Windows 7: Hits and Misses

Written By: admin on February 9, 2010 No Comment

Windows 7 finally released on October 22, so itâ??s time for us to review of what Windows 7 does well and where it still misses the mark.

Hits

A slimmer OS: The best thing about Windows 7 is addition by subtraction. In other words, itâ??s not the stuff that Microsoft put into the new OS; itâ??s the stuff they took out. Microsoft developers clearly spent a lot of their energy streamlining the underlying code in Windows 7, because compared to Windows Vista; Windows 7 installs much faster and has a smaller footprint. Thatâ??s why Windows 7 can be installed on minimal hardware such as notebooks and laptops, almost impossible with Vista. Microsoft has also taken out software such as Windows Mail and Windows Movie Maker in favor of making them free downloads.

UAC: One of the worst features in Windows Vista was User Account Control (UAC). UAC was developed with good intentions as a security enhancement, but in practice it was far too complied and resulted in users simply clicking it blindly to make it go away. UAC is not nearly as noisy in Windows 7, thanks to.

Various tools for IT: Windows 7 offers some fresh tools and enhancements that will be warmly welcomed by IT technician, such as Problem Steps Recorder, enhanced projector compatibility, Biometric device integration, and Power Shell v2 and many more.

Power sipping As par IT professional who have installed Windows 7 on notebooks and tablets that were previously running Windows XP and they quickly noticed up to 30% better battery life. This has the potential to be a killer feature for business adoption, because it can save organizations a lot of money in aggregate and the battery issue can boost the productivity of road warriors.

Misses

Missing cloud integration: For all of Microsoftâ??s ambitious talk about Azure and Software+Services, thereâ??s almost no online services integration in Windows 7. This is a big missed opportunity. Microsoft could have done simple things like providing a Windows Live service for backups to automatically backup a personâ??s My Documents folder. This would have given Windows 7 a reputation for being well connected and ahead of the curve. Itâ??s possible that anti-trust concerns may have tempered any of these types of efforts, but whatever the case may be, itâ??s an opportunity that was squandered.

Needs more imaging tools: One of the IT tweaks that became very popular during the Windows XP era was system imaging, where IT divisions set up one machine, build a software â??imageâ? off that configuration, and then use that image to deploy the companyâ??s standard configuration across all of the systems that use similar hardware.

While Microsoft still pushes methods like unattended installs, system imaging has largely become the standard method of doing mass installations. Microsoft has done a few things to make imaging easier in Windows 7, but the company could have gone a lot further. The software giant could have built functionality into Windows 7, Windows Server, and System Center that allowed IT professionals to create system images in a much more granular and flexible manner in order to better adapt to hardware changes and company policy changes.

System files and data still on same partition: One of the worst things you must have noticed that the default installation of Windows does is to keep system files and user data on the same partition. This has always been the case and Windows 7 has perpetuated the problem.