Windows 7 First Impressions

I'm finally running a modern Windows system on one of my own boxes now.

Hey, I am a Mac user after all.

First off, it looks very nice. Straight up one of the best looking operating systems around, though I do believe KDE has had that style for a long time now.

The problem with 7 is that there is never a new feature there that makes me think, "I wish I had that before" or "that's a really great idea". I got that feeling all the time with OS X. Or even with major revisions of Firefox.

I don't care about how much they've changed under the hood; I don't have lasting virus issues (which can be about 80% attributed to "not being a retard") and it just doesn't affect me as an end user.

What does affect me is their silly pop-ups that come up anytime I want to do anything. I understand the reasoning behind it, but (a) once some average user sees it come up a million times a minute, they'll just ignore it and click affirm to everything and (b) doesn't ask for your admin password to make modifications so while it might protect you from random internet programs, it doesn't prevent some guy from just screwing around with your computer. The Windows convention of always running as admin is dangerous, SUDO is a very good idea.

The new taskbar looks nice, but the latency from me hovering over an icon to it showing me what windows are open is aggravating. The worst part is, this is actually a good idea; just let me change the timings.

The new Start menu is stupid. I can't rely on the Search function to find what I need since it selectively indexes and I have no clue how it chooses to either. Then when it inevitably fails, I am forced to dig through all my folders to find what I need because it apparently never occurred to Microsoft that there are files I use often enough to want to keep in a location that is easily accessible while not often enough to be on the Desktop or Taskbar. Argue about indexing optimization all you want, all I know is that Spotlight never fails to turn up what I want (even if it's some text file in an obscure directory) while Search comes up empty quite often.

I could talk more, but my feeling has been conveyed. I think what Microsoft did was hire a lot of graphical designers in recent years, but neglected interface designers. Because Windows Phone 7 looks quite good. Bing looks quite good. Windows 7 looks quite good. But they all have tons of shortcomings in their functionality. This is why Google and Apple are running circles around, because at the end of the day Google's page-rankings give me what I want and Bing's doesn't.

Bonus story: This morning I wanted to check something in another browser so I literally opened IE 8, typed something into Bing search and pressed enter. This naturally caused Windows to come collapsing down around me as IE failed, and Explorer, and Task Manager, and every other possible program except (ironically) Firefox. Fresh install, brand new computer; should not be happening, Microsoft. No excuse.