So with all the hype going around the internet about Windows 7, I decided to give it a shot.
Did take ages to download build 7000 x64 on my connection, but I did manage to get it done :P

MS is aiming Win7 to be the fix for Vista, but it's yet to be seen if they can convince the masses to upgrade.  For one, MS haven't really been able to convince people why they should move from XP to Vista, one of the reasons for mass scale retention on XP, especially amongst corporate systems.
Hearing that MS is planning to make Windows 7 run on netbooks suggests that they're definitely trying to reduce resource usage of the OS, which made me keen to check it out.

Anyways, this is my impression of Win7:


First impressions
This pretty much looks like Vista with a few tweaks.  There's a few minor new options added to the taskbar (but they removed the classic start menu :/) otherwise, it's pretty much the same deal.  The desktop looks the same, explorer looks pretty much the same.  There does certainly seem to be a heapload more Control Panel icons however.


Security
I really disliked Vista's draconian security measures, but turning off UAC at least disabled half the prompts.  Win7 seems to have a lot less prompts to being with, but even disabling UAC, there's still too much security to my liking.
Here's an example: navigate to C:\Windows\System32 and try to rename sethc.exe to something like sethc.exe.bak - you get greeted with some nice prompts, and the thing fails in the end anyway.  Renaming from the command prompt gives an "Access Denied" message.  And no, sethc.exe isn't locked or anything (if you're wondering, it controls part of the Accessibility options in Windows), but Windows simply refuses to allow you to touch it.
For the general population, I guess this isn't a big issue, but not being able to do things I want to is a discouragement.


RAM usage
Other main issue with Vista is it's RAM bloat.  With a fresh install of Win7, disabling Superfetch and the paging file, it takes around 730MB of RAM.
Disabling a heapload of junk services, and it goes down to about 545MB RAM, after some force deallocation, pushed it down to 422MB.
(note on force deallocation - if you have some free RAM, even with Superfetch disabled, the system may cache some stuff to increase processing speed; to "force deallocate", one basically allocates as much RAM as possible, with the paging file disabled, to see how much usable RAM is available - whilst this may seem like a better measure, it may be a little counter-intuitive, as giving away this amount of RAM could cause system slowdowns)
On the other hand, Windows XP x64 uses around 230MB with the standard services, and without force deallocation.  After disabling useless stuff and some force deallocation, around 180MB.
As can be seen, Win7 still doesn't get close to XP64's RAM usage, but does seem to be an improvement over Vista.


Disk space usage
Win7 takes over 8GB of HDD space without the page file or hibernation file.  Thus I recommend a minimum of 12GB drive for Win7 installation, and recommend 20-24GB if you can.  This is problematic on netbooks with smaller SSDs, so it'll be interesting to see if MS aims to release a stripped version of Win7, if it aims to get it running on such netbooks.

Stability
Well, I managed to crash explorer a few minutes after use, by entering something in the search bar (also, changing from large to small icons on the classic theme causes the start button not to redraw properly :P, and just changing into the classic theme causes the start menu to have a black baground).  I felt kind enough to send MS an error report, so hopefully it won't be in the final build.
In the Virtual memory / page file settings dialog, it shows no drives - interesting bug there...

But otherwise, it seems to work reasonably well.


Initial benchmark
This really isn't the best comparison, but since Assassinator was so kind to write up a script, I decided to use it as a quick benchmark tool.  The script just uses x264 (a video encoder) and encodes some video.  Using a multi-thread encode, on my quad core Q6600, XP64 encodes at around 143fps, Vista64 at 133fps and Win7-64 at 142fps.  As can be seen, Win7 is definitely back up there with XP64 in terms of speed.  (for a single thread encode, as expected, there's very little variation between XP, Vista and Win7 (if anyone's wondering, Win7 did beat both XP and Vista in this test, but only by around 1% which is hardly significant)).


Libraries
Pressing Win+E now takes you to "Libraries" instead of My Computer.  From what I can tell, Libraries is basically like a second desktop - all it does is have shortcuts to folders.  Nothing special, but I guess it could be useful to some.  I still prefer My Computer though - if you need to quickly access your USB drive, Win+E » USB Drive.  If you want quick access to your music collection from My Computer, just map a virtual drive across to the folder.  Whereas now, you don't get a dynamically updated list of available devices when you press Win+E.


Other features?
Seeing as how little difference I could find, I actually read up on the "What's new" document provided.  Stuff like dragging windows to the top to maximise them really aren't big features (besides, I prefer double-clicking the titlebar for this anyway - faster than dragging the mouse around).  Touchscreen & SSD support will be beneficial to users in the future, but unless you have either, you don't actually benefit from it.


Conclusion
To me, Windows 7 is basically just an improved version of Vista - nothing terribly great really.  The NT6 kernel does have some nice features over the NT5 kernel (like rewritten audio stack, support for symlinks etc), but nothing terribly notable IMO, which is why I found the extra resource availability of XP more beneficial than any added features in Vista.
Win7 does seem to fix some problems Vista has, and if you've got a new machine and doing a fresh install of Windows, there's probably less reason to stay with XP.
However, is it worth the effort upgrading your current setup?  I wouldn't say so, to be honest.  Windows 7 is definitely a welcome change and a step in the right direction, however it's hardly revolutionary.


Will I be using it?
Maybe, but definitely not now.  For one, there's little support for various applications, and there's no (easy - manually removing files takes too long) way to strip out poo poo I don't need.
I said maybe primarily because I'm not terribly glad at how I set up my current XP64 setup, so I might want to redo it, but instead of that, set up Windows 7 if there's little issues with it, when it gets released.  After all, it doesn't seem to have much penalty of XP, except for more RAM usage perhaps (though I'm lowering my available RAM on XP64 so I can hibernate anyway - Win7 seems to allow hibernation with the full 4GB, so I might actually get more available RAM on Win7).

(This post was last modified: 24/01/2009 04:50 AM by ZiNgA BuRgA.)

thanks Zinga you saved me alot of troubles,. ;p i better wait,. wait,.... waiting,.. wait some more untill its 2010,.. ;p
win7 sure looks promising!!

(This post was last modified: 24/01/2009 10:59 AM by Mickey.)

nice review, I'm using 7 as my main at the moment as i love the taskbar, i am one person who is bound to jump out on the first day to buy 7 as long as microsoft don't rip my e-wallet to bits by taking the adobe style of pricing.

z7shaft Wrote:Wow that's a nice review ;)
But wait... I have a question about that last thing about hibernation
How can I reenable it? my laptop can't hibernate. I have 3gb ram, and XP SP2... Whenever I hibernate or put my system into stand by, it BSODs and then it reboots... so how can I change that :S?

XP (32-bit) isn't quite known for its stability.  BSoDs typically occur from driver issues, so I'd suspect that.  XP64 is much more reliable however.