Windows 7 Review - Not bad

As most of you know (through Twitter), I recently installed Windows 7 in VMWare Fusion. Chris Davis (blogger) asked me to write up a review on it, so here it is!

First off, installing Windows 7 was a painless process. I installed using the VMWare Vista drivers and all worked well. Some of you that are familiar with VMWare know that it “captures” your mouse, not so with Windows 7, your mouse is free to move back and forth between the VM and the host OS (before installing VMWare Tools).

Now onto something Microsoft messed up on. Again. If you notice in the screenshot (right), Windows 7 will have the same “versions” as Vista (Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate). A big mistake in my opinion. All that it leads to is consumer confusion. I can’t help but say: “You’re already taking ‘borrowing‘ so many ideas from Apple, please ‘borrow‘ the notion that one price gives you all the features.”

One cool feature of the dock-like taskbar. is the ability for applications to display progress. For example, Internet Explorer displays the progress of downloads as a progress overlay on the icon (see screenshot to right). The question will be, are third party browsers/applications going to be allowed to access this functionality? Or are we stuck using IE if we want this functionality?

Web developers rejoice! Windows 7 ships with Microsoft’s best attempt so far at being a standards-compliant browser: Internet Explorer 8. But then again, it’s not fully standards-compliant, so you still can’t use all of those nifty CSS 3.0 features. Oh well, it’s a start. (And then there’s the possibility someone will accidentally go into “compatibility mode” and never find their way out…)

One thing I thought was greatly improved from Vista (maybe I’m wrong…) is unity performance in VMWare (see screenshot to left). I was able to drag around windows from either OS and not have graphic glitches. I’m not a huge unity user, but I find myself using it once in a while, so I’m glad it works nicely.

That about wraps it up, if you have any questions or comments, leave me a comment below, or contact me through any of the methods listed on the contact page.