is organization, stability, practicity, ease of use and, of course, sleekness. I must confess I wasn’t surprised by early versions of 7 because I was thinking it was going to be something similar to Vista – heavy, clumsy and disfunctional in many fundamental ways. It was visually alluring, yes, but seemed to be too heavy!

 

In this regard, I was wrong. It is nothing close to vista, and in fact, surpasses all the expectations. finally a good reason to upgrade from xp for sure. it’s a bit pricey… but it’s worth it. you can have 7, photoshop and free applications like google docs and picasa to handle documents and images and you’ll have anything you need to accomplish regular tasks (and many other professional ones too – I do all my word processing on photoshop too; I know, it’s not what it is for, but it does it so well as well!). the picture viewer could be a lot better in my opinion, but maybe I only think that because I am such a big fan of picasa’s.

thanks for reading, and sorry for all the gross mistakes. I just felt like I should write it, but schedule has been so tight lately! I had to squeeze it in.