Windows 7 is just Vista with small alterations

A new Microsoft Windows operating system is always big news, especially for the federal government, which irresistibly depends on Windows of one stripe or another to execute just about everything. The last really stable operating system to find widespread acceptance was Windows XP. Vista added a lot of user-friendly choices but was more or less branded as a consumer product that is not really suitable for business. And now we have Windows 7, which is examining to keep most of the shades of Vista while maintaining the businesslike status that XP enjoyed. The Windows 7 desktop seems suspiciously like Vista, but there are a few new things executing behind the scenes.

When loading of the install was done and were stormed that it could execute from the drive like a normal program and not need to be booted. Once it scanned the test computer, it asked if you want to upgrade your existing operating system or install a clean edition of Windows 7. Because you are migrating from Vista, you chose the upgrade option, which did keep all of the existing programs in place. A lot has been written about how XP users are out of luck in terms of holding their old programs. If you are moving to Windows 7 XP, you must select a clean install.

At this point, the program admonished that the install could take hours and that the system would reboot several times. On these points, it was correct. The time from when we clicked OK to the time Windows 7 was ready to go was 1 hour, 40 minutes on the tested system, which had a 1.6 GHz dual-core processor. There is a nice progress bar at the bottom of the install screen that shows how far along you are. It’s a guess at best given that the actual status percentages for each element seem to rush ahead and then stop for half an hour at an odd spot, such as 72 percent. But at least it gives some reading as to what’s going on.

Here’s the dirty little secret that Microsoft is definitely not telling anyone. If you hated Vista because of the interface, then you are going to hate Windows 7, too. Vista totally changed the look and feel of Windows from XP, but Windows 7 only marginally modifies the look and feel from Vista. In fact, 90 percent or more of the interface is exactly the same as identical. Going on just the look and general behavior, Windows 7 is little more than what Microsoft could have pitched in a free service pack to the Vista operating system.

On the bad side, most of Vista’s annoyances have remained intact, even if Windows 7 is executing an internal process. Performance is also unaltered overall on a system executing Vista compared with Windows 7. The systems executing Vista and then benchmarked them again once they changed to Windows 7. They were unchanged. Going from Windows XP 7 resulted in a little performance decrease, much like when going from XP to Vista.