Little Green Delusions - For April 2009
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Working with Windows 7
I have been working with Windows 7 for the last few days now. A not-quite-legal copy, to be sure, but it's just a temporary situation - I'm just trying to determine if I am even going to waste my energy with it, or if I am simply going to continue to recommend XP (usually XP 64-bit) to my clients.
My first impressions are that Microsoft really did solve the performance issue. It runs nearly as fast - and in some rare situations, even faster - than Windows XP 64-bit. That alone has nearly made me begin to recommend this release to clients.
Where they failed to fix glaring problems is with the User Interface. No, I'm not talking about Aero. It might be a performance hog, and nothing more than some pretty on-screen baubles, but it doesn't impact usability all that much (and in some cases even improves on it!). What I am talking about is how people access the nuts and bolts of how Windows is configured.
Microsoft seems to be obsessed with "dummy-proofing" Windows 7 by adding roadblocks, unnecessary warnings and obscuring paths to vital system settings. Take display settings for one. In XP, it was as simple as a right-click anywhere on the Desktop, and then selecting "Properties" from the resulting drop-down menu. You were presented with a SINGLE window with 5 tabs holding all the desired display settings. Now in Windows 7 these settings are buried much deeper - at least two screens and a dogpile mess of confusing links later.
There are other problems throughout the entire OS. While I appreciate the new folder sidebar in Windows Explorer, I desperately miss the very power-centric folder tree it used to contain. It takes a map and two guides to find out how to reach the list of protocols for a network card, whereby it was available via two clicks in XP. And the Start Menu, with its All Programs menu shoehorned into it -- don't even get me started on that!!
This all reminds me of a favourite quote: "The problem with people who try to make things completely idiot proof, is that they always underestimate the ingenuity of complete idiots." The new UI that Windows 7 inherited from Vista is nothing more than a big frustration. It gets in the way of what I need to do when examining and diagnosing a computer, and it does nothing but slow me down if I am using Windows 7 by myself. Microsoft should have implemented a "power users" setting which could eliminate many of these frustrations and bring the UI back to more of an XP-like efficiency.
But hey. This is Microsoft we're talking about. When have they ever not taken two steps sideways for every step forward?