Windows 7: The good, the bad, and the ugly (episode 4)

In this final installment of my four-part series, I take a hard look at those new features of Windows 7 that have directly affected my own beta experience. Some are really good. Others are of questionable value. And a few are downright ugly. So, with a respectful nod to Sergio Leone, let us continue.

Windows 7: The good

It’s no secret I’m a big fan of Windows’ Image Backup facility. In fact, I’ve extolled its virtues many times here on this very blog. However, I never realized how dependent I had become on this virtual safety net until I managed to completely hose my Windows 7 beta installation.

It started when I first installed the beta and realized that the Wi-Fi adapter in my Precision M6400 refused to wake up after a suspend/resume cycle. Worse still, if I tried to reboot the system to fix the problem, it hung during shutdown. I eventually identified the culprit as a buggy power management scheme and resolved it by disabling all power management features for the Precision’s Intel 5300-series Wi-Fi adapter.

Of course, being the obsessive type, I would occasionally revisit the issue to see if any of my recent system modifications — a new wireless chip set driver, some patches from Windows Update — had corrected the problem. And it was during one of these attempts, in which I re-enabled the power management switch and tested via suspend/resume, that I clobbered my beta install.

After confirming that the adapter was indeed “dead” upon resuming the system, I proceeded to force a power-down via the ACPI “hold power button for five seconds” technique. When I then powered the system back on and booted the beta, all of my normal network adapter icons were missing, replaced by a laundry list of obscure, mostly Microsoft-authored drivers, none of which actually worked. Several fruitless hours of debugging later, I finally threw in the towel and used the new Windows 7 recovery console to restore the system image backup I had completed just a few days earlier.

Needless to say, Image Backup saved my bacon — again. In fact, if it weren’t for the ease at which I could restore myself to a known working environment, I seriously doubt I would feel confident enough to dabble with the Windows 7 beta on a production system (I still have the image I took of my Vista configuration just prior to my beta clean install). Overall, a truly remarkable feature.

Windows 7: The bad

Whither the notification area? Now that we can pin program icons to the Taskbar, this much-abused bit of Windows 95 nostalgia seems more irrelevant than ever. After all, why bother creating a solution that revolves around a tiny icon that so often gets obscured by the auto-hide mechanism, when the ability to pin yourself to the Taskbar and using a full-size, animated icon to display your notifications is now finally within reach?

As it stands, I often end up with multiple icons — one in the notification area and another on the Taskbar — for the same application. Outlook is a good example. In previous Windows environments, the combination of the Hide Outlook option and the notification icon made sense. However, with the advent of pinnable shortcuts, the Hide option now has no purpose and the dueling icons simply confuse the user. Microsoft needs to aggressively encourage developers (including its own) to move away from the notification-area model ASAP.

Windows 7: The ugly

The new Shutdown button on the Start Menu is simply horrible. Clunky and looking out of place (it doesn’t even align straight with the Search field), Windows 7’s Shutdown button fails miserably in the style department. Compared to the elegant pair of (admittedly confusing) buttons with Vista, the new single-button look is just too utilitarian. Microsoft usability studies be damned! I want my shiny “whatever they are” buttons back!

* Previously: Aero Peek, Taskbar thumbnails, and those awful new icons.