Windows 7 has been given a firm release date of October 22nd 2009. This is welcome news for a growing number of users (myself included) who are becoming more fed up by Vista’s countless time-wasting shenanigans on a daily basis. In anticipation of the final product release I’ve been looking over some of the benefits that Windows 7 will offer, and in this post I’d like to highlight the top 3 speed-enhancing features that I’m looking forward to.
3. Faster Startup
Every morning I walk into work, push the power button on my PC, wait 20 seconds or so, enter my username and password, and proceed to hit the office dining area to snag a cup of coffee (that’s not as good as what I just drank at home). I don’t perform this daily ritual because I just can’t get enough of the Folgers, but simply because Vista routinely takes anywhere between 3-5 minutes to connect to the network, load my essential programs, and get itself awake and firing on all cylinders. Windows 7 is a good bit faster. The preview release boots about 20% faster, and some expect the boot up time to be even more efficient when Windows 7 hits the shelves this fall. This may seem like a marginal improvement, but I’m used to Vista’s turtle-like pace so I’ll take any speed improvements I can get.
2. Snappy Dual Window Comparison
I work on the web development team for the email security company, Mailprotector. Frequently I find myself optimizing websites for cross-browser compatibility, and in the past it’s always been a pain to drag window handles to the right size in order to show two windows on one screen with each taking up 50% width and 100% height. It seems like an awful lot of work for something that should be simple, and thankfully Microsoft agrees.
With Windows 7 arranging two windows in this type of configuration is a snap… quite literally. All you have to do is drag one window until it hits the right side, drag the other window to the left side, and watch in awe as they snap beautifully into place with 100% height and 50% width exactly how they should. No more messing around with cumbersome drag handles.
1. The Jumplist
Vista’s taskbar is little more than XP’s taskbar with a minor facelift. Sure the thumbnail that appears on mouseover when Aero is enabled is neat (albeit uselessly small and really it’s nothing more than eyecandy), but the actions you can take on tabs for running programs themselves are pretty much exactly like they were in XP. Such is not the case with Windows 7. Enter the “Jumplist”.
With the Jumplist you can right-click a program in the taskbar and instantly see a list recently taken actions and recently viewed files associated with that program.
The Jumplist lets you quickly view recently (or frequently) taken actions or recently opened files for each program that’s pinned to the taskbar. Now THIS is handy.
In most programs I use on a daily basis, this will eliminate some hassle for me. For instance, when using Photoshop, I generally have to open the program and go to File\Open Recent>recentfile.psd to open something that I’ve been recently working on. With the Jumplist all you need to do is right-click a program in the taskbar (running or not) and a list of files you’ve been working on will show above the icon. From there just click the file or action you want to use and you’re good to go. It’s not going to save you hours of time, but it’s a solid and sensible feature that will allow you to jump around between files more quickly.
Overall I’m really stoked about the new features that Windows 7 is bringing to PC users. I think it’s clear to see that Microsoft seems to be getting it right this time out as Windows 7 is proving to be sleek, fast, and powerful. I eagerly anticipate the day when I can take Vista off life-support and reformat my system with an OS that was thoughtfully designed around the concept of improving user experience and task efficiency. October can’t come soon enough.
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