Windows Useless... I mean, Windows 7

The Beta has been there for a while, ready for free download and testing if you've got a spare computer lying around or have enough spare time to set up a partition. And now, Release Candidate is here.

I've been looking at dozens of reviews, and just like with Vista, so many people seem to be brainwashed by all the pretty colors and seemingly innovative but actually useless new features. Things like sticky notes – little stickynote-shaped things that you put on your desktop, and write stuff on so you remember something when you come back to the computer. Gee, I thought we already had an extremely simple text application that could serve this purpose. But I guess Notepad isn't stickynote-shaped, so clearly it's useless.

Another such feature is the ability to highlight a portion of the screen and save it right there as an image, eliminating the need to press Print Screen and paste it in an image editing program. A nice feature, were it not for the fact that this feature saves with the quality that Paint does anyway! For those of us that actually have standards, we'll still be Print Screening and pasting in Photoshop.

Aero Snaps: You drag a window to the left or right side of a screen, and it resizes to the side of that screen. Top to bottom, but from the side to the center of the screen. Or, you can drag the window to the top, and it maximizes the window. I had no idea simply clicking the little Maximize button was such a nuisance.

Aero Shake: If you have several windows open, you grab one of them and jerk it back and forth, and it minimizes all the others. Do this again, and it brings the others back up. Not only is this fairly useless, but I can already see a bunch of people inadvertently setting this feature off and minimizing/maximizing all their stuff without wanting to.

Aero Peek: This feature makes all your windows transparent, allowing for a look at your desktop. I guess if you enjoy having memory-hogging widgets all over your desktop you'll find this feature useful.

Device Stage: A new feature where you plug in a peripheral that's compatible with Windows 7, and an icon for it will appear in the taskbar. Click it, and a window will pop up telling you all the things you can do. Play files, add files, etc. This window will also tell you applicable information for the specific device, such as the power remaining on your MP3 player, and how much free space is left. Useful, but I can't help but think that a person who plugs in a USB will simply use the popup window right there to do what he wants.

Bitlocker To Go: This is a security feature for your USB flash drives and external harddrives. It puts a password on the drive, which has to be entered to view the files. This works on every Windows 7 machine you use, which is good. But this means that your drives will be read-only on older versions of Windows. Another move to add to Microsoft's history of trying to force people to upgrade and monopolize the market without getting busted for it. As a side note, I have NEVER saved anything as a .docx or any of the other filetypes designed to drive OpenOffice and other free/non Microsoft suites out of the market, and I never will.

Windows 7 comes with a Windows Media Player, which has a new user interface. Need I say more? Jesus, Microsoft, leave WMP alone. But that isn't to say this new version doesn't have new features. For example, it comes with a feature called “miniplayer”, which shrinks the playing window very small. So lets say you're watching a movie while doing other things that take up the majority of your screen, you can use this feature. Yeah, you know how often THAT happens, right? Well, if it's such a pressing issue, why not just resize the window manually? Is clicking and dragging such a hard thing to do? Why then do we have Aero Snaps trying to do away with clicking the Maximize button?

Windows 7 hypes their improvements of the taskbar. For starters, it's about twice as tall. That means it's BETTER!

But that aside, for example, you can drag an application to the taskbar, and the application will be given a shortcut there, allowing it to be launched with a click. This is different from the Quicklaunch toolbar... how? Well, it takes up more space than the Quicklaunch toolbar, I guess that's a difference.

The other massively hyped feature in the new taskbar are the Jump Lists. Right click on one of those quicklaunched icons, and a list of recently accessed documents for that program will pop up, saving you the trouble of first opening the program and then going to File > Open Recent. This works from the Start menu too. I can see how this would be useful, but is this feature worth buying a new operating system for? It won't take long for a third party to whip up a freeware program to do this just as well. Or maybe Firefox and Linux have spoiled me in that assumption.

But I could go on all day and highlight all the seemingly innovative but mostly useless new features that Windows 7 offers – features for speech recognition (which we've already had free programs for since the first Ninja Turtles movie), touchscreen compatibility (because using a mouse is too hard), new networking features such as Homegroup (features which normal people don't need and networking gurus spit on for trying to overly simplify rather than using industry-standard terminology), etc. Rather than go into detail on all that, let's look at the basic thing that Windows 7, like all of Microsoft's recent products, does.

It makes you relearn everything you want to do.

Remember how the Ribbon system in Office 2007 forced you to relearn how to do even the most basic things you wanted to do? Well, now it's been implemented into Paint and Wordpad as well. For simple programs like these the system works better, but simple programs like these also had a much smaller toolbar up top. Now you have that big, honking ribbon up there, eating up twice as much workspace as the old system.

And really, so many things in 7 are rearranged just for the sake of rearranging. Nothing is actually improved; the thing that was once on the left side is now across the top. Kudos, Microsoft, you've changed my life and tripled my productivity.

Windows 7 is basically a polished version of Vista. It's the same basic operating system. What does that mean? It means that all of Vista's compatibility issues will be present in Windows 7, simple as that. Those programs you need, those games you want, that laser color printer that's only 4 years old so there's no reason at all to upgrade, say goodbye. Nobody has noticed because nobody is using the Beta to actually do all their day-to-day work, but the fact of the matter is still there. Windows 7 is Vista with a fresh coat of Oxy-Clean, so anything you had trouble with in Vista will still be there.

Some of my critics will point out that it's those hardware and software manufacturer's responsibility to make patches for compatibility. It can come down to support from the game company or product-in-general company, yes, but simply put: not our problem. There are programs, games, and peripherals that are upwards of a decade old that a surprising number of people still use because there's just no reason to fix what isn't broken or because it's still fun to play, and it's impossible to rewrite an operating system from the ground up while still being fully compatible with every one of them. That's why Vista failed and that's why Windows 7 will fail. Well, that, and the memory hogging, useless features and shiny things.

Now, Microsoft can take suggestions from users on programs to try to make compatibility patches for, or to contact the companies of to have them do it, but I seriously doubt that'll happen. The Xbox 360 can still only play a handful of original Xbox titles, and most of them are laggy and barely playable, if at all. If Microsoft cares this little about backwards compatibility of their own products, imagine how little they give a damn about the products of other companies.

In closing, XP added many actually useful features. Primarily, plug-and-play compatibility with most USB peripherals. Nothing new in 7 is that useful, and hell, very little of the new things in 7 are useful at all. It's all memory-hogging shiny things, mildly amusing but basically useless new features, incompatibility with any non-mainstream software, and a big price tag. I'm eagerly awaiting the release of 7, as I'm predicting it'll be the OS that finally cracks Microsoft's stranglehold on the industry. Then we can get some new minds on fixing the last of Ubuntu's problems, and move on from these dark ages of proprietary operating systems.