An informal review of Windows 7 Beta 1 (32 and 64 bit versions)
Since 2 days Microsoft allows normal users to download and try the official Beta 1 of Windows 7. I had some time and enough bandwidth to download both 32 bit and 64 bit versions (2.5 and 3.2 GBs respectively) and try them with Parallels 4 on my MacBook (2GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM).
Because the OS was tried on a virtual machine, absolute numbers are almost meaningless. Nevertheless comparisons can be made between the 32 and 64 bit version and XP (tested in the same way).
Most of the following impressions are valid for both versions of Windows 7. I never really tried Windows Vista, so I cannot comment with regards to it.
The Virtual machine under Parallels 4 (latest version that supports Windows 7, released last week), was configured for both tests with 1GB RAM, no Sound, 2 cores. The ISO files from which the installation was carried out (no DVD was used), was done over an external HDD (the ISO was on the external drive, while the virtual machine HDD on the MacBook).
My impressions/comments:
- the installer says that the system will have to "reboot several times" during installation - it actually did this twice (why?); in comparison Mac OS X and Linux (if nothing changed for the latter in the past 10 years) reboot only once, after installing all files
- the startup animation is pretty cool with glowing orbs that blend together forming a glowing colorful windows flag
- the installation took about 30 minutes (pretty good!)
- although the Beta 1 is fully functional until August, for some odd reason the user is required, though not immediately, to go through the Windows Product Activation - why?
- after installing Parallel Tools (which are not compiled for 64 bits), Windows 7 downloaded 1 update for the Windows Defender signatures and started (due to the Parallels Tools) the (Home) Network install procedure; after this I performed a disk defrag (which was completed on the 32 bit version with 5 passes!) and then performed a complete reboot to see it boot performance
- Windows 7 64 bits boots in Paralles 4 in 2 minutes (yes, that long), while the 32 bit version in 1'30"; XP in Parallels required 50"...
- after the boot, soon after the desktop has finished loading, the RAM usage was about 500MB for the 64 bit version, 360MB for the 32 bit version; in comparison my OS X 10.5.6 installation requires about 450MB and XP usually requires around 150MB...
- Windows Media Player and IE8 are still compiled in 32 bit
- Windows 7 has an increasing amount of eye candy, like a glowing start windows flag button (bottom left of the task bar - is this also in Vista) when the mouse hovers over it, or on active tasks the bottom of the task bar buttons follows the mouse by glowing slightly
- Windows 7 sports a cleaner look and the Sidebar is disabled by default; the desktop is mostly clean and uncluttered; the Control Panel though, when displaying all items is pretty confusing (the items are not grouped by type) while the category view is not enough detailed to get access to what is necessary (I personally find "System Preferences" of OS X cleaner and more effective); the Explorer views are also full of details in comparison to OS X - it takes time to get used to it and often I was asking myself if all that information was always really necessary (the answer is no, at lest for me)
- I tried to carry out the Windows Experience Index test, but after 3 mins of no response I gave up; BTW: why does the WEI rating go from 1.0 to 7.9? I mean, 7.9?? why not 8.0 or 10.0? is 7.9 some magical number or does it mean anything specific? why not a round number?
- a new thing that I noticed are "libraries" - libraries are a collection of items and folders in a common view without moving the single objects - that is, as far as I understood, libraries is another name for a collection of links to several folders and files in different locations (local and external/networked drives, for example); you can do that anytime in XP, Vista, OSX, etc - I didn't get it really the purpose of it.
I am curious to read in upcoming review about the performance of Widows 7 in comparison to XP and Vista when running natively on a Windows machine or a MacBook with Boot Camp (not sure whether Boot Camp can support Windows 7 - but I don't see why it shouldn't). As it is I cannot say that this new version will bring improved performance and reduced memory footprint in comparison to Vista. In comparison to XP, in the same test conditions, it clearly didn't, if not for RAM (understandibly) at least for performance.
In the meantime, I am waiting eagerly for Snow Leopard to be released. As it has happened already for the past 2 versions of OS X (Tiger 10.4 and Leopard 10.5) the performance and/or RAM consumption has improved on the same hardware each time compared to the previous version.
If you want to read a more thourough and in-depth review from a true expert, please follow this link to Paul Thurrot's excellent Supersite for Windows.
