Microsoft recently released its newest operating system, Windows 7, on Oct. 22. Although it has only been two years since Windows Vista’s debut, this release comes as no surprise since Vista was by all measures a tremendous embarrassment for Microsoft. Even after millions of dollars were spent on advertisements and promotions, Vista still only holds about 20 percent of the operating system market, while its seven-year-old predecessor, Windows XP, holds a solid 70 percent. Soon after it realized Vista’s failure, Microsoft responded swiftly by piecing together Windows 7, which many critics call “Vista done right.” This latest release is by no means a major upgrade — it’s rather similar in flavor to Windows Vista. Regardless, Windows 7 has several great new features and, all in all, just works a lot better than Vista. It’s Vista pared down and more streamlined. For Windows 7, Microsoft decided to axe Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Movie Maker, Windows Calendar and Windows Mail, but they were all fairly useless to begin with. Numerous minor enhancements throughout the interface indicate that Microsoft has really focused on making a user-friendly and efficient operating system.

The Amherst College Information Technology department offers the most feature-packed version of Windows 7, the Ultimate Edition, for a bargain price of $15 (retail price is $220/$320 for upgrade/full version) in either 32- or 64-bit editions. The current trend (however slow) is toward 64-bit computing, which has several benefits over the older 32-bit or “x86” architecture. A 64-bit architecture can handle more than four gigabytes (GB) of RAM, theoretically up to 16 exabytes of memory to be exact. That’s approximately 17.2 billion gigabytes. Realistically, most users will never need anything close to that much RAM, and Windows 7 64-bit can only manage up to 192 GB of RAM (which is much more than enough for most users). Some professional programs like Autocad and Photoshop have 64-bit versions that can make use of the speedier potential of a 64-bit OS. Virtually all brand-name computers sold after 2003 will have processor support for 64-bit operating systems, but before purchasing Windows 7 64-bit, check with the computer’s manufacturer for driver support.

I purchased a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate recently and installed it on a desktop computer that I had built about a year ago (AMD Phenom 9850 Quad-Core, 2 GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD4850). To avoid any potential problems, I did a full install as opposed to an upgrade, backing up the entire hard drive beforehand (after the installation, however, I found out that Windows 7 had kindly put all my old documents and programs from the prior Vista installation in a folder named “Windows.old.” The installation took about 40 minutes, with several reboots towards the end. I was glad to see the computer boot up without a glitch. My first task after installation was to go to my motherboard and video card manufacturers’ Web sites and download their latest drivers designated for Windows 7 64-bit.

One of the similarities between Windows Vista and Windows 7 is the Aero Interface. Note that the translucent windows and fancy graphical effects of Aero are only available for systems that meet the minimum hardware requirements. The most obvious change is the new task bar. Microsoft took the idea of the quick launch bar and improved it tremendously. Clearly, the folks at Redmond were borrowing from the Mac OSX Dock, but they have taken it to another level. Aside from being able to launch applications quickly, the new task bar is also quite efficient at managing multiple open windows. A nice new feature called “Aero Peek” shows thumbnail previews of open windows when a user hovers the mouse over the appropriate application icon. Hovering the mouse over a specific thumbnail will bring the corresponding window to the front and make all other windows invisible— a really useful feature when many windows are open. Right clicking on the program icon will bring up a list of documents recently opened by that program.

Windows 7 also introduces some new ways to view open windows. Grabbing a window’s title bar and dragging it all the way to the top of the screen will maximize the window. Dragging a window to the left or right border of the screen will resize it to fill up half of the screen. This is really useful for quickly comparing two documents side by side. Taking a window and shaking it will minimize all other windows. The “show desktop” icon is gone now. Instead, there is a little rectangle at the right side of the task bar that reveals the desktop when the mouse hovers over it, no clicking necessary.

Navigating through files and folders is a lot easier with Windows 7. The live search bar in the upper right corner of Windows Explorer has been nicely improved since Vista. Results appear almost instantaneously as the user types, and search filters can be added right in the search bar via a pop-out menu. Another new feature in Windows 7 is document libraries, which are great for gathering related files and folders into one place. “Libraries” are sort of virtual folders that can list items from anywhere within the computer. For instance, one of the default libraries is “Pictures,” which a user can edit to contain items from his or her personal folder, public folders and even folders on an external hard drive.

On the cosmetic side, the default theme packages in Windows are quite beautiful, with periodically-transitioning background pictures. The widgets that were confined to the right side of the screen in Vista are now free to move anywhere. Windows Paint and Calculator have several new features and are actually quite useful now.

When it comes to performance, Windows 7 is less memory-hungry and significantly faster than Vista. The requirements for the 32-bit edition are: 1 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, 16 GB of free disk space; for 64-bit: 1 GHz processor (64-bit compatible), 2 GB RAM and 20 of free disk space. In order to have the nice transparency effects of Aero for either edition, the computer will need a DirectX 9 capable graphics processor with support for WDDM driver model 1.0. As a rule of thumb, most hardware one to two years old will likely be able to run Windows 7.

From a bigger picture, most of the “new” functionalities in Windows 7 have more or less been available on either Mac OSX or Linux for quite a while. Ubuntu, the most popular and ever-improving Linux distribution, can do all the fancy graphical effects of Windows 7 on half the hardware. Nonetheless, Microsoft does deserve credit for doing things right this time around.

Windows Vista was a nightmarish mistake that the software giant would love to forget, but support for it isn’t scheduled to end until 2012. Until then, it will continue to live in the shadows of Windows 7, along with the likes of Frankenstein’s monster.