Microsoft Windows 7 review

We’ve poked and prodded, ruminated and cogitated, we’ve debated its worth, and benchmarked it to within an inch of its life. We’ve installed it on a huge variety of machines, from netbooks to luxury laptops, low-powered PCs to gaming rigs – and now, we’re ready to deliver the PC Pro verdict on Windows 7.

Without giving too much away, you’ll be happy to discover the news is good. We like Windows 7 a lot – so much so, that the disappointment that was Windows Vista has already become a distant memory – and during the course of this extended review we’ll be detailing exactly why.

Over the coming pages you’ll find detailed analysis and ratings of Windows 7’s ease of use, its new features and how it performs. More importantly, we deliver our final verdict on whether Microsoft’s new baby is worth the upgrade.

Use the links below to jump straight to the various sections of the review:

EASE OF USE
Jump Lists, HomeGroup and an improved search tool give Windows 7 a huge usability boost.

FEATURES
Touchscreen technology, new media features and more – but are the new features worth paying for?

WINDOWS LIVE ESSENTIALS
We see how Movie Maker, Mail and Photo Gallery have changed, and welcome a newcomer.

PERFORMANCE
A change in Windows 7’s display driver model means it’s the most responsive OS since XP.

OVERALL
Should you upgrade? Will businesses take the plunge? And which version should you buy?

To return to this index at any point, just hit the Page 1 button, below.

WINDOWS 7 – EASE OF USE

Windows Vista probably had more opprobrium heaped on it than it truly deserved, but if there’s one area where the OS merited every last anger-filled adjective, it was ease of use. From the early compatibility issues to the clumsily implemented Universal Account Control to the ineffective eye-candy of Flip 3D, Vista largely failed to make our computing lives easier.

Has Windows 7 raised the usability bar? Indisputably, magnificently, yes. The most obvious improvement comes in the form of the new desktop interface. Gone are the flat taskbar labels and fiddly Quick Launch icons next to the Start button; in come bold, chunky icons sitting in a beefed-up taskbar.

For the first time, applications can be “pinned” to the taskbar even if they’re not open, meaning everyday apps such as email clients and web browsers are never more than a click away. What’s more, taskbar icons can be dragged and dropped in your preferred order – settings that are retained even after the PC is shut down – so it soon becomes pure instinct to find, say, Outlook next to the Start button.

A right-click on each icon also reveals another excellent new feature: Jump Lists. Click Word’s Jump List, for example, and up sprouts a list of recently opened documents – again accessible with a single click. As with the taskbar, items can also be pinned to Jump Lists – regularly used forms and templates tucked away in the nether regions of the company intranet are now easily within reach.

In some instances, Jump Lists provide shortcuts to features (such as Internet Explorer 8’s InPrivate Browsing mode), and it’s only a matter of time before software makers find even more time-saving uses for them.

The taskbar has its foibles: new software with an unfamiliar icon can be harder to recognise without its text label, and the practice of stacking multiple icons belonging to the same app on top of one another is unwieldy – especially when you have, say, three or four Word documents open at one time. But it’s a welcome overhaul of a taskbar system that had outgrown its Windows 95 roots.

Snapping windows

Many of the usability improvements in Windows 7 aren’t as immediately apparent as the new taskbar. Drag a window to the top of the screen, for example, and it immediately fills the screen; drag it back down again and it returns to its original dimensions (Microsoft Word 2007 being a bizarre exception to the latter).

It’s equally effortless to compare two documents side-by-side by dragging their respective windows to either edge of the screen, giving each precisely half the screen. Flip 3D, meanwhile, remains like a geriatric uncle in the armchair in the corner that everyone ignores.

Unlike early Vista systems, the Aero Glass interface and its transparency effects don’t necessarily hamper performance. We’ve had it running smoothly on netbooks with 1.6GHz processors and a mere 1GB of RAM. That said, Windows 7 is snappier on netbooks with Aero Glass switched off.

Networking made easy

Networking is another area where significant progress has been made. The new HomeGroup feature makes accessing files on another Windows 7 PC on the home network almost as simple as retrieving files on the PC itself.

Installing printer drivers is now a one-off job, with PCs joining the homegroup automatically sharing the settings. Microsoft’s decision to allow only Windows 7 PCs into homegroups seems a cheap trick to convince people to upgrade, but the emergence of Family Pack upgrades makes such shenanigans a little more palatable.

And, after more years of unnecessary dialog boxes than we care to remember, connecting to a Wi-Fi network is now merely a matter of left-clicking on the icon in the System Tray and choosing your network.

Talking of the System Tray, this too has been tidied up. Icons no longer spew forth – only three are permitted to show by default, with the rest tucked away in a pop-up overspill area. Meanwhile, the new Action Center (curiously represented by a white flag icon) swallows up all Windows updates, maintenance and backup issues, with pop-up reminders now thankfully banished.

The revamped User Account Control (UAC) is less needy, with a sliding scale of alert options ranging from Never to Always Notify. A step above Never is all that’s needed to avoid pointless disruptions, but to still be warned in advance of major (or potentially malicious) activity.

Device management

The most impressive boost to usability in Windows 7, however, arrives with device management. Since Windows 7 remains wedded to the Vista code base, compatibility issues are kept to a minimum. Indeed, we’ve heard of only a handful of problems, most of which have been solved by using Windows Update and existing Vista drivers.

Impressively, driver software is almost redundant. We plugged in an ageing Canon Pixma MP450 all-in-one device, for example, and Windows 7 diligently hunted down drivers online and installed the hardware in less than 1min 30secs. No need for manufacturer CDs and the associated crapware. Installing the same device in Windows Vista, by comparison, required a manual hunt for drivers and a two-part installation.

Once installed, most hardware gets its own Device Stage – a screen devoted to that specific device, including shortcuts to functions such as scanning, printing and maintenance. The device is even designated its own taskbar icon, with an accurate picture of the hardware itself and a Jump List of commands.

The single caveat is that not all hardware manufacturers have embraced Device Stage to the extent Microsoft hoped, leaving you with the old-fashioned driver interface. Hopefully, this will change, and we also hope device manufacturers will embellish useful Device Stage with further shortcuts to online manuals and replacement ink cartridges, for instance.

The power of search

Even if a feature in Windows 7 isn’t immediately apparent, the vastly improved Start menu search bar will help to hunt it down. Applications, Control Panel features, documents, email and other files are all searchable from the Start menu, with results appearing as you type. The indexing has no noticeable impact on system performance and results are accurate.

The results provide more than a simple text match; type “disk space”, for example, and the option to defragment your hard drive appears, although neither of the search terms appears in the feature’s title.

Windows 7, at last, feels like an OS that wants to work with, rather than against, you; an OS where the front-end has been designed with care, rather than carried over from the previous version. Windows 7 is, in terms of usability at least, the front-end that Vista has long deserved.

WINDOWS 7 – FEATURES

Rather than succumbing to feature creep – Microsoft’s habit of throwing hordes of extra features at every new release of its products – Windows 7 is, if anything, suffering from feature shrink. There are few glitzy additions this time around: in several key areas, Windows 7 has actually cut out features.

For a while it seemed that even Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) was going to be stripped out of Windows 7 – in the European editions at least – but it’s still here. Microsoft’s proposal to the European Union is that, at the point of installation, you’ll be given a choice between Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and IE8.

A number of programs have gone. There’s no email application, no video-editing tool, no calendar, no parental controls, no instant messenger, no photo gallery app. All these formerly bundled items of software have been moved to the Windows Live Essentials group of products (see right) – still free, but this time as a separate download.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, everything you need from an OS remains, and with the development team focusing on the core operating system – think ease of use and performance – we’re happy to see extraneous features offloaded.

Light entertainment

This isn’t to say that Windows 7 has been stripped bare. It does indeed boast a raft of new features – but since they’re more relevant to the task of running your PC, they’re a little harder to track down. Entertainment junkies will be pleased with Windows 7, for instance, since it introduces a raft of subtle yet important improvements.

Windows Media Player’s new streaming features allow you to share songs and videos not just within your home network, but over the internet. Meanwhile, the program’s “Stream to” feature allows you to send music from a PC to any player that features a DLNA sticker.

Media Center sees similar additions, including additional support for DivX, XviD and H.264 file types, which means more video will be instantly playable on your PC without hunting around for codecs. There’s a neat Gadget to give quick access to recent recordings, direct from the desktop, and a timeline to do the same from within the app itself.

And talking of Gadgets, these are now set free from the restrictive Sidebar of Windows Vista, and can be dropped wherever you like on the desktop.

Advanced users will love additions such as Federated Search – a facility that allows you to search the internet from an ordinary Windows Explorer window. For example, say you want to search for a story you know you saw on this website: we’ve created a downloadable file that will integrate a PC Pro search into Explorer.

Touching times

Windows 7 also includes more support for touch. With a capacitive touchscreen PC, you can now scroll through lists of files, pinch to zoom web pages and images, and employ flicks and gestures to launch Jump Lists.

The onscreen keyboard is more usable than its Vista counterpart too, with the new multitouch capability allowing you to hold Shift and hit a letter at the same time to get a capital.

Hard hitting

Administrators and business users haven’t been neglected. There’s a host of improvements in Windows 7 designed to make administering and working with the OS on a daily basis that bit easier.

BitLocker To Go, for instance, extends Vista’s BitLocker full-disk encryption to USB flash drives and external hard disks – although only for users of the Ultimate and Enterprise editions. There’s also AppLocker, which helps administrators control the execution and installation of software.

Less obvious is the new Windows Biometric Framework, a software stack that all versions of Windows 7 (apart from Starter) use to support fingerprint readers natively. The idea is that users shouldn’t have to deal with poorly programmed security tools produced by hardware suppliers to take advantage of, say, encrypted password storage.

Potentially more significant is the fact that the new software components make it easier for third-party software developers to take advantage of fingerprint readers; we could soon see browsers building in support for fingerprint readers, for example.

Windows 7 also places more focus on virtualisation. Part of this is the ability to set up virtual disks – quicker than setting up physical disk partitions (note that only Ultimate can boot from a virtual disk). Another is Windows XP Mode, available in Windows 7 Professional and up, which uses Microsoft’s Virtual PC software to seamlessly run programs designed for the older OS.

Every little counts

In addition to all these extras, there’s a list as long as an orangutan’s arm of small, handy additions you’ll come to appreciate more than you might expect.

Windows 7 sees an overhaul of the calculator tool, for example, with a new multiline, editable display. WordPad has been given the Office 2007 treatment with a swanky Ribbon bar replacing the old, static toolbar.

Paint has seen a major overhaul too, with more tools than before and a Ribbon bar again to help with ease of use.

And let’s not forget the useful Snipping Tool for taking selective screenshots, and the dull but worthy Problem Steps Recorder, which lets you capture a series of onscreen actions, annotate them and email them in a single file; invaluable for diagnosing technical problems or demonstrating software to new users.

Conclusion

It’s perhaps inevitable that some will view the stripping out of major applications as a retrograde step, but Windows 7 does include a lot of new features and improvements (see our comprehensive guide).

More importantly, almost all the additions are relevant to the task in hand; they make the job of working with Microsoft’s new operating system on a day-to-day basis a pleasure, rather than a chore.

WINDOWS 7 – PERFORMANCE

As soon as the public beta of Windows 7 appeared back in January, we were struck by how fast and responsive it felt. Thankfully, that nippy feel has remained all the way through to the final release.

But, when we subjected Windows 7 to our Real World Benchmarks, we received some surprising results. The most obvious anomaly was our Office benchmark, which took more than 70% longer to complete on the new OS than in Vista (see graph, below).

This also affected the multi-application test, of which Office is one component, and had a knock-on effect on the overall score. In our other tests, Windows 7 did prove faster than Vista – but only by a margin of around 2%. In everyday use this difference is undetectable; so how can this be squared with our experience of Windows 7 feeling faster than Vista?

It comes down to Windows Display Driver Model 1.1, which is new in Windows 7. The model permits multiple apps to draw and update their graphics at once, whereas under the 1.0 model used in Vista only a single process could draw to the screen at any one time. This was a prime reason why the interface could sometimes feel unresponsive.

On Windows 7, apps can update their windows as soon as you press a button. The system thus feels much faster, while measurable performance is similar.

The office benchmark

So what went wrong with our Office benchmark? The answer is down to another change in WDDM 1.1. In Vista, display elements were stored concurrently in both video RAM (accessible via the graphics hardware) and system RAM (accessible by the OS), while WDDM 1.1 uses video RAM only.

This leaves more system memory free for applications, but it also means that if the OS wants to draw graphics without going via the GPU, the relevant elements must be copied from video RAM to system RAM and back.

This may sound like a tiny imposition, but it takes quite a toll on the PowerPoint segment of our benchmark, which is designed to render slides as quickly as possible. Under Windows 7, the delay causes each slide to take more than twice as long to render as it does under Vista. Over 500 slides, the cumulative effect wrecks the overall Office score.

To the human eye, the slower redraw rate is barely noticeable, but if you need to revert to the old way of doing things for any reason, you can. Windows 7’s Basic Theme effectively turns off WDDM 1.1 off, and we’ll be using this approach to run the Office portion of our benchmarks, in order to achieve scores comparable to older machines.

Less demanding

The reduced RAM footprint is particularly helpful for netbooks and nettop devices, which can ship with as little as 1GB. For comparison, we repeated our benchmarks with only 1GB of RAM in both Vista and Windows 7. In Vista, we saw a 12% drop in overall performance, reflecting a 1% slowdown in the CPU-based encoding test, a 12% fall in the Office test, a 13% drop-off in 2D graphics, and a massive 23% slowdown in our multitasking test.

In Windows 7, performance with 1GB held up better: again, the multitasking test was worst hit, but it fell by only 12%. The encoding, Office and 2D graphics scores fell by 1%, 6% and 9%, yielding an overall drop of only 7%. Factor in the faster UI and it’s clear Windows 7 is a better choice for low-end hardware.

DirectX 11

As well as improvements on the desktop, Windows 7 ships with the all-new DirectX 11, which, when partnered with a compatible graphics card (such as the ATI Radeon HD 5870), will enable games to take advantage of more advanced effects than ever before.

DirectX 11 also includes a raft of new computational features, enabling developers to write complex programs designed to be executed on the GPU. This will speed up certain types of operation enormously: in some cases, GPU-based video encoding can be more than ten times as fast as CPU-only routines.

But DirectX 11 isn’t restricted to Windows 7. DirectX 10 was never released for Windows XP, but its successor is due to be back-ported to Vista, so there’s no need to upgrade to get the full benefit of newer, more powerful graphics hardware. However, there aren’t yet any games that take advantage of DirectX 11. And when we tested DirectX 10 games on Windows 7, performance was identical to Vista.

Network performance

Windows 7 offers a small improvement over Vista in networking too. In our tests, reading 200MB of small files from a remote PC over 100Mbits/sec Ethernet took our Vista system 47 seconds, while Windows 7 managed it in 40 seconds. Copying the files back took an identical 1min 26secs, regardless of the client OS.

That’s a small benefit, but given how much underlying code Windows 7 shares with Vista, it’s impressive that there’s any speed boost at all. And we’re encouraged to note that, although the beta and release candidate builds of Windows 7 have been available for more than nine months, we’ve heard no reports of it inheriting the slow network performance that mysteriously afflicts some Vista users.

Conclusion

So, our tests show that, when it comes to raw number-crunching, Windows 7 is negligibly faster than the older OS. It certainly doesn’t retu0rn to the speed of Windows XP, which in our benchmarks has proved as much as 22% faster than Vista on identical hardware.

Couple that with the fact that DirectX 11 will be available in Vista, and you’d be forgiven for concluding there’s no point upgrading from a performance perspective.

But don’t underestimate the importance of responsiveness. The upgraded driver model makes Windows 7 applications seem to fly along, where Vista could sometimes feel like wading through treacle. Don’t be put off by the alarming graph on the previous page: in real-world use you’ll be more productive simply because it’s easier to click around, and less frustrating to get things done.

Windows 7 won’t magically turbo-charge your hardware then, but it’s still a genuine step forward when it comes to making the most of your computer’s potential.

WINDOWS 7 – OVERALL

In this extended review, we’ve already seen the impressive roster of features Windows 7 brings. We’ve lauded the operating system for its ease of use, and analysed why it feels so fast in practice – even though the underlying code is similar to Vista. But now it’s time to get to the nitty-gritty. Should you upgrade?

The biggest problem for Windows remains the sheer sturdiness of Windows XP. IT managers the world over now know this operating system so intimately that it will take either a big benefit or a brave move from Microsoft to wean them off it.

With extended support for Windows XP lasting until 2014, the latter may seem distant. However, it will become more difficult to buy computers with Windows XP preinstalled, so (aside from businesses that have images already prepared) IT managers will at best have to cope with a mixed environment for the next five years.

For laptops, there are many arguments for making the move sooner rather than later; the case for Windows XP is becoming less and less convincing. Your users will be more productive in Windows 7 (or Vista for that matter), as the superior support for Sleep and Hibernate modes means they can start working almost the instant they lift up the laptop lid.

There are also “green” benefits of Windows 7 versus XP. We wouldn’t risk forcing users to automatically slip into Sleep mode after 20 minutes’ inactivity under XP, since there’s no guarantee of the PC springing back into life. With Windows 7, you can be certain it will
leap back into action.

And there are other benefits on offer to add weight to the argument. Ultimate/Enterprise introduces AppLocker for controlling which applications are run and installed, and BitLocker To Go for encrypting removable drives. Arguably, the jewel in the crown is also included in Professional: the beautifully implemented Windows XP Mode for combating all the cries of “our programs won’t work!”.

Microsoft hoped touch would be the killer feature for consumers. Cast your mind back to the piano-playing demo when we first caught sight of Windows 7 in the wild; clearly this was seen as the big breakthrough by Redmond.

But although we’re going to see a slew of touch-enabled computers over the coming months, it seems inevitable that touch isn’t going to be central to Windows 7’s success. We’d be surprised if more than one PC in ten included a touchscreen by the end of 2012.

Far more likely to prove a hit are the little details. Better support for home networking, thanks in part to HomeGroup. Easier navigation, with Jump Lists reducing the need to dump every single item onto the Windows desktop, and the improved search mechanism via the Start menu. Plus the fact that everything just works.

This is also a less irritating operating system than Vista. It feels quick and responsive, even if we know that under the skin not much has changed. And Microsoft has tamed UAC, so that it’s a help rather than a hindrance.

Barriers to success

We’ve been looking around trying to find any potential problems to match Vista’s sluggish file transfers, and the closest we’ve come is some early issues with intermittent network dropouts.

However, a combination of improved drivers and Windows Update has solved all the problems we’ve seen, which leads us to believe that – in technical terms at least – Windows 7 has a clean bill of health.

That’s not to say it’s perfect. There are still too many ways for cybercriminals to attack the OS, and until some big steps are taken – whether via sandboxing using virtualisation or a protected-kernel approach akin to MinWin – that will remain the case.

The biggest barriers to Windows 7’s success, however, are also potentially its greatest weapons: pricing and marketing.

Should you upgrade?

In the absence of any jaw-dropping features, Microsoft is supporting Windows 7 with the biggest weapon in its armoury: marketing. Quite aside from the adverts you’re about to see, there are numerous special offers to give consumers and businesses compelling reasons to upgrade.

Take students: they’re being offered Windows 7 Professional for £30 inc VAT. With the definition of student a hazy “someone with a .EDU email address”, many households in the UK will benefit from this deal. The Family Pack is a compelling offer too, with one licence allowing up to three Windows XP or Vista machines to be upgraded to Windows 7 Home Premium. We’ve seen the boxed version of the single user version of Home Premium on sale for £65 inc VAT, while the Family Pack is on sale for around £130 inc VAT. So yes, for home users, we recommend you upgrade.

Businesses will rightly be more cautious. While Microsoft has tools available for businesses to make upgrades as seamless as possible, there are the associated costs of retraining and upgrading existing systems.

It’s more difficult to justify this disruption, but at some point you’ll have to shift from XP. The old adage of waiting for SP1 doesn’t carry as much weight as usual; it’s a well-known fact that Windows 7 is based on Vista’s code, and in some ways it’s more akin to Windows Vista Service Pack 3 than it is a brand-new operating system.

One thing is for sure. All the most interesting new hardware is going to be Windows 7 only, so if you want to keep your senior executives happy then you’re going to need to manage Windows 7 machines sooner rather than later.

Which version?

We’re disappointed by Windows 7 Professional. With pricing so close to Ultimate, it feels like a pointless edition – the omission of security tools such as BitLocker and AppLocker, which are most likely to be installed on business laptops, remains baffling. Home Premium, on the other hand, strikes the right balance between features that most home users will want while keeping the price low – at least while all the price promotions continue.

Which leaves Ultimate/Enterprise, the OS split at marketing birth. As a piece of engineering, Ultimate will appeal to all techies: extras such as Windows XP Mode and virtual hard disks will give owners endless geeky pleasure. And if your business is on a licensing scheme that bundles Enterprise, then it should impress IT departments too.

So, overall, is this a ringing endorsement for Windows 7? It’s certainly hard to find fault. Sure, there’s no shout-from-the-rooftops feature that will have Mac enthusiasts casting aside their MacBook Pros, but Windows 7 delivers on ease of use, performance and features. We recommend you make Vista and XP a thing of the past as soon as you can.

Details
Software subcategory	Operating system
Requirements
Processor requirement	1GHz or higher
Operating system support
Other operating system support	N/A