When the change to Vista came it sounded the deathknell for a single UI element that I loved.
Within windows explorer you could enable something known as the Status bar, along this you would see information such as what security zone you were in, how much space you had left, how many files were in a folder and what size of data this represented.
It was this ability to see not only how much space you had left but how big in terms of storage capacity the folder I had open was consuming that I loved - system info at a glance that was germain to my task.
Not even OSX showed you this information, going out of its way to hide how big a folder is and breaking up the information as to how much space you have left into little locations across applications and folder views.
The only thing I wished it did was count up the values of the folders within that folder, but this would have made explorer very slow. I wonder if this is why browsing the file system in vista is very slow because this functionality was added, but for the tooltip hover instead of the status bar!
My hopes for this to make a return in win7 were dashed when I opened up explorer and it was just the same as vista.
Am I alone in wishing for this little UI element to return? Do you know of a way of returning this to vista/win7? If so, would you be willing to share?
Surely I can’t be the only person who mourns it’s loss?!
Well, I said I’d post a few screen grabs showing the subtle changes between vista and win7, here they are.
First up is the Solution Centre
The usual incessant blast of messages have been bundled up into a single system tray icon. Also, that little translucent rectangle next to the time is a “show desktop” quick button.
Then we have the streamlined desktop settings
In here the alignment of multiple monitors is now done by dragging and dropping, it also gives hint to one of the windows quick key combos - something of which many still remain unknown by most users (win+e for explore, win+r for run prompt, win+l for a quick lock of the PC and win+f for the search dialogue being 4 extremely useful combos). A very minimalist interface.
The interface has been cleaned up..
Since there is no longer a difference between the interface when opening and exploring, they have finally tidied away the two options and turned them into a single one. Win7 is full of these little cleanups that vista was just missing.
Tablet edition is basically cooked into the system.
Seems to be quite odd in that it’ll pick up words from mindless scribbles :S It must have an inbuilt bablefish for gibberish!
Here’s the contents of a few messages as I was streaming my installation of Windows7, which I had to cut short the streaming because my GF entered the room and I respect her privacy. Just as I had people picking up the stream after my flatmate got it linked on EVE Radio .
Sorry for those who were cut off so soon!
urgh.. come on microsoft, why can’t I delete a dynamic drive from the setup? do I *really* have to go into another instance of windows to do it? BAD FORM
ok, after some jiggery and pokery with storage and moving data across I’m now *finally* moving with installing win7. Just got the 45 min copy of files to wait now :/
well, after having a play around with the settings and a nose about media centre, the damn thing packed in on me and wouldn’t boot back up again. I think it’s more down to a buggered HDD than the OS. Will explore tonight.
Had plenty of problems, primarily with the fact that I only had sata hdd’s at hand but the machine I was using didn’t have onboard sata. Sadly, the only sata card I have is an Adaptec 1210S which never had vista drivers built and win7 doesn’t have any native support.
I then tried a HDD from an old system, a tiny 10gb and was rejected “windows requires 12gb of free space”.
Found another, but was a dynamic disk and just like vista it refuses to deal with it. This is quite a bad failing really, there should be no reason why you can’t convert it within the setup interface! I had to boot to another OS in order to sort it out before win7 setup (winPE) would even accept the HDD.
To anyone with influence at MS, please get this looked at!
I will be continuing this tonight, as I try to resurrect the damn thing and grab some screenshots. One thing I did notice is that all the changes are very subtle right now.
I know the major interface changes have been omitted right now, but there are still plenty - something I noticed immediately is that the “explore” option when right clicking [my] computer has been eliminated because it is all one view - which it has been since vista.
The display settings interface has been tidied up a bit, I really wish I had got screen caps before it died. It looks a bit more friendly to less experienced users.
Win7 seems to accept vista drivers for hardware quite happily, so maybe the driver hell won’t be as pronounced with this version. I had my sound card (ADI onboard) and Hauppage TV card (PVR350) running quite happily from drivers downloaded from their respective sites.
Windows picked up its own drivers for the 6600GT I was using for the video card, I used an fx5200 when installing it. Wanted to see how it would handle a vid card swap. No problems.
Something I didn’t notice was the performance scoring system, it just let me go straight into the aero style without having to redo anything. Whether this will be in the final version or not remains to be seen.
Media Centre is very usable, with some tweaks here and there - teletext buttons onscreen was a nice touch that I don’t remember being there before. It seems to have lost the double right click to go back to the EPG for some reason.
I just plain didn’t have enough time to go through it as it crashed in media centre and wouldn’t let me get to the task manager before it rebooted on its own and complained about the boot device, halting my playtime.
Also, if you’re thinking about running the beta win7 in virtual PC don’t bother. The VM additions software will blue screen on you and stop it from booting. On the plus side, I got to see the recovery wizard that will run through a diagnosis for you and then spit out its recommendation - in this instance it suggested I do a rollback using system restore, don’t know if it will always suggest that or if it can do other things too.
Expect some screenshots in the near future, until now it’s text only
