Windows 7: Home

A central foundation of Windows 7 for home users is the brand new HomeGroup feature. It’s a recognition on Microsoft’s part that a number of households have two or three PCs and laptops, all networked and often sharing files and media in a less-than-ideal, ad hoc way. Windows XP and Vista’s Public folders have proved almost completely opaque and stupidly difficult to navigate, and sharing folders across different operating systems is a horrible experience.

HomeGroup brings the inherently tricky concept of network sharing into a friendlier and more easily accessible interface, at least in theory. In practice, the insistent offers to join a group as soon as you get a Windows 7 computer on to the network are an annoying barrier to just getting yourself up and running. And if you do decide to set one up straight off the bat, user friendliness isn’t helped by the setup wizard generating a fearsome-looking ten-character password. Rather than offering to automatically copy this password to a USB flash drive, it awkwardly suggests you write it down. You’ll then need to type it manually into any other PCs to join the HomeGroup.

That’s the bad news. The good is that once you’ve set up a HomeGroup, it will show up on other Windows 7 PCs (alas, not XP or Vista machines) as being available to join in the Network and Sharing Center. Once you’ve joined up, an icon for the group appears in Explorer’s left-hand pane, containing default library categories that mirror those of local document libraries (read on for more on those), and you can add files and folders in the same way. It’s simple and intuitive, and the confusion of public document directories with Windows Vista is solved.

HomeGroup sidesteps the inconvenience of having to install printer drivers on every machine in the home
HomeGroup also sidesteps the inconvenience of having to install printer drivers on every machine in the home. Once the printer has been installed on the first PC in the HomeGroup, the drivers are automatically installed on any subsequent Windows 7 PC that joins the network, so you won’t have to go ferreting around cupboards for the CD-ROM or download drivers afresh.

What HomeGroup doesn’t address is the perennial difficulty of sharing folders between Windows 7, Vista and XP machines. That’s a shame since the biggest stumbling block for casual home networks is the apparently random interactions between the different operating systems, and the labyrinthine permission-setting procedures you need to navigate to get a Windows XP computer talking to a Windows Vista or Windows 7 one. Essentially, Microsoft is saying that for easy home networking you’re going to have to abandon or upgrade your old systems to Windows 7, which is far from ideal. But we have to say that the ease of HomeGroup networking, once you’ve made the effort to set one up, is a powerful argument for abandoning the old OSes.

Browsing the Libraries

Libraries are a new Windows concept that some of the PC Pro team have taken to like a duck to water, while others have decided they’re too abstract to be useful. The idea is designed to alleviate the common problem of having files and documents scattered around various disks, and the issue of important files being tied to your system drive. It’s possible to change the default location of the Documents folder under XP and Vista, but it’s complicated and can lead to difficulties if an application expects, for instance, your Pictures folder to be on the system drive.

Libraries do away with that problem. Click on a Library icon in the left-hand pane of Explorer windows – they come in the usual flavours of Documents, Music, Pictures and Videos – and you can see files and folders from several, customisable physical locations all presented in one view. So document libraries are in some ways an extension of the file shortcuts that have been around since Windows 95 – they allow you to organise files from different locations via a link, without needing multiple copies of the file itself.

You can add your own locations to your libraries, and Windows 7 lets you select a folder from anywhere – even on the network. Once it’s added, the contents of that folder will appear whenever you click on the associated library in the left-hand pane of Explorer menus. The documents remain in their original location.

The issue that confuses some is what happens when you want to copy a file into a Library view? Since that library might consist of views on to different folders, where is it saved? The answer is simple: to the predefined save location, which for a default setup is simply your c:userdocuments folder. You can change the save location via the dialog that pops up when you hit the Locations button in any Library view.

For home users, the benefits of libraries are huge
For home users, the benefits of libraries are huge. A large media collection can live on an external hard disk, and doesn’t have to be tied to the system disk. That makes organisation and backup easier. You can also create as many custom libraries as you like.

The danger – as some dissenting voices have suggested – is that you’ll add folders in so many different locations to a library that you’ll lose track of precisely where data is stored. It’s a fair point and, as ever, there’s no substitute for a little pre-planning and thought when it comes to organising your libraries.

Moving music around

With every release of Media Player, Microsoft likes to mix things up. It tends to change the interface just enough to give the curious a feeling known only to users of Microsoft applications: confused familiarity. Windows Media Player 12 is no exception: the Now Playing tab has disappeared, for instance, and menus are just as difficult to find and navigate as ever. But there are serious advantages to both Media Player and Media Center in this release.

Media Player adds a significant feature in the form of remote media streaming. Click the new Stream dropdown in the main interface and you get a couple of intriguing options. The first is the ability to allow internet access to your home media. To do this, you must link your computer to an “online ID provider”. Currently, that’s limited to Windows Live IDs, but Microsoft says that: “Additional online identity providers might be listed when Windows 7 is commercially released”. Once you’ve associated two Windows 7 PCs with an online ID, you can sign in and stream media from your home PC across the wider internet to the other machine. The setup process is a bit of a faff, and you need to download and install the Windows Live ID Sign-in Assistant, but once it’s up and running, signing in on a remote computer activates the Other Libraries entry in the Media Player interface and you’re away.

The second streaming option is to allow remote control of the player. Once that’s activated you can push media from one PC to another on the home network. So, for instance, if you have a PC connected to your hi-fi, you can push music from your laptop to it, instead of playing it through the laptop’s speakers.

No-fuss videos

Most of the enhancements to movies centre around codec support. No longer will DivX and XviD fans have to scour the net trying to find a codec package they can be sure won’t give them a virus, as well as the ability to play their ripped X-Files collection. Windows 7 brings the ability to play them natively. The same goes for the HD codec of the moment, H.264. The AAC audio codec used for the soundtrack of many video files is also supported out of the box. It’s a step in the direction of media nirvana that could relegate scratching around on the web for an hour to history. You even get support for AVCHD – the raw format that HD camcorders tend to use – and 3GP mobile-phone videos.

And finally, after more years of waiting than most of us care to count, the Release Candidate build includes the ability to play QuickTime MOV files. That brings with it the tantalising prospect of never again having to relegate control of your system to Apple’s QuickTime Player and its penchant for downloading every update under the sun. This feature alone makes Windows 7 an attractive upgrade. Unfortunately, though, most of the recent movie-trailer MOV files we’ve tried need a newer version of the codec, and we wouldn’t put it past Apple to increase the rate at which it updates QuickTime to keep the installation of its standalone player a necessary evil.

You can now play H.264 video directly through a Media Center Extender such as an Xbox 360
When it comes to Media Center, changes to the look and feel are minor. Again, the big win is the codec support, and you can now play H.264 video directly through a Media Center Extender such as an Xbox 360. A new, but fairly limited, Media Center desktop gadget is available from the desktop Gadgets menu – it sports a list of recently recorded TV programmes and quick links for music and pictures.

Picking a theme

In case you haven’t noticed, Windows 7 is very pretty indeed. And there are many ways of making it prettier, with dozens of backdrop images to choose from. But central to this release is the updated notion of themes.

Each theme is now associated with a sound set as well as a visual scheme, and you get six themes by default: Architecture, Characters, Landscapes, Nature, Scenes and a local theme which, for the UK, gives you nice views of heritage sites such as Stone Henge. The themes are more cohesive and feel much less frivolous than Vista’s equivalents: they really do seem to change the character of the system. For the first time there’s also a desktop background slideshow option with a configurable time delay, and a neat related addition is the ability to get your desktop background from a photo-RSS feed, allowing it to auto-update.

Backwards compatible?

A fundamental feature that Microsoft has had to get right for Windows 7 is application backward compatibility. It’s hit the ground running insofar as Windows 7 is heavily based on Vista, so API-level problems should be minimal for any application that explicitly supports the previous operating system. For older applications, however, there can be all sorts of problems. Thankfully, the Program Compatibility wizard is helpful indeed. If a program fails to install and run, a dialog box pops up automatically and offers to try to run it in a special compatibility mode.

The Program Compatibility wizard then starts up and attempts to identify problems automatically. Windows 7 will then try to launch the application in an environment resembling an old OS as closely as possible. If it doesn’t work it offers to try again, giving you the chance to simulate a different operating system.

It isn’t perfect, but with a bit of trial and error we’ve found most applications can be coaxed into life. The exception is apps that check the operating system version before installing and won’t continue if they don’t like what they see. But if your old application is being stubborn, you can resort to the new Windows XP Mode.

Disc burning

Windows Vista could write to CD and DVD, but there’s an overdue enhancement in Windows 7: ISO disc burning. Packaging a large application (or, indeed, operating system) as a single ISO image – in other words, one that represents the exact cloned image of a CD or DVD in a single file – is increasingly popular. Until now you’ve needed one of the many commercial or open-source utilities to write an image file to a blank disc. In Windows 7, you just right-click on the file itself and choose “Burn disc image”. It’s a simple addition that worked perfectly in our testing.

Taking to the Device Stage

There are two significant new features when it comes to easy management of devices. The first is the new Devices and Printers view. This is in addition to the existing, horribly austere Device Manager that’s been with us since Windows 95. Devices and Printers is far more user friendly, with a predominantly graphical interface. It shows only end-user peripherals that you might actually need to interact with: cameras, MP3 and video players, and smartphones, for instance.

Second on the agenda is what Microsoft has dubbed Device Stage. When you attach a new device, after the automated driver installation routine has done its stuff, you get a neat window showing the device, information about it and various associated tasks. It also adds an icon for the device to the quick-launch area of the taskbar.

For instance, attach a digital camera and after a few seconds you’ll get a view showing the camera’s battery level, plus total and free storage space. Below that, a task pane gives you quick access to links to manage media on the device, browse files on its memory, import pictures and videos, and change settings. We tried a few recent camera models and they all worked fine, although some lacked a battery-level indicator. The same is true of the MP3 players we tried.

But the potentially great thing about Device Stage is that it’s customisable by manufacturers, allowing them to skin the view and add features. The hope is that in the near future we’ll do away with the need to install horrible third-party pieces of software and that it will all be wrapped up in a nice, consistent Device Stage window. For better or worse, though, manufacturers tend to think their terrible software is brilliant and may want to cling to it, and that could ultimately be the undoing of Device Stage.

Device troubleshooting

The level of automatic resolution of device problems has taken a massive leap too. For instance, if you’re not connected to the internet the first time you connect a device, the installation routine obviously won’t be able to download drivers. That device will then appear in the Devices and Printers view with an exclamation mark. Click on it, and the status panel at the bottom will tell you it needs troubleshooting. Once you’re back online, all you then have to do is right-click and select Troubleshoot, and the system will go off and find the drivers, install them and that’s that. In our testing so far there’s been no need to reboot, unplug and replug devices, or do any of that traditional messing about in Device Manager. It’s a joy to use.

Calling for backup

The biggest disappointment in Windows 7 is backup. The Backup and Restore Center has been replaced by a more prosaic Backup and Restore screen, but the functions are near identical. It still won’t back up files on FAT-formatted hard disks, system or program files. And as with Vista, the complete PC backup – which takes a cloned image of your system disk – is available only in the Business and Ultimate versions.

VERDICT: WHICH VERSION IS BEST FOR THE HOME?
Home Premium should be the baseline for your main PC. There’s little reason to go any higher unless you have a crucial application that can’t be brought to life: XP Mode is available only in the Professional edition and above. If you really want complete PC backup you’ll need to go with Professional or Ultimate, but you’re better off buying a third-party backup program.

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