Windows 7: a cure-all for Vista? 5 reasons to think twice

Windows 7 has been tested by the pros but also individual users for months. The general consensus is that Windows 7 is likely to supplant the failure of Vista in our memories. But if Seven is so good, what about the following considerations?

We’re not trying to be provocative for the sake of it here, but just wanted to let you know that Seven may not change your life as much as you thought. It’s like politics: the old King is dead, long live the King!


1 - Windows 7 and Vista, it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other

Updating from Vista to Seven doesn’t require you to format your machine, as we explained yesterday, and as we showed successfully. Why? The core of the system is the same. Those who were hoping for a revolution will have to wait for future versions. Nor has the interface itself undergone great changes apart from the task bar. Has it improved? Those of you who like to keep tens of windows open at the same time won’t necessarily think so. It will please users who like a tidy screen that doesn’t display 1001 tools at the same time. Windows 7 piles the windows of a given piece of software under a single icon in the new superbar. This is practical in terms of saving space. But it does make switching quickly from one window to another problematic when you deliberately want to open a whole load of them at once. You can however set it and you do get used to it.

On the image above, Firefox, Photoshop and Messenger are running. You can see the icons for these programs are framed in the new task bar to show this.

2 – In W7, will your computer be more responsive? Don’t get too excited…

'Seven is a good deal faster!' – is once of the comments we’re hearing a lot. Well… it’s 2 seconds faster than Vista for processing a Photoshop task, but 6 seconds slower than XP. Does that count? We carried out quite a few tests. And yes, it is faster than Vista. But in practice you probably won’t notice the difference.

Régis Jehl, our chief components tester, noted a significant improvement on a new, powerful machine equipped with 64-bit Windows 7. But how many of us have this type of configuration? Most users will be using Seven on their old PC. Don’t expect an exlosion in performance. When it was struggling before, it is very likely still to be struggling.

3 – The price!

Some people will get Windows 7 when they purchase a new computer. Others, many of us, will update their current machine. How do you explain such a difference in the cost of an update between Microsoft and Apple, especially when PC-users so often claim that Apple’s prices are too high?

This is especially relevant when you consider the relative failure and user frustrations of Vista, and that Seven is widely seen as a correction. As such it’s a pretty expensive one!

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Still on the subject of pricing, we could also return to the fact that those who have bought a machine based on Vista since June and who were promised a free upgrade, will in fact have to lay out between 10 and 30 quid to get their hands on Seven.

4 – updating from XP to Seven means you have to format your machine

As Microsoft confirmed at its press conference on Wednesday, Going from XP to Seven means you’ll lose any data and applications that are installed. You’ll have to save everything on a separate partition or external hard drive: your photos (you should be backing them up in any case) your web preferences, logins and passwords, find your software CDs and DVDs, security keys etc. Get ready for several hours of fun.

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5 – Better battery life for laptops? Once again, keep cool.

On top of its rapidity, praise for Seven comes for the extended battery life it's supposed to give laptops. Once again, a test is worth far more than a rumour, even when it is so unanimous. We’ve given over a full page and numerous tests to check out energy consumption in Windows Seven.

Once again, the major gains are for a powerful machine in 64-bit Windows 7 and even here only in idle! When the computer is working, the gain is minimal. On the other hand, on a more modest set up in 32-bit Windows 7, in idle nothing changes but there is a gain when the machine is working. You should be able to watch films for longer on the train…

In practice Régis Jehl notes that you gain about 20 minutes of battery life on a laptop when you’re not putting too many demands on the processor: internet use for example.

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