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Windows 7 Beta: Microsoft’s Back in the Saddle Again

January 12th, 2009

A lot of people want the Windows 7 beta that good ol’ Microsoft released into the wild on Friday, 9 January 2009. Considering how hotly its been discussed in every tech-blog on the Internet, how much stir even screenshots of the damn thing have made, and how many tens of thousands of times a simple technical preview of the damn thing has been downloaded via BitTorrent…well, one would think that MS would have had a clue that officially releasing the beta into the wild would draw lots of attention. But, as usual, the public launch on Friday didn’t go as planned because they “underestimated” the number of people who’d be interested in downloading the beta. Their servers simply couldn’t take the beating and went casters-up within minutes of Friday afternoon’s delayed and delayed and delayed release.

Now, by way of “apology,” Microsoft has said, “Ah, to hell with limiting the beta to only 2.5 million downloads—all’a’y’all can have at it until January 24th! Enjoy!”

Regardless of whether this was just a typical Microsoft oversight or a deliberate ploy to drum up even more talk and excitement surrounding their forthcoming flagship release, it seems to me that the Ballmer Brigade knows exactly what it’s doing this time around. Microsoft has learned a lot from the Vista debacle, and it shows not only in the testing/marketing of Windows 7 but also in the actual construction of the product itself.

First, before we even get into my first impressions of Windows 7, let me say a few things about Vista. Vista is not a bad OS. Today, at least. In mid-November, I decided to invest in a new desktop computer, and because I’ve had good luck with HPs, I purchased a new one with a whopping 600gb hard-drive and 8 gigs of RAM. I was a little wary of it at first, because it came with the 64-bit version of Vista, and I’d read many a horror tale online (especially concerning music-related soft/hardware) about poor 64-bit driver support, endless software issues, and possible incidents of daemonic possession concerning Vista x64. However, all that storage plus 8 gigabytes of RAM for under $800? Hell, if any of my musical *ware didn’t work, I could always return the machine and look for something else.

Turned out my fears were mostly baseless. True, I have a few 32-bit VST plugins that won’t work on Vista x64, but they’re not even ones I use very often; everything else has worked just fine. And Vista x64 runs a thousand times better than Vista x32.

Of course, the different in bits—plus the quadcore processor, plus the RAM—certainly gives Vista a lot more room to work on this new computer as compared to my old one (dualcore processor, 300GB hard-drive, 2GB of RAM)…but Vista just flat-out works better on the new machine, in ways that have nothing to do with greater physical resources. My old machine didn’t originally come with Vista; it was born an XP machine, and just never took to the OEM version of Vista x32 that I put on it when Vista first came out. Even after the release of SP1, Vista on the older machine was unstable, cranky, and flatout more trouble than it was worth. Program crashes were an hourly affair. Sometimes it would recognize my pathetic M-Audio MobilePRE USB soundcard, and sometimes most of the time it wouldn’t (though I suspect the problem here lay more with the fact that the device was a complete Piece O’ Shit*). Anytime I tried to put the computer to sleep—or even change the screensaver: BSOD.

Even after two years of availability, my experience with Vista was so disheartening that I fully expected to wipe it off the hard-drive of my new computer and throw XP x64 on it.

Instead, I have not had a single problem with the Vista installation on my new computer. It is just as stable as XP ever was. I have had no hardware problems whatsoever. And, for that matter, no software problems aside from the aforementioned handful of VSTs. Vista 64-bit is a smokin’ awesome OS. At least I think so. Now.

Vista has finally matured into a decent step up from XP…even if, ultimately, it’s not that much of a step up. But just as it’s coming into its own, it’s going to be utterly eclipsed by Windows 7. Just as Windows ME was eclipsed by the vastly-superior Windows XP.

The problem with Vista—which Microsoft is most certainly not repeating with Windows 7—is that MS bungled the production and the launch of the OS. When the first beta of Vista came out, I was eager to try it, and really liked it: the new Aero look was sleek and pretty (I admit, I’m a sucker for eyecandy), and there were quite a few interface tweaks—especially in Explorer—that I quickly found indispensable. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why or how it took Microsoft five years to produce the OS, but…at least it seemed pretty decent. If, of course, they worked the bugs out of it before they released it. But hey, that’s why you do widespread beta-testing, right? To scare all the insects to the surface and swat them as they come crawling out of their holes.

When Vista went Golden in January of 2007, though…it was actually worse than the beta. I’d had some minor problems with driver support using the beta, but nothing to write home about. You expect that with a beta. The driver support in the final release of Vista was nothing short of execrable, however. It was a demonstrable step backwards from the beta. And rather than get better over time, it got even worse. Somehow, the patching process kept making Vista worse rather than better. Who the hell ever heard of an OS that gets worse and develops more problems over time? (Well, Mac OS X Leopard did, too, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)

Simply put, Microsoft rushed the damn thing out the door. They’d spend five masturbatory years dicking around with the code and suddenly found themselves facing being left behind as Apple released another major upgrade to their OS. The OS was a Gordian nightmare of needlessly convoluted code accreted over five years by developer teams who clearly never knew what one another were working on. It was a bloated resource hog that demanded more power than a lot of computers then could handle. But even worse, the company knew it had a shoddy product on its hand and threw together a shoddy, last-minute promotional campaign to go with it.

When Microsoft released the betas for Vista, there was a lot of excitement about it. It was the first new version of Windows in half a decade, after all, and folks were excited to see what new innovations the OS would display. Basically, a shiny new interface and some GUI enhancements. But even though the expectations of many beta-testers were let down, the OS still seemed like it would be a decent product, provided, of course, that MS spend the time to debug the damn thing properly—something the company is not known to do. Well do I remember all the problems folks were having with XP when it first hit the market. But Microsoft’s philosophy has always been “Release it and we’ll patch it as we go along.” When you’re dealing with something as complex as a general-use operating system, that’s not necessarily a bad approach—if your initial release that people are actually going to pay for is stable enough and usable enough to be worth the investment.

Vista wasn’t. The version of Vista that went to manufacture in late 2006 was barely a release candidate, let alone an actual stable release. A lot of people complained that Vista just wasn’t worth the amount of money Microsoft was charging for it: after all, it didn’t offer that much more than XP already did—but every version of Mac OS X since the very first hasn’t really introduced anything revolutionary to that OS, and people still lined up for Tiger and Leopard even though they were merely incremental upgrades too. Vista immediately got a well-deserved bad reputation for being a clumsy bug-ridden dud.

It isn’t anymore. If you buy a new computer with Vista on it today, you’re getting a stable, decent operating system. Microsoft has finally patched and sutured and kludged it to the point where it’s just as usable as XP was in its heyday.

But thank the gods Microsoft has learned from the Vista mess. As soon as they realized that Vista’s reputation as a product as irrevocably tarnished, there were two things they could do: attempt to rehabilitate the product via patching and a new promotional campaign, and/or plan for its successor. Smartly enough, they did both…even though the rehabilitation campaign—the ridiculous “Mojave Experiment”—did more to prove that Vista was a black sheep than reform its public appearance. Fortunately, that rehab regime has resulted in a stable, good version of Vista to keep consumers happy until the follow-up OS is released. Fortunately, they’re doing that follow-up right.

Just a little over a year since MS first announced that they were actively working on Windows 7, I’m writing this using Microsoft Live Writer, which is running on the public beta of Windows 7. Of course, being a beta, the OS has problems still—I’ve had to install almost all of my drivers in Vista compatibility mode, for instance (but I fully anticipated that), and there have been a few stability bugs here and there. It’s definitely not ready for Prime Time yet.

But it sure as hell is close.

Even though there are, naturally, bugs in the system, the beta is almost entirely feature-complete. I’m sure some more stuff will be added by the time it goes gold, but the Windows 7 beta offers beta testers and early-adopters a chance to play with and test drive a lot of new features. Windows 7 is ultimately built on the same basic code structure as Vista, but 1) its developers have cleaned up the code and tightened the resource requirements considerably, and 2) the OS is full of notable advancements. I love the new icons-only taskbar, for instance; the compacted system tray is really useful, too; and the OS is packed full of reliability and troubleshooting utilities—many of which debuted in Vista, and have since become absolutely indispensable to me.

Excitement about Windows 7 has been growing since the first technical previews were demonstrated over the summer. This OS is clearly a step up from Vista, and an even bigger step up from XP. Microsoft has been releasing new screenshots, new demonstrations, and new information concerning the OS every chance it gets. Instead of hiring a million monkeys to pound on a million typewriters (or VT-100 terminals), the Microsoft development team has banded together tightly to release a lean, mean, fully-integrated machine full of neat new stuff…and Microsoft’s PR department has been busily letting the world know about it. After the Vista fumble, MS has rediscovered its focus. I’m surprised Ballmer didn’t come out on stage at CES this year chanting “WIN-DOWS SEV-EN! WIN-DOWS SEV-EN! WIN-DOWS SEV-EN!” Because that’s prettymuch exactly what the company is doing.

And it’s working.

The public beta offering on Friday was originally scheduled to be capped at 2.5 million downloads, but it’s clear now that way more than 2.5 million copies of the beta are going to be DLed. And that’s not counting the copies that are already being traded on BitTorrent. This is a beta release done right. With this amount of beta exposure, Microsoft will have a unique opportunity to test out their new OS on a huge variety of machines doing an even larger variety of tasks. Every window in the beta has a convenient Send Feedback link in the upper right corner, and the feedback application that it links to makes it very easy to talk back to the development team, so consumers can not only report bugs but request new features and comment on others. If Microsoft even takes a tenth of those reports to heart—and I’m betting they will, considering how dedicated to this project they appear—then by the time Windows 7 goes gold (almost certainly this year rather than the original projected 2010 date), they may very well have their first revolutionary, rock-solid release since Windows 95.

So, if you’re a Windows user, are you doing your part to help MS shape and polish this beast? If you have a spare computer lying around, give it a shot. It’s 100% free! Here’s a nifty overview of the new OS’s most salient new features courtesy of The How-To Geek, and here’s a guide to setting up a convenient dual-boot Windows Vista-or-XP/Windows 7 system courtesy of Lifehacker. I highly recommend installing Windows 7 on its own partition so you can easily switch back and forth from a stable version of XP or Vista and the beta because, like I said, this sucker still has some warts and holes in it. It’s not production-quality yet, but it will be soon enough!

I’ll report soon on the features of Windows 7 that I really like, once I have a few more days to test drive it and kick the tires.

*Seriously, never buy M-Audio products. They are the Ford of the computer-music world.