Bolstered by the strong recommendations and positive experiences that my colleagues had shared with me I finally decided to dive into Windows 7 Beta. In the spirit of full transparency I should be clear I've only been running the beta on my production box for three days, but… Wow! This has truly been a _great_ experience!
Now, being a manager, I will admit it took me over a week to get the environment full set up – though that had very little to do with Windows 7 and a lot do to with the amount of time I had available to get everything installed and configured. In fact, that leads to my first top 5.
Number 1 – Fast, Fast, FastI am completely serious, this OS is all sorts _fast_. And it started with the install. After blasting the drive partitions with the nice GUI-based FDISK-like utility and rebooting to a "fresh" machine (yeah, I'm OCD like that), the installer laid down the initial OS in what couldn’t have been more than 10 or so minutes.
While I have a decent little laptop here, it's no power machine. It's one of those little (PRODUCT) RED™ Dell XPS M1330 small footprint laptops (that I hosed with the heavy 9-cell battery, but I get 5 hours, so I suffer through it). It's got a decent ESATA drive running at 7200RPM, solid data transfer rate, a decent bus, and a nice 8x +R/W slot-drive, and a T7500 Intel Core Duo clocking at 2.2GHz. So, decent but not blindingly fast.
And the install really completed in just about 10 minutes, give or take. And that's not the only speedy thing about Windows 7. Quite literally _everything_ is fast. Boot up time? Maybe 20 seconds. Launching and shutting down Outlook 2007? Noticeably, visibly faster. Internet Explorer 8? Much, much faster (though that's probably a combination of the improvements in IE8 over IE7 plus the Windows 7 enhancements). Launching Visual Studio 2008? Yup, quicker. Shut down? My favorite; when I'm ready to go home or grab a beer with the gang, I just do not want to wait – and Windows 7 hits a home run. Don't believe me? See Denny Boynton's post on his first 24 hours with Windows 7. Where I just have a gut feel this thing is faster (and it's only a beta; performance tuning is still around the corner), Denny actually times the differences between Vista and Windows 7.
Not to speak heresy here, but I think my Windows 7 install on a "manager's laptop" outperforms the big machine running Windows XP at home.
Number 2 – Jump Lists I was there in LA and I saw the demo at PDC. I thought, "That's interesting." But I didn't really quite get them at the time. Now I've played with them and I have to say, killer feature. Jump Lists are basically MRUs (most recently used menus, like the last files opened in Word) integrated into the new taskbar.
A picture of the Windows Live Writer Jump List is to the right. The Jump List is easily accessed by right-clicking the program icon on the taskbar. You see a couple of options. At the bottom of the menu is the option to close the current app. Above that is to pin the program to the taskbar, which adds the application icon permanently to the taskbar – sort of like the Quick Launch toolbar in Windows XP and Windows Vista, but with more powerful capabilities. Next up is the ability to launch a new instance of Live Writer. Finally you see the Live Writer file MRU. This is a list of the recent files you've saved (you see this post in draft). What I love about this is that I can actually manage my MRU. I can pin the files to always appear on the list, I can view the properties of the file, and I can remove the file from the list (I wish the Office MRU had that feature).
Jump Lists also appear in Start Menu as a fly-out menu, exposing the file MRU and offering the same access to file properties and the ability to pin or remove the file from the list. Just click the arrow and the Jump List flies out over the right side of the Start Menu. Love this feature!
Number 3 – TaskbarInitially I rebelled against the taskbar. Not because the taskbar wasn't functional, useful, and powerful, but because my beloved Quick Launch Toolbar is gone (more on _that_ below). But I've come to not only respect but love the taskbar.
These are the icons you right-click to get at the application's Jump List. You can see multiple running instances of the application with the little outlines to the right of the icon. Windows 7 give you information about the application through the icons – for example, if you're downloading a large file a green gradient progress bar-style "fill" progresses across the IE icon on the taskbar giving you a constant update on long-running tasks without you needing to swap to the window with the progress bar on it. And in a vast usability improvement over XP/Vista, if you hover over or click the icon of a running application, you get a much improved preview of each of the windows of the running application. And in the case of IE8 (and possibly other applications), you see a preview of each _tab_ in the browser:
You can instantly close a window associated with that application with the close button. And as an added little bonus (and there are loads of them; again, see below), if you hover over one of the open windows, the OS hides everything on the desktop except the running instance that you're looking at. This feature has definitely had a positive impact on my productivity… and I don't even miss the Quick Launch Toolbar as much anymore (again, see below for a pleasant side story on the Quick Launch Toolbar).
Number 4 – Location Aware PrintingThis may be one of the smaller features, but it's made it to my top 5. Location aware printing simply means that the default printer changes depending on the network. When I am at home my default printer is my HP Color LaserJet 2840. When I am at work, it is the big dog HP LaserJet M9050 printing/copying/scanning/faxing behemoth. This is a really great little productivity feature; no more Ctrl+P to bring up the print dialog – just click print and the document spools to the right printer every time. w00t!
Number 5 – Spiffed Up AppsI'm a sucker for eye candy. I like the enhancements to Paint and WordPad. Both now have Office 2007-style ribbons that make features more discoverable.
Paint
I honestly didn't realize Paint had those capabilities, and I am both surprised and impressed that WordPad supports a variety of file formats now, not just RTF or text. You can now open and save Word 2007-compatible Office Open XML files as well as the OpenDocument specification that IBM and Sun have proposed.
More GoodiesI am sure there will be a number of "Top 5s" that I come up with as I dig into Window 7 more deeply. Despite "going over to the dark side" (management), as my friend Joe Healy often accuses (I still love ya, Joe), I still fancy myself a Windows power user. I am really looking forward digging into the internals of Windows 7 and learning all the nooks and crannies.
And if you would like to learn about some of those nooks and crannies from an expert on the subject, Tim Sneath posted a stellar article, The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets, listing his 30 favorite hidden Windows 7 features and capabilities. It's a great article with wonderful nuggets of goodness (such as how to restore the missing-by-default Quick Launch Toolbar). Read it, get hold of a copy of Windows 7 Beta, and try it out for yourself.