// caseydunham.net

I’ve been using Windows 7 Ultimate for about two days now and have to admit that so far I really like it. It seems that most of the minor nit picky things that have been really annoying to me in prior versions of Windows, have been fixed or at least aren’t as annoying. Some of these things may seem trivial and some should have been in Windows a long time ago, but they are consistent annoyances in my use of Windows and while I use Linux operating systems just about as much as I do Windows, I am glad that Windows is starting to catch up in some areas.

First on the list is the speed. I have it installed on my laptop with 2Gb of Ram and an AMD Turion 64 X2 processor and it is speedy, even with all of the fancy GUI settings.  This most likely has a lot to do with the new Windows 7 graphics stack which has brought with it a much needed drop memory usage in the Desktop Windows Manager (DWM) which I tested by opening a lot of applications, playing videos and watching Syfy in Firefox and IE at the same time. The memory taken up by the DWM was about half that of Firefox while playing an episode of Ghost Hunters (by the way, IE on my setup actually consumed less memory doing this same task than Firefox did). I’ve been watching performance on various applications throughout the last couple of days and most of the Windows processes seem to be well behaved.

Next on my list has been a constant annoyance, probably going back all the way to Windows 95, is the lack of my ability to rearrange the icons on the taskbar that represent open programs. I find myself opening up applications in a certain order, as I usually keep longer running applications, or those that I use a lot throughout my day, to the left of the taskbar and since every Linux window manager I have ever used has allowed me to rearrange where those icons get placed, the annoyance on Windows had grown even more. The ability to do this now, makes me very happy.

Still on the topic of the taskbar is something that I haven’t quite gotten used to yet, is the removal of the quick launch taskbar (it can still be turned back on, directions here). I haven’t turned mine back on even though I have used it for years for my most frequently used applications, because I wanted to first see if the new way had any gain. In Windows 7, the taskbar rolls the quick launch bar along with the running programs into one. The difference now is that the items on the taskbar that are pinned to it (shortcuts that remain there) have jumplists that can be accessed with a right click (or left click and move the mouse upwards) that presents an application defined menu of quick links. I haven’t quite gotten used to the new feature yet but am going to play around with it for a bit more. I think it will definitely be interesting to see how applications take advantage of it (such as maybe providing a list of recent saved games and being able to run the game and load that saved game without having to go through a series of menus).

Another notable and much needed inclusion was native support for burning .iso files. Finally, I no longer have to download another program or switch to my Linux system to burn an image.  All I need to do now is to double click the image file and Windows pops open a small window and I can start burning. I’ve burned a few applications that I needed to install this way and it seems to work quite well.

One last minor irritation has always been the built in calculator. At my last job I often had to do a lot of bit manipulation or masking while programming and I always wished I had a Gnome’s calculator on my Windows box which allowed me to do not only do conversions between different bases, but I also could do right and left bit shifts and rotations. Now I have a built in application to do this.

My only real irritation with Windows 7 right now is the ribbon menu system that they introduced with Office 2007 and is now the standard for Microsoft’s applications on Windows7. I didn’t like it in Office and I am not a big fan of it right now in Windows 7. I am sure to get more comfortable with it over the next few weeks, but I don’t think I am ever going to really like it. I don’t like bloated windows and really don’t like a lot of toolbars and extra things floating around, but we’ll see.