Windows 7 Review

Introduction
This is a review of the latest and greatest offering from Microsoft. Windows 7 is here and ready to be unpacked. I've been honestly using Win7 for some time now. For a Microsoft product, it is - well - mostly harmless. Vista came out and was supposed to right the injustices that plagued the horrendous Windows XP - poor user interface, bad support options and continual crashing. I - for one - stuck with Windows 2000 one my one home Windows machine until I could no longer find support for most of what I needed. (Windows XP was the reason I switched many of my machines over to Linux.)

I will be using the RC version of Windows 7, downloaded from Microsoft directly. One side note - the Windows version will be run inside a virtual machine using Virtualbox 3.x and I will not be testing for speed. This would be unfair compared to bare metal operating systems not being virtualized.
Setup
Windows 7 starts from the DVD by loading itself in a non graphical environment. Then the graphical interface takes over and it asks you to install. There appears to be no live version available. You either install it or eject the media. You have a choice of language selection, time and currency format as well as keyboard format.

Clicking on next brings you to the installation main dialog.

A very simple "Install Now" button appears which will begin the process when clicked.

Here you can load drivers if needed and review if your PC is ready to load Windows 7.

Since this was a virgin drive, I did not test whether or not you can load Windows side-by-side with other operating systems such as Linux or Unix or even older versions of Windows. (This is a common feature in Linux, as you probably know.)
Once this process is complete, you are asked to enter a computer name and user name to identify the computer on a network. I would assume that - if you were on a SMB network such as Active Directory or LAN Manager - you'd be prompted for those credentials.
Oddly enough, the system does not ask for a separate administrator account and password. In fact, you can even bypass a password altogether. Note that there are no password requirements such as minimum characters, alpha and numeric keys or special characters.

Windows then requires you to enter a license key number. This is given to you by Microsoft and must be entered for certain update features to be functional later on.

There is a checkbox included also. This allows for what Microsoft terms "activation." It is a process to change some binary files in your operating system files to ensure Microsoft knows you purchased the product and own - or rather license - it correctly. I did not bother with this, since I only planned to use the license for the purpose of writing this review. According to Microsoft, you do not actually “own” Windows, rather you license a copy of it for the terms they choose.

Running Windows
Having completed all the information, you will then be presented with the Windows desktop:

I'm not sure why they chose a fish as the desktop background. However, it is fairly decent looking. Oddly enough, the “sunburst” light source in the picture changed from dead center in the setup screens to the top left in the final product. In any case, it is a far cry from the Fisher-Price look of Windows XP but not as nice and clean as the Windows 2000 look. (If you want to change the look back to the classic Windows 2000 look and feel, simply right-click the desktop, select Personalize and then choose your theme. I have Windows Classic selected for my work.

Windows comes with the basic theme, some various Aero themes and some specific themes for the visually impaired.


If you want, there are various items you can add to the desktop as a side bar. I personally find these annoying and do not use them, but some may find them beneficial. Right-click on the desktop and click Add Gallery item. You get to add such items as a clock, weather, current news feed, stocks ore a slide show.

More items can be found at the Microsoft Windows Gadget website: http://gallery.live.com/home.aspx
For internet, the only option is to use either FTP through the command line or Explorer or browse the web using the only included web browser, Internet Explorer. This version of Windows comes with version 8.0 of Internet Explorer.

Version 8 of Internet explorer is decent on the display of pages, though many sites optimized for versions 6 or 7 of IE will display with odd behavior. There are methods to turn this oddness off, by switching to "Compatibility Mode" in IE. The default search engine is Microsoft's new "Bing" search service. However, you can switch to the more useful Google or other searches with a few clicks. IE8 - unfortunately - still allows ActiveX controls to run embedded in the browser. You would have thought this security hole been cleaned up by this version of Windows.

Unfortunately, online media is mostly inaccessible using IE 8. Out of the box, Flash is not installed. This means that you will not be able to watch your favorite YouTube videos:

Other multimedia options are also limited. Windows does not - by default - allow for OGG or FLAC playback.

It does appear to play the proprietary .mp3 format, however.

Windows 7 also does not have any facility for playing a commercial DVD, which is a huge disappointment.

Applications
Windows 7 does come with a limited number of applications. Though, you will be disappointed, as most productivity applications are not included and major document formats are not supported out of the box.
Standard formats such as PDF are not supported at all. You can - of course - purchase or download viewers for this file type. You do get an editor for common image filetypes - jpeg, bmp, png - as well as an editor for text files. There is an included stripped-down word processor included - Word Pad. It will handle Open Office files as well as Rich Text and Microsoft Word 2007 files. However, if you have older proprietary Word 97-2003 files, you will not be able to open them.
Windows does have also a fairly handy calculator, fax software and rudimentary scanning software. These can be used in addition to other products you may purchase or obtain.
Any workflow applications, productivity and calendaring applications, games, multimedia editing, spreadsheets, databases and web page authoring or servers will have to be obtained elsewhere.
There are also no repositories from which you may perform an install of any software from a central source.
Security
Microsoft developed NT (the predecessor to Windows 7) back in the early '90s, when PC's were disconnected and single-user. This mindset still prevails in today's version of Windows. As a result, Microsoft dealt with a number of security issues during the years, as inter-connected networks of computers and bad decisions as to the relevance of security became issues. Though all operating systems can become exposed as a result of a malicious command forcing a stack overflow in a critical file, there are steps that can and should be taken to alleviate this issue. One step that has been in practice by most UNIX and Linux - based systems is to run not as the administrator but as a regular user. Microsoft came out with programming guidelines in 1999, which were to focus application developers on using regular user accounts and not forcing the user to login with administrator privileges. Ten years later, however, most people simply login as the administrator and continue to operate in that manner.
As a result, there are many tools needed. First is a firewall to prevent and track incoming and outgoing connections. Windows does provide a rudimentary firewall to prevent what it considers unauthorized connections. The system will ask you whether or not you wish to allow these connections. Second is a feature - first debuted in Windows Vista - called User Account Control.
In Windows Vista, this feature notified the user any time an activity was initiated that changed any system files. Under Windows 7, there is a bit more configuration. Many people had resorted to simply turning this feature off in Vista. In Windows 7, one can take the default - on down to never notify.
Conclusion
Though Microsoft has come out with many improvements since the awful and buggy XP was released as an “upgrade” to the mostly decent Windows 2000, they fail to capture what needs to be seen in an operating system, of the 21^st century. There are still too many security holes - for example no enforcement of user privileges vs. administrator privileges. In addition, the Windows 7 distribution is crippled in that there are little to no productivity tools or applications for the end user to choose from. One must actively seek out solutions for such simple tasks as word processing (Open Office), image manipulation (GIMP), Torrents (Azureus/Vuze), Media Players (VLC) and email/newsgroup programs (Thunderbird). Even the internet browser is only given one choice - Internet Explorer. To find other browsers - Firefox or Opera or Seamonkey - one must obtain these software choices independently.
For those who require Windows and already use 2000, XP or Vista, I'd suggest that a migration to Windows 7 is not necessary. For those who are using other operating systems such as Macintosh or Linux or Unix, there is little need to migrate. I use Windows on a regular basis, as my work has not upgraded to Linux or Unix yet. For this, I use both Windows XP and Windows 7.

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Windows 7 Review

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