After all the FUD surrounding Windows Vista, can 7’s last release before retail make people trust Microsoft again?
Four months after the beta release, the final version of 7 is as near as we can get to the retail version, barring any last minute bug fixes.
We’ll already assume that the Linux Penguins won’t be touching it, but can it convince those people hanging onto their copies of XP that Vista wasn’t the taste of things to come?
One of the main criticisms was that Vista made powerful machines into stumbling behemoths, but 7 seems to have understood that response time, even when starting up, is paramount to user goodwill. There’s nothing more annoying than having your computer stutter for no reason, especially when posting.
What’s new since the last release? Well, there’s the new Aero Peek, which previews a program running on Alt-Tab, and Jump Lists, which adds more functionality to right click menus.
There’s also some Remote Media Streaming, but at the moment this seems like Windows Media Player. There’s better ways to do it with free programs.
As for losses: The drag and drop for libraries has been removed, due to there being an easy confusion on copies and shortcuts. This also means that external drives need their own library or it panics.
Autorun is disabled on non-optical drives as well, probably due to the Conficker spread, which also is why User Access Controls (UAC) has been put to a high priority, so the viruses can’t lower your security on their own. There’s also full support for Touch screens, but I doubt that will be a major selling point.
One thing that may get people excited is the news of an XP mode, which, hopefully, is the backwards compatibility that most Windows users scream for. The only problem is that it may not run accelerated graphics in XP, but as long as 7 is supported by the big games manufacturers, this shouldn’t really be a big problem.
This alone could make people actually want to splash the cash for the upgrade, and rather than “The wow is now” approach of the calamitous Vista, this may yet be Microsoft getting back in touch with their user base.
Source: The Register
