Family Tech: Windows 7 released without fanfare

Poor Microsoft. It used to be the release of a new version of Windows garnered all sorts of excitement. A week and a half ago, they released Windows 7, and no one seems too excited about it.

The truth is, operating systems are becoming less important. The excitement now is in browsers. They are the window to our computing reality, the Web.

Operating systems like Windows 7 just offer a support for running the browser and managing local storage. Not horribly exciting anymore.

Windows 7 replaces Windows XP, eight years after its initial release. Some may argue that Windows 7 replaces Windows Vista, but in the great scheme of things Vista was just a blip; the 21st century equivalent of Windows Me; not widely adopted and likely soon forgotten. Or to look at it another way, Vista was a beta version of Windows 7. Windows 7 is a cleaned up, useful Vista.

Vista users can do an in-place upgrade retaining their programs and data. XP users, and that is most of us, cannot. To upgrade my XP system, I had to backup everything, and make sure I had the install CDs to replace all my programs.

If that sounds like a fun adventure, as it did to me, go for it. If the idea makes you nauseous, wait until you buy your next computer and Windows 7 comes pre-installed.

My installation went smoothly. The specs call for a 1 gigahertz or faster processor, and a 1 gigabyte of memory or more. I have a 3 gigahertz processor, and 2 gigabytes of memory. My performance is OK, but my memory is almost full much of the time. I think 2 gigabytes of memory would be the least I’d use; I’ll upgrade to 4 when I can. There are more requirements and a compatibility tester in this week’s links page.

The improvements are largely evolutionary and nothing really revolutionary. That’s not Microsoft’s fault, as PCs haven’t dramatically changed recently. Windows 7 can handle USB devices and Wi-Fi connections more smoothly. And it looks different, with a new user interface designed to make users more productive. I’m still discovering little tweaks that make sense. For example, when a new piece of software begins to install, Windows detects the install and asks if it is OK to install it. That should stop some of the covert software installations that lead to trouble.

Even the eye candy is refreshing. After staring at the same user interface for eight years, it is nice to see something, anything new.

The big advantage to my upgrading was cleaning up an ancient system. Years of adding and removing software, the occasional power loss, and the day-in and day-out tribulations of a computer had left my system acting a bit eccentric. No virus sweeps or System Restores could ever set things back to the pure wholesomeness of a newly installed system.

I get fewer odd behaviors now, and overall a much smoother operation. This would also be true if I had reinstalled XP from scratch. Now I get the fresh behavior, new eye candy and new things to learn and play with.

Some built in applications have been improved, specifically the calculator and WordPad. Most versions if Windows 7 come with Media Center, so if your computer has a TV tuner in it, you can record and playback programs from TV or the Internet. And a Netflix streaming video interface is coming.

I have yet to run into a piece of software from my XP system that does not work on Windows 7.

Leo Laporte, a tech columnist and podcaster, believes Windows 7 isn’t only the best Windows ever, but is as good as the latest Macintosh operating systems.

I’m not quite there yet, but Windows 7 does give us an attractive and useful platform for the next era of home computers.

And it may be the end of the era of PC only operating systems. I think future operating systems will be the big brothers of the software driving our phones, as the entire computer experience from our phones, to our net books to our full PCs become more integrated.

Links for items mentioned in this column can be found at: http://bit.ly/FamilyTech. Mark’s blog is at http://markstout.blogspot.com and his e-mail address is markstout@gmail.com.