Windows 7 Makes Vista Look Like “New Coke” – Tips and Impressions

Since Windows 7 was released to developers last week I have installed it on my two personal machines – laptop and desktop. In the short time I have used it in both environments I have been so pleased with it that it is worth noting. But I realized that most of the features and performance that have been so welcome, are mostly because of the corresponding disappointment with Vista. My overall impressions follow – technical tips for those installing the Release Candidate are at the end.

In the last three years I bought these two machines with Vista on them. Even though the specs on these machines were near the high-end of their category, both seemed to perform even slower that older XP machines when running as shipped with Vista. Both are HP machines and came with the typical demo-ware and expire-ware and general junk software that seems to come with all new machines now. I rebuilt them with Vista Ultimate x64 (laptop had 4Gb and desktop had 6Gb – wanted to access memory and CPU features) and had an immediate speed increase. But many of my USB devices would not work with Vista – and less would work with Vista x64. My printer, phone, and Bluetooth devices were all without drivers, so things wouldn’t work. Also, much of my 3rd party software would not work with Vista – utilities, anti-virus, and even development tools would not run or were restricted and stopped working because of Vista’s new “security” features. Even Microsoft software like office and Visual Studio seemed to conflict with Vista – don’t these people work together? Needless to say, I was nearing buyers remorse with both machines after their showing with Microsoft’s new flagship operating system. In fact, I passed up opportunities at work to move to Vista and kept working on Microsoft XP until early this year when my work PC was upgraded.

So fast-forward to May 2009 and the release of Windows 7 RC – a completely different experience. I installed the x64 version on my desktop and the x32 version on the laptop (just to see if x64 was still more of a pain). The install process was painless and fast and all of the devices on the desktop were found and compatible drivers were found. Windows 7 even correctly identified my two LCD monitors (one of which is really old) and set them for optimum resolution. Now boot-up is quicker, sleep actually works on the laptop (Vista sleep/hibernate is terrible), only 2-3 security prompts so far during installs, applications are running. Overall things seem really tight, fast, and stable. It is like Vista should have been. I can’t stress enough how dramatically different these two installations feel and perform.

Why the dramatic difference between these two seemingly similar operating systems? I think there are at least two reasons: 1) Time and 2) Damage Control. The immediate analogy to the “New Coke” fiasco in the 80s. Coke changed their long-time formula for Coke and spent a lot of money on marketing to convince people it tasted better than the old standard. Nobody bought it, and die-hard Coke fans revolted. It was a dark time and Coke seemed to be going down, but then the re-released “Coke Classic” and regained their market share and more. Vista really is Microsoft’s “New Coke”.

Microsoft has had time during the release of Vista to get all the technical bits worked out – the missing drivers, the UAC and data execution blocking issues, and software and hardware vendors have been able to come out with new versions of their software that are more compatible with the new underlying OS architecture. Remember, Windows 7 is really more like Vista SP3 with “extras” and “junk removed” – which is fine by me. Vista will get the blame for being so difficult to use and incompatible, but Windows 7 will get the credit simply by being years later in the game. Microsoft also has recently added the Virtual XP Mode to Windows 7, which is really a huge win for older software in corporate and educational installations where software has been orphaned and will not be updated. Vista also failed on the new category of netbook machines – small/cheap/portable laptops – where XP has been so popular. Windows 7 is much more performant on laptop devices.

As for damage control, Microsoft, like Coke, stepped back and looked at all the complaints of their best customers and realized that this wasn’t just “growing pains” and that they wouldn’t just “get used to it” and move on. These were significant and real problems that weren’t going away. So what could they remove from Vista that was the most glaring issues, and what could they add back to justify a new operating system. The combination of removing the most annoying problems of Vista, while adding significant features in, is really an operating system worth looking forward to.

In the end I think Windows 7 will be a big success for Microsoft – like I said, it is what Vista should have been. But if we all had to go through the pain of Vista to get to Windows 7, I think the short attention-span of consumers will quickly forget and move forward. Vista may join the ranks of Windows Me, Microsoft Bob, and other well-intentioned mistakes in the evolution of Windows OS.

Here are a few tips and details of what I have installed – in case this helps anyone.

• Mounting .iso images on Windows 7 – PowerISO is working to mount .iso files, Daemon Tools is not.
• Virtual XP Mode is a set of separate downloads – not included with the base Windows 7 RC. They are in MSDN in the Virtual PC area.
• After installing the base OS, let Windows Update go get all the OS and hardware updates it can find before proceeding.
• After installing all your Microsoft stuff (e.g. Office, Visual Studio) to the same (updates).

Installed and working:

Development

• Visual Studio 2008 w/SP1
• Silverlight 2 Tools / Toolkit
• Microsoft Expression Studio w/ Blend SP1

Personal Productivity

• Office Ultimate (Word, Excel, etc.)
• Visio 2007

Communications / Networking

• Microsoft Live Messenger / Live Writer
• TweetDeck / AIR
• Chrome / GMail

Utility

• PowerISO
• AVG Anti-virus
• VLC Player
• Virtual XP Mode x64
• Virtual PC Beta x64