Posted on January 21st, 2009 by David Fearon

The real reason to buy Windows 7

For the past decade I’ve been disappointed with every Windows release, opening up the standard applications like Notepad with childish anticipation, only to discover that – yet again – they haven’t improved. With the WIndows 7 beta people seem to be going loopy over the new Office Ribbon look of Wordpad and Paint, while overlooking the fact that they do precisely nothing the old versions couldn’t do. No word count in Wordpad; no new editing tools in Paint. Okay, Wordpad can now cope with OOXML files but that doesn’t count as a new feature in my book.

But wait, what’s that riding boldly over the crest of the application-shaped hill?

Yes! It’s Windows Calculator!

I love the new Calculator. I love the fact it’s resisted becoming a twee simulation of a handheld calculator the way the Mac OS X one is. And it has oodles of new things in it.

First up there are two new modes joining the old Simple and Scientific. Yes, two! One and another one! You get a super-useful Programmer mode (useful if, yunno, you’re a programmer), so now you can work out the decimal value of 1010010100 in a flash (it’s 660). And there’s a super Statistics mode. I don’t know if that’s useful or not since I’m not a statistician, but I’m plumping for yes.

Ferret in the Options menu and an avalanche of new features awaits. You can add separators to make your £1000000 salary a £1,000,000 salary, but the best bit is probably the Templates feature. It gives you a handy way to do stuff like calculating those payments on that mortgage the bank probably won’t give you:

And the Date Calculation feature is a great little thing – click on two dates and it’ll tell you how far apart they are. I can’t actually think of any reason for it, but if you do ever need it it’ll save a hell of a lot of fiddling in Excel.

And so yes, I’m being daft, but there’s a serious point here. This is all the stuff of which new consumer operating systems should be made. Silly little trinkets like Calc shouldn’t be the reason you buy an OS, but they’re like the packaging an iPhone comes in – technically irrelevant but important to the buzz and feel of taking your shiny new software for a spin.

And that revitalised attitude of properly packaging up Windows 7 – as well as making it faster and better than Vista – is the reason I’ve just fallen a little bit more in love with it.

Tags: Windows 7

Posted in: Windows 7

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11 Responses to “ The real reason to buy Windows 7 ”

David Wright Says:
January 21st, 2009 at 3:16 pm
“First up there are two new modes joining the old Simple and Scientific. Yes, two!”

And how does this differ to the one in Windows XP or Vista? The scientific calculator has been there (under the View menu) for donkey’s years! :-S

“You can add separators to make your £1000000 salary a £1,000,000 salary”
Just like the existing one then… :-S

The templates sounds interesting though.
David Fearon Says:
January 21st, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Yes, there are two new methods *joining the old* Simple and Scientific. Meaning that Simple and Scientific were there before.

You’re right about the separators though. Just goes to show how little I try and use Vista…
Jobby Says:
January 21st, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Sorry to join the pedants, but you could already figure out that 1010010100 Binary = 660 Decimal: Switch on scientific mode, check Bin mode, type ‘1010010100′ then check Dec mode. Voila!
Oh, and that’s in Windows XP (never mind Vista). Ditto separators. P
Dipendra Darbar Says:
January 21st, 2009 at 5:16 pm
I was thinking of purchasing the 3XS Black Widow system that would have come with Windows Vista 64-bit edition but I am going to hold it back and wait for a PC that comes with Windows 7 64-bit. I hope that they release Windows 7 this year.
David Wright Says:
January 22nd, 2009 at 10:28 am
Sorry David, missed the “new”, I read “two methods”… *red*

But as Jobby says, the binary/octal/hex modes have been there since before XP as well.

As I said, the templates sound interesting.
DaveAckroyd Says:
January 22nd, 2009 at 11:05 pm
It’s an expencive way of getting a Calculator… I would work out how much it would cost but I only have a standard windows Calculator (unless I boot into my VM of Win7 – will turn this machine into Win7 at weekend as it’s only got 1 day until activation on Vista Ultimate) and the other thing I’m missing to do the calculation is the cost of Win7.

From what I have used Win7 for so far it’s good but then again that might not be a great sign as I’ve used Vista from beta and thought that was good. I do like the fact it worked (and worked well) on the Dell netbook I was looking at at Bett last week
Nick Says:
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:44 am
I cannot agree. Windows 7 is being hyped as infinitely better than Windows Vista, yet, to me, the same old problems are stil there, along with a host of “new stuff” that adds absolutely no value or import – the calculator, for example.

There are better, free scientific calculators available for download. Use them.

I know Pro needs to cover Windows 7 for the readers and with commercial pressure from MS it must be difficult to critique but serious challenges must be made of an OS that is more complicated and contains so little of real use – network monitoring, management and location specific config settings/ No? That “location awareness” for printers is daft. There should be profiles available at a click to define a swathe of settings from printers to proxies, but there are not. Instead we get a control panel with close to sixty items in it, 90% of which no one will ever use and a method of managing installed apps by “hiding them” when really they shouldn’t be installed at all, and the controls to do this removed from the user.

It’s a clumsy, blunder behemoth that brings little genuinely useful or productive to the table. A bit like Ballmer himself.
David Fearon Says:
January 23rd, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Nick,

Let me make it abundantly clear that there is no commercial pressure whatsoever from Microsoft for us to say anything at all about Windows 7, good or bad. I think Vista is a terrible operating system, and Microsoft’s newly launched DRM-based music download service is a ridiculous idea at best. And I wouldn’t able to say that if Microsoft was paying us now, would I?

I’m waxing lyrical about Windows 7 because, based on the pre-beta and beta releases, I love it. Simple as that. Your points about management and networking are valid of course, but as a consumer operating system, so far it is (my opinion only of course) by far and away the best thing there is.
Andre Says:
January 25th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Is Windows 7 a replacement for WinXP? This is the question to be answered.

Open XML is no feature after what Microsoft did with ISO they should drop the format once and forever.

The calculator is far too complicated for average users. It has a cluttered user interface.
David Wright Says:
January 25th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Windows 7 is the replacement for Vista… :-S

Vista replaced XP. Heck, Linux replaced XP for me, back in 2003, Vista is what brought me back to using Windows on a regular basis.
Steve Cassidy Says:
January 29th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Commercial pressure from Microsoft! Dear me, let me adjust my truss and have a cackle at that one… The predominant attitude to Pro people from MS is most similar to that of someone dropped into a cage with a tiger in need of root canal treatment. They are terrified of us; I suspect because they know that their bosses read what we write.

I have to say, I really like Win7. I have the occasional shudder thinking how it might have been without the rise of Atom and Green-ness in general (those surely being the main reasons for throwing out all the Vista bloat): but this week, it manages to run on an HP DX2250 I got for two beans and a smartie (ok, for an hour fiddling with a Cisco SAN switch), so I prefer it to XP, which wouldn’t. But then I’m a simple soul.