Need of Windows 7

've been using Windows 7 for months, first as a pre-beta and now as the remarkably stable Beta 1. It's an encouraging update. No wackiness. When I use it, I don't find myself wondering, "Who moved my cheese?" It's sensible and smart—often in hidden and surprising ways. It also seems to be allergic to blue-screen crashes.

Truth be told, I have had a handful of crashes. They happened when I wasn't looking at the Lenovo X300 I've been using to test Win 7. All I saw was a blinking cursor in the upper left-hand corner of an all-black screen. Each time, I needed a hard reboot to recover, and when I did Win 7 noted that it had stopped running under suspicious circumstances and offered to send the error logs to Microsoft. Typically, the system rebooted on its own without incident. Even with these rare crashes, I never saw a blue screen. I have to wonder if Microsoft has simply removed that response. I would say this was a good move if it did, especially since I do not see people adopting the phrase, "black void of death." (Windows 7 maven Jeremy Kaplan blames graphics drivers for the aforementioned crashes, telling me that companies may still be working to perfect their Win 7 updates.)

The more I use Win 7, the more I wonder when the other shoe will drop. When will I discover this version's UAC (User Access Control)? Yes, the UAC is still around in Win 7, but I can shut it off. I opted to step it down a notch, so that it bothers me only when programs try to make changes to my computer. But it doesn't dim the screen. This setting comes in handy when, say, you want to change the date or time on your PC. No, it's not as easy as it used to be with XP; there's still another click necessary before you can actually adjust the time or date. However, in Vista, the UAC dims the screen and a warning pops up. With my new setting in Win 7, I get right to my time and date controls. One less bother in Win 7.

As I mentioned in a previous column, Win 7 is similar enough to Vista that it won't confuse anyone who's been using that OS for any period of time. The bigger question, though, is how those still using Windows XP (and there are a lot of you out there) will adjust to Win 7. My guess is you'll be fine.

More Useful
Windows 7's Taskbar and Device Stage actually are improvements instead of frustrating productivity roadblocks. The Device Stage may be the most significant change and improvement in how Windows lets you interact with devices since Microsoft introduced the universal printer driver in Windows 2000. The good news is that all the things you do with virtually any device will have a home on the Stage—provided the manufacturer includes the necessary XML information. The bad news is that since we'll all be hooking legacy hardware up to Win 7, our hardware and gadgets will have a schizophrenic existence, with some on the Stage and others not (it'll be old-school, with a different window for each function). If our devices were simpler (Why do you do so much, all-in-one printer?), this would not be an issue.

For those who haven't seen the new Taskbar, it looks a lot like the interface concepts Microsoft showed us when Vista was still called Longhorn. I never knew why those didn't make the cut, but Win 7 has revived them and makes them work. Programs, files, and so forth all sit in the Taskbar, just as they did in Win XP and Vista. However, instead of word boxes sitting next to each other or stacked up so you can never really see what's going on in any of them, Win 7 approaches the multiple program and file metaphor in layers. You start with the simplest—just big square images depicting the programs, browsers, devices, and files. In order to see what's going on under any of them, you simply mouse over the boxes. If there's one file open, you see the thumbnail of that file (as in Vista). You can click it to view it, or close the file/app by clicking on the red X. Multiple files, browsers, apps, and the like under one box automatically display side-by-side. You can also "pin" programs and devices to the Taskbar or unpin them.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft still has a penchant for silly function names. If you right-click and glide the mouse over any of the task boxes, you get a Jump List. This is really just a menu list of possible actions you can take on one or more of those windows. Nice, though I would've called it Action List. Likewise, Libraries, which is the new file storage metaphor, adds a level of complexity to file storage. Underneath Libraries are the familiar Documents, Pictures, and so forth. I know that breaking free of Folders will make the system more flexible, but the name "Libraries" makes about as much sense to me as Gmail's "Labels."