Give Them Your Opinion; I Gave Mine

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes (ZDNet) has asked, this morning, what users of the Windows 7 beta thought about it thus far. I got in after a few others, and it seems as though the entries are coming in quickly, but if you have need to give your opinion, you should definitely  take the time to comment.

As my father used to say, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. So if the changes are not to your liking, the chance of changing things will be better if you actually speak out. Saying nothing gets nothing.

I gave this one…

1 star, because 0 stars was not a choice -

As someone who has been using Microsoft products since DOS 3.3, I think I am almost as disappointed with Windows 7 as I was with Vista. (Windows Me was a good upgrade on the machines I used, so, while it was a minor update, it worked without incident for me). It is better than Vista, just not enough better.

Every time I look and see something I like, I then see 2 other things that simply irk me, they being either non-intuitive, or a clear step backwards.

The install process is the high point. It goes by very quickly, and a bit too smoothly. By that, I mean that I think there should be an advanced install, that would allow more control over the install, instead of making someone go back and change things that could have been set up to individual taste from the start. Since I devoted a slower machine to the install (Athlon64 3000) I was less than impressed at times when I aw no disk activity, and only the recycled ellipsis to indicate progress. Bar graphs are what is needed. My wait was not long, as the entire install was only slightly over 30 minutes, but I think that is because so much software is left out of this install - hardly justifying the title Ultimate.

The screen metrics I like, the color schemes, not so much. It is perfect for secretaries and florists, not for me. But I can change that. Again, I don’t think it is a good start to things. I like the Segoe fonts, it doesn’t make me want to switch everything back to Tahoma, as I have wanted to on other things. The way things are rendered is slower, but they do look very nice, so I’ll submit to it. On the other hand, I absolutely abhor the menuing system, and think that for Microsoft to remove this is simply inane. How tough is it to include the code for the standard way of navigation that will make so many people happy? This item alone would make many of the people I’ve spoken to give it a pass, but as it is, no go.

Performance is faster than Vista, and (subjectively) not as fast as XP, but since it is faster than Vista, it is acceptable.

Since it took some time to get the Aero interface going, and it was absolutely impossible to install the ATi drivers for the beta, or the ones for Vista, I felt we were lied to. So much for the driver base being the same! Programs I’ve tried are working fine, which is nice since many are 32 bit and I’m using the 64 bit beta. so a conditional thumbs up here.

I’m with your colleague, Jason Perlow, on this, there are just too many things that are changed for no apparent reason. Take the home network function for instance. It may be fine for people who know nothing from the start, but those of us who have some experience find it an annoying change. I allowed it to join my ‘home’ network, thinking (silly me) that it would analyze the private address scheme, and join the named network. No, it invented it’s own network, and added entries to the other machines in my house. Just redundant and stupid.

I can’t say enough about my disgust for the change of the start menu. It is a deal breaker. If it would change to the new style XP menu, that would be acceptable, but no it was changed, for no real reason, and certainly not in the name of usability for anyone who has ever used a Microsoft product before.

I’ll not try to shade things my way – the majority of responses were extremely favorable. This is annoying, but reasonable if you believe that many of these people are sheep and also, that after the Vista experience, people are just happy for a change, however small, in the right direction.

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