Unless you are a PC professional or your recreation consists solely in fiddling with computers (and you’re not sure whether there is an opposite sex or not), you’d be better off staying away from Win7.
You will be doing Microsoft’s integration testing and final QA. And you will pay for the privilege. I’ve been using Win 7 Beta since it first came out, and the Windows 7 Release Candidate (supposedly frozen code) for the last 6 months. Both were generally good OS packages, and fast, but the purchased version has features (and “inconveniences”) not in the Beta or the Release Candidate. My guess is the code was frozen a few minutes before the first product disks were made.
Win 7 is a big improvement over Vista. But then, XP is a big improvement over Vista. Win 7 is much faster than Vista, it may be faster than XP. But it has big-company computer management clunkiness, not what I want in my very-own personal PC.
And Win7 is not ready for Prime Time. Nobody but Microsoft could get away with releasing such untested software.
Networking among Win7 computers is totally different from the Workgroup networking of 98 and XP. You will have to forget all you figured out over the last decade and start over. Vista concepts may be carried forward, but as I studiously avoided Vista, I don’t know how Vista to Vista networking works.
If you understand and are competent with XP, you will find Microsoft support clueless. They can help first-time computer users set up Win7, but beyond the basics they are lost. Good, friendly people, eager to help, but in over their heads. And second-tier (higher level) technical support is buried. Not a good sign.
After 30 hours of trying to get Win7 to do what I could do with XP, I reloaded XP. This review is typed on XP. I’ll wait for Win 7 service pack (SP) 2 in a year or so. I suggest you do the same.
More details and explanation
I had Win 7 Beta in a heterogeneous network with XP. When I upgraded my XP computer to Win 7 things changed – particularly networking.
I’ve been using Microsoft products since the beginning, and have advanced through Win 95, Win 98, and XP, with home networks since networking became native with Win98. For me a computer is a tool to do work. Computers are not hobbies, entertainment, nor my profession. I try to get computers and networks to do what I want (sharing printers and files, backing each other up) and have generally succeeded, but fiddling with them is not entertaining.
Win 7 is a big improvement over Vista. But then, XP is a big improvement over Vista. I replaced Vista with XP on my laptop when I realized the 3gigaherz dual-core laptop with 2 gig of memory running Vista was slower than my desktop which had a 500 megaherz Pentium, half a gig of memory, and ran XP. Eight times the processing power, 4 times the memory, and slower. Vista is a pig.
But then, Win 98 is an improvement over Vista, as was DOS 6 and Windows 3.0.
Overall Approach.
Windows 98 was for personal computers – your computer, you managed it, you (and only you) used it. It was your computer with your OS, your configuration, your file structure, your networking, and your software.
Windows NT and Win 2000 were for corporate PCs. The computer belonged to corporate IT. Corporate IT managed and controlled the computer: its configuration, networking, software, available services, etc. A Windows 2000 computer was just a terminal into the big distributed corporate computer, a terminal that had local storage for your personal work, but you, the user, were not to control it.
An environment (and need) that emerged about 10 years ago was the multi-user PC: your spouse, your kids (of varying ages), the baby sitter, your brother, and anybody else who happened to be in your house would use your PC, surf the web (porn sites), download software, introduce malware, and make changes that messed forced you to rebuild.
XP adapted to the multi-user PC environment, giving you, the owner, some control and giving each user his own logon and file structure. This changed where files were stored, even if you were the only user, pretending that the file system actually began with the Desktop (a la Apple; Bill Gates has a serious envy problem relative to Steven Jobs) rather than with the hard drive, the actual root. XP wants to force all your work into the “My Documents” folder which is OK, I guess, unless you want to put your work on a hard drive or partition other than C:\. My Documents is, of course, actually located at C:\Documents and Settings\
Win 7 combines the Win 98, WinXP, and Win 2000 approaches into one single package. Now, its may be your persona PC you bought from Dell, you may be the only user, but there are some things you can’t do unless you are the Administrator. This is to protect you from people who won’t be using your computer anyway and to ensure you use the PC in a corporate-approved way. If you follow Microsoft’s advice and set up an Administrator account in addition to your user account, you will discover that, when you turned the computer on while you were making coffee, it didn’t boot all the way up, but only half-way and waited for you to tell it who was going to use the computer: you or the Administrator (which is, of course, you). After you give it an answer, Win 7 will finish launching while you waste time watching it.
If you want your laptop to be ready to do work when you come back with coffee, don’t set up an Administrator account. Just make sure you have all administrative privileges (easy to do) when you set up your user account during install. Or straighten everything out with the Users program in Control Panel. Vista is the same way, so if you’ve been suffering with Vista you already know about it.
Operating without full privileges actually makes sense in Linux, where you can accidentally do some serious damage very quickly, and when IT doesn’t want you do change your PC, but it is unnecessary for a personal PC. (It’s sad when PC no longer means “Personal Computer,” so you have Corporate Personal Computers and Personal Personal Computers.)
Still, you will regularly be told you can’t do things you want to do unless the Administrator approves. Click a button to approve (or turn the protection off, I don’t remember how) as it is an opportunity to think twice before doing something really stupid – like installing and running eatsyourdiskforlunch.exe which you accidently downloaded).
When upgraded from XP, I discovered that I didn’t have permission to install some of the utility programs I’d downloaded (and paid for). The upgrade conveniently saved the install files, but I couldn’t run them. Changing the file ownership (file ownership – another new “feature”) didn’t help. Fortunately I’d copied all these programs to another disk and I could run them from there. Why Win7 would save an exe file then not let you run it is another entry in the growing list of Redmond Mysteries.
Networking
Somewhere along the way (98 or XP) Windows made networking a native feature of the OS and introduced the concept of Workgroups. Workgroups allowed you to set up logical subnets on your router so I could keep my computers and their associated storage and printers separate from my kids computers. You can give your workgroup any name you want, though the default was “Workgroup”. You added individual computers to one workgroup or another. Certain resources could be shared among workgroups. Each computer selected files and folders for sharing, with or without passwords, and it was all pretty powerful; at least it did everything I ever wanted it to. Firewalls on individual computers provided added protection and flexibility.
Rather than building on the familiar, Win7 introduces a totally new concept: Homegroup. In a heterogeneous network (e.g., Win 7 and XP on different computers) Workgroups still exist, but became inoperative when I upgraded my XP to Win7. Now everything is “Homegroup”. All homegroups are named “Homegroup”. You can put in security and passwords, but you can’t change the name. Perhaps that’s not true, but Microsoft support doesn’t know how to do it.
If it is possible to set up separate logical subnets on a router – with different passwords and sharing – and I’m not convinced it is – all the homegroups will have the same name: “Homegroup.” Worthless.
Support.
The Microsoft website is about as organized as a library with all the books misfiled. There is a support Chat function, if you have the Win7 ID number (the one that appears in Computer Properties, not the unlock key that comes with the disk) you can “chat” with friendly, responsive people who seem to know less about Win7 than I do. I’ve been into chat 3 times, each time it took me 30 minutes to find it, and each time I somehow got there a different way. It isn’t easy and obvious like other support sites like Dell and Computer Associates.
Like much that comes from Microsoft, the web site makes sense only if you already know so much that you don’t need to go to the web site.
I spent 4 hours with three different first-level support people (nice folks) doing goofy things as they tried to figure out how Win7 networking worked. Microsoft is so inundated with Win7 problems that the second-level technical support is backlogged at least 24 hours.
When support is buried, you know the product has lots of problems.