From a marketing point of view, it’s an obvious message for Dixons to be pushing. But in reality, as we all know, one of the great merits of Windows 7 is that most of us don’t need a new PC to run it. I use it happily on an old Advent laptop with 1GB of RAM and a Pentium Dual-Core processor; David Bayon runs it on his Atom-powered Samsung NC10 netbook. If there was ever an edition of Windows that didn’t mean “time for a new PC”, this is it.

With Microsoft getting so much right in Windows 7, it’s a disappointment to see it permitting (perhaps even supporting) such a misleading marketing slogan. And I think it’s a mistake. In the coming years Windows is going to be increasingly threatened from multiple directions — by a buoyant Apple, by emergent operating systems such as Chrome OS and by cloud-based mobile computing. Surely as the battle grows Microsoft will want its best foot forward, in the shape of a satisfied user base. The last thing it will want is to be weighed down by still-lingering resentments over Vista.

Yet this slogan seems designed to deliver precisely that outcome. Dissatisfied customers won’t appreciate being told they must write off their old PC to escape their unsatisfactory OS. Many who can’t afford a new PC will stick with Vista and remain disgruntled with it. And those who know the truth – that any machine that runs Vista will run Windows 7 better – will resent Microsoft’s apparent collusion in an attempt to get them to waste money on an unnecessary new PC.

To a certain extent, I think this happened with Windows Vista. Back in the hazy days of late 2006, early 2007 we nailed our colours to the mast and the operating system earned a five-star review. If I’m honest, I think we were too forgiving of its foibles, as we were so used to the OS being a beta.

For example, we put issues like slow file-transfer times down as minor bugs that would be ironed out. In fact, file-transfer times turned out to be a major bug that wasn’t quashed until Service Pack 1.

If I was to pre-guess how we’d rate Windows 7, before we’ve used the RTM in an operational environment across multiple PCs and laptops, I’d say it’s likely to be a six-star review (our top rating). From my own year-long testing of the beta and then the Release Candidate, I’ve found it to be stable and fast.

But personal experience isn’t enough, and I worry that too many definitive-looking reviews that have already been produced are actually based on one person’s experience – sure, the OS will have been loaded onto various machines, but for an operating system as huge and important as Windows you need to live with it. But even more importantly, you need thousands of other people to have lived with it as well, ideally within business environments.

So while PC Pro has already produced a mammoth guide to Windows 7’s features – for gamers and enthusiasts, for work, for mobile and for home – I’m afraid you will have to wait a little while before you can read our definitive, final verdict.

In the meantime, I’d be very interested to hear what you think of Windows 7 RTM. Not just the bad, but also the good – and whether you intend to roll out Windows 7 in your home or business.

Fortunately, Microsoft has produced a chart to show you what’s possible (click to enlarge):

Fetched your paracetamol, yet?

The chart confirms what we’ve known for a while: that XP owners can essentially go whistle for an upgrade, and that they have to start from scratch with a clean install.

However, even those who shelled out for Vista aren’t necessarily able to upgrade to the version of their choice. Those who paid through the nose for Vista Ultimate are particularly hard done by, with their upgrade options restricted to Windows 7 Ultimate, providing a final kick in the teeth for buyers who were promised plenty of “Ultimate Extras” and received absolutely nothing of note.

Even though the upgrade path has now been opened, I’d still echo Jon Honeyball’s earlier advice and recommend that everyone undertakes a clean install. Not only does this give you the freedom to choose whichever version of Windows 7 you want (including the 64-bit options), it also means there’s no chance of detritus from Vista being carried over into your Windows 7 installation and slowing down the PC.

(P.S. As Jon Honeyball, and the ever-vigilant David Wright points out on comments below, did Microsoft even launch a 64-bit version of Vista Starter, as displayed in the grid? Although there are Far Eastern sites on the web claiming to sell it, Microsoft’s own site makes no mention of it.)

One notable omission in 7100 is Windows SideShow. It’s completely disappeared from the Control Panel and doesn’t appear when you perform a text search in Windows 7’s magnificent Start bar search. However, as the screenshot below proves, it was definitely there in Build 7000.

SideShow was one of Microsoft’s big ticket items for Windows Vista. It was support for a secondary screen – be it a small display embedded into a lid of a laptop or smart remote control – that displayed information such as unread emails or your music collection. The idea was you wouldn’t have to fire up your PC to find out if you’ve got any new messages or if you wanted to listen to music on the train home.

Unfortunately, it won about as much support from hardware manufacturers as the campaign to put a statue of Gary Glitter on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.  There was the Asus W5fe laptop and the Dell XPS 420 desktop, which had a small screen built into the case, but not a lot else.  

I was always quite keen on the SideShow concept, but it lacked a killer application. If you’re that bothered you’re missing out on unread messages, you’ll have push email on your smartphone; if you want to listen to music on the train you whip out your iPod (other MP3 player brands are available).

Microsoft won’t confirm that SideShow has shuffled off its mortal coil because our downloaded build isn’t yet an “official” version. But it looks almost certain that this one’s joined WinFS and Ultimate Extras on the list of Vista’s broken promises.  

It took mere hours for my baseline Vostro PC to be bettered, thanks in no small part to blog reader Tom A pointing me in the direction of Ebuyer’s pre-built PC section. There, for a penny-perfect £249.99 inc VAT and delivery, sat the Zoostorm Versatile Premium PC which now tops my shortlist.

The specs improve on the Vostro:

• 2.2GHz Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2200
• 2GB DDR2
• 250GB hard disk 
• DVD writer
• mouse & keyboard
• Vista Home Premium
• 1yr warranty

Ebuyer also had several others even cheaper than that, including the same system with a Celeron Dual-Core and Vista Home Basic for £209.83, as well as a low-power Fujitsu Siemens PC with lesser components and no operating system for £189.97. Neither really piqued my interest.

One other system that did intrigue me was one of Ebuyer’s own with an almost identical specification to the Zoostorm, but with a hefty 4GB of RAM. I couldn’t believe my luck when I saw the price of £199.99, until I realised it comes without an operating system. It’s a dilemma I’ve had at several other sites too.

Now, an OEM copy of Vista costs more than the £50 I’d have left, so should I go the Linux route and spend it on other extras instead? I’m reluctant to. The remit was to buy an everyday PC for £250 and – I’ll be honest here, don’t hit me – I’m just not sure I’d want to use Linux every day. Vista has it’s many annoyances but it would have to crawl out of my screen and wedge my keyboard somewhere uncomfortable to make me go so far as to get rid of Windows entirely.

So the Vista-equipped Zoostorm has the yellow jersey, at least until I find a site that sells a more impressive pre-built system for my budget. I’ve been looking and I’ve not found one yet, so keep the suggestions coming…

It’s built around a Pentium Dual-Core E2200, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard disk and integrated graphics. My choices for affordable upgrades are:

• Vista Home Premium – add £20+VAT
• 2GB RAM – add £10+VAT
• from DVD-ROM to DVD-RW drive – add £20+VAT

As useful as it would be, I draw the line at paying more than £20 to upgrade to a DVD writer, so with the first two upgrades selected my new baseline system comes to £246.10 inc VAT and delivery.

So where should I go from here? My first thought would be to the PC manufacturers who send us the systems for our Labs but, being smaller companies focusing on custom builds, I very much doubt my budget will accomodate them. I’ll give them a try and see what I find, but I’m thinking the big supermarket-style retailers will be the best way forward.

So that’ll be sites such as PC World, Dixons, Tesco, et al, and this is where you come in. Have any of our readers bought one of these off-the-shelf PCs before? If so, who did you buy from? How was the ordering process? And most importantly, did the resulting PC do the job?

Being more of a build-your-own man myself, I’m heading blind into the depths of internet PC shopping, and any guidance would be much appreciated!

But what I find particularly encouraging is not just the code itself, but what it reveals about how Microsoft’s mood and methods have changed since the Vista launch.

For a start, Windows 7 shows every sign of arriving on time, or even early. That alone bespeaks a major improvement in Microsoft’s internal processes. Remember that Vista was originally intended for release in 2003, with a number of headline features that never, in the end, saw the light of day. Its successor, by contrast, is already so complete, and so stable, that many of us here at PC Pro are happily using it as our primary work OS.

What’s more, I think this is the most generous Microsoft beta programme I’ve seen. Anyone at all who wants to try Windows 7 can use the Ultimate edition – in either 32-bit or 64-bit flavour – absolutely free for almost eight months. I’ve had entire computers that didn’t last that long. And, since this beta installed smoothly as an upgrade from the pre-beta distributed at PDC, I’m hopeful that you’ll be able to transition just as cleanly from the beta to the final version when it arrives.

Waking up smarter

When you remember the “Mojave Experiment” of a mere six months ago, Windows 7 seems to represent a remarkable change of heart. The empty swagger of the run-up to Vista is nowhere to be seen. Microsoft seems finally to have recognised that its current woes stem directly from its own past arrogance, and that it can no longer take the patience and loyalty of its user-base for granted. It seems that the company really has, in Steve Ballmer’s deathless phrase, “woken up smarter.”

For it’s surely no coincidence that where Vista was criticised as sluggish and over-complicated, its successor is praised precisely for its responsiveness and simplicity. While Microsoft has been publicly brushing off criticism of Vista its developers have evidently got the message loud and clear – and have acted on it. Now, as our esteemed editor so neatly puts it, the product of their labours is “what Vista should have been.” No wonder they wanted to show it off as widely, and as early, as possible.

Stand and be counted

But though the beta is already here, we’re many months away from the final release. And that gives us all, as Windows users, a rare opportunity. Because if you’ve tried the beta, you’ll have noticed a little link at the top-right of most windows inviting you to “Send Feedback”. Click on it and you can beam your comments on any part of the OS directly to Redmond.

Generally I ignore links like that, and I’m sure you do too. But in this case I think it really is worth using it. I suggest you press it every time you have something to say about Windows 7 – be it praise, a complaint or a suggestion. Let the Windows team know exactly what they’ve got right and what they haven’t.

Because, for once, it looks like Microsoft really is listening. At this stage there may not be time for major code revisions, but there’s a lot they can still do to make Windows 7 the OS we actually want. Let’s help them get there, and not leave them to produce another Vista.

As always, though, an economic downturn has a profound effect at every level of society – even if they don’t make the headlines. The IT industry, for instance, is feeling the haunting presence of the current crisis. In particular, system builders are feeling the squeeze as component prices rocket – and we’ve asked several of them for their thoughts on the future and how they’re planning to cope.

The problem is a global one, but home-grown businesses are also feeling the effects. “The whole IT industry functions in dollars”, says John Medley, Reviews Manager of British firm PC Specialist. This system avoids the problem of having to deal in different currencies in many countries, such as Hong Kong, China and Taiwan, where the majority of PC components are made.

It may be convenient for doing business, but the weakening of the pound against the dollar – as well as the increasing cost of raw materials and wages where the parts are manufactured – means that less can now cost considerably more.

Martin Sawyer, Senior Sales Manager of Chillblast, echoes many of these sentiments, attesting that “keeping a competitive retail price has been extremely difficult” in the current climate. As well as the aforementioned exchange rate difficulties, the US currency has also weakened against those in the Far East, producing a “double-whammy” effect.

This has a profound effect on the way that many British computer manufacturers are conducting their business. “Prices have gone up by as much as 25%” says Jonathan Bakewell, of Eclipse Computers. This has resulted in several businesses being stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place. On one hand, they can purchase excess stock to maintain the same level of profit margin that they’re used to – but, with PC sales falling, this brings far more risk into play.

It’s an impact that’s been felt by PC Specialist, too. John Medley explains: “each time we order we’re paying more for stock, thus reducing our margins on that particular batch.” It’s a situation that won’t be resolved until, he says, the various currencies around the world begin to stabilise.

In the meantime, businesses have to decide whether to make customers pay more or to bite the bullet and reduce profit margins. PC Specialist is trying to use both approaches, saying that while it may be “passing on cost increases to our customers” on some systems that it’s also keeping prices low where they can – by using stock that was bought and stockpiled when exchange rates were more favourable.

Eclipse is facing a similar predicament. “Normally”, explains Bakewell, “companies use these situations [of purchasing excess stock] to make extra margin, but since business has been low, companies have kept their margins the same.” While this means that prices look good when compared to those of competitors, it’s still not ideal with extra sales – or even maintaining a steady level of sales – certainly not guaranteed.

Problematically, some of the most important components are those that are seeing some of the biggest price rises. Sawyer has experienced the price of popular Intel chips, including the Core 2 Quad Q6600 and Q9550 and Core 2 Duo E8600 and E8500 “increasing by as much as 40%”, and “OEM copies of Windows Vista rising [in price] by over 50%.”

Chillblast has also seen some unusual effects from the credit crunch: whereas a new generation of Intel processors normally causes a furore as people try to upgrade, demand for machines equipped with Core i7 processors has been slack, with few people investing despite the product’s undoubted quality.

Sawyer lays blame at the door of some of the big manufacturers, too. While a minority are providing rebates and incentives to make buying components easier, “far too many are doing nothing to prevent the UK computer industry from getting into serious difficulty”. Several manufacturers have had to close their doors in recent years – including Evesham, Carrera, Time and Tiny – and he sees this trend continuing unless the situation changes and the industry is afforded a level of protection.

Medley has a different take on the situation, though: “it’s not that prices are increasing,” he argues, but that “they’re returning to what they used to be before the pound became such a strong currency against the dollar”. It’s an interesting point of view that suggests the days of £300 or £400 desktop systems could be numbered – and that, rather than losing out, we’ve merely been having it too good for too long.

We’ve become accustomed to prices always dropping and getting more for our money: in issue 160 of PC Pro, the Mesh Matrix Venom provided a 2.2GHz AMD Phenom 9500 CPU, 4GB of RAM, 750GB of hard disk space and two ATI Radeon HD 3850 graphics cards for £1,155.

Now, the Mesh Titan GT Pro offers a 3.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E8500, 4GB of RAM, 750GB of hard disk space – as well as an Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT graphics card – for a mere £575. The cheaper system, a year on, outscores the older Mesh in our 2D benchmarks: a reasonable 1.33 from the Matrix Venom is blown away by 1.82 from the Titan GT – a system that, literally, costs half as much.

This situation has become so familiar to us that we expect prices to keep falling – and the amount of performance we can buy for the same sort of cash to keep increasing. The state of the global economy dictates that it’ll be near-impossible for this situation to continue. Medley sees this as a double-edged sword, saying that increasing prices should see the end of “margin erosion” on cheaper systems that plenty of people are buying. Instead, prices may continue to rise and, as Medley says, “return value to our industry”.

In a world where netbooks, cheap desktop machines and money-saving deals have ruled the roost for much of this year – and, conceivably, the next – increasing prices could spell bad news for many manufacturers. However, rising prices may not deter many of the people who had been considering investing in a decent PC anyway – if they were still going to buy amidst a recession then it may be a case of a couple of extra months of saving money rather than refusing to buy at all.

This seems like an optimistic outlook, though, in the face of plenty of nervous realism from some of the UK’s more successful system builders. While Chillblast, Eclipse and PC Specialist all hope that increased prices won’t put customers off, it seems that constantly dropping prices will soon be replaced by a more volatile marketplace entirely. It’s good to see several of the UK’s most prominent system builders remaining reasonably upbeat during an incredibly unpredictable time – we certainly hope that they can ride out the recession and emerge unscathed.

But a few of you have raised good questions about the tests I used to compare performance between XP, Vista and Windows 7. So let me explain them in a bit more detail.

For the feature “Memory Laid Bare” in issue 169, I ran a series of tests, using the standard PC Pro benchmark suite, to find out how much RAM you need for peak Windows performance. One of my findings was that, on a given system, our benchmarks complete significantly more quickly under XP than Vista, regardless of how much memory is installed.

Unsurprisingly, it was GDI-heavy tasks that suffered the most. On the 2GB test system I used for that feature, our Microsoft Office test took 6:51 to complete in Windows XP; under Vista it slowed down to 8:07.

But calculation-intensive operations, such as video encoding, were also affected: our Canopus ProCoder exercise took 5:01 under XP but 5:11 under Vista. While that’s a much smaller gap, it demonstrates that the OS affects efficiency even for seemingly CPU-bound tasks.

In light of these results, I was intrigued to discover that both of these applications perform identically in Vista and Windows 7 – especially with commentators consistently reporting that the new OS feels faster. To me, there’s one obvious inference: that Microsoft has responded to criticism of Vista’s performance by speeding up the interface while leaving the back-end fundamentally unchanged.

But of course, Windows 7 is still a work in progress, and while Microsoft is starting to nail down the feature set (see Barry Collins’ reports on the new tools for IT admins, Device Stage, networking, touch controls, and user interface), its developers still have a year in hand to tidy up the code. They could yet surprise us by streamlining the internals to bring back XP-like levels of performance.

Then again, of course, they could spend that time inventing a truck-load of glitzy new services to slow the whole caboodle down even more.

Here’s hoping they really have learnt from Vista.

And the net effect? Surprisingly little. At this stage of development, over a year from release, Windows 7 looks almost identical to Vista. There are some welcome new features, as already noted by our esteemed editor and deputy editor (see their blog posts here and here); but the high profile changes (such as the snazzy new taskbar that Barry Collins saw in California the other week) are yet to be plumbed in.

Tortoise and hare

Yet Windows 7 does already offer one compelling advantage over Vista: it’s fast. Both our senior pontificators were struck by how nimble Windows 7 feels after you’re used to its predecessor. As Tim Danton writes, “Vista was never this nippy. You press on an icon and it leaps into action. . . . I can’t remember using any new OS that was this quick.”

Now if that’s not cause for celebration, I don’t know what is. Vista has had us driving with the handbrake on for the past two years, but at long last Windows 7 is coming to set us free. Admittedly it’s not actually going to get here for another year, but at least salvation is in sight.

But it’s a funny thing, you know. Because I’ve been running a few benchmarks, just to find out exactly what sort of speed boost we’re talking about. And I can exclusively reveal that the actual performance gap between Vista and Windows 7 is… nada. Absolutely nothing. Our Office benchmarks and video encoding tests complete in precisely the same time regardless of which OS is installed.¹

Perception is reality

It’s tempting to see this as a bit of a con. They’ve sped up the front end so it feels like you’re getting more done, but in terms of real productivity it’s no better than Vista.

But personally I think it’s an inspired move. Over the past few years, Microsoft has learnt the hard way the power of perception. Once the masses got hold of the idea that Vista was a lumbering step backwards, no Mojave Experiment could rescue its reputation.

Now, to borrow a phrase from Steve Ballmer, they’ve “woken up smarter.” They’ve recognised that perceptions of speed focus almost exclusively on interactive performance. Very few people notice or care whether a big mail-merge job takes thirty seconds or forty, but they sure as hell notice when they click a button and nothing seems to happen. That’s what wrecked Vista’s reputaton, not its disappointing benchmark scores; and that’s why we’re all hankering after Windows 7 despite its identical scores.

All the small things

Of course, it’s a disappointment to realise just how similar Microsoft’s new OS is, under the bonnet, to its current one – similar enough to explain why Windows 7 actually has an internal version number of 6.1. We all had high hopes of a lightweight “MinWin”, akin to what Apple is reportedly working on for OS X 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”).

But while this faster front-end seems like a superficial change, it makes a world of difference. As I’ve said before, there are plenty of things in Vista to like, but I find it impossible to enjoy them while the whole experience is weighed down by a sluggish interface. No longer. I can only echo Tim Danton’s conclusion: “Windows 7 is exactly what Vista should have been.”

Of course, it’s shameful that it’s taken so long to get here. It’s generally suspected that Vista was a rush release, but there’s no reason the improved window manager couldn’t have been dropped in via Windows Update once it was ready. Holding it back for Windows 7 is a real two fingers to users who paid for Vista, and I’m not sure it makes sense for Microsoft. The company surely realises what Vista is doing to its reputation, yet here it is giving Apple another year, on top of the two it’s already had, to thumb its nose and woo away potential customers.

All’s well that ends well

But ultimately I see Windows 7 much as I see the latest edition of Norton Internet Security. In both cases, previous versions acquired – with some justice – a reputation for terrible performance. In both cases, that’s now been fixed. We can kvetch all we want about how and when it should have been fixed, but the fact is that the battle is over. If you feel you were ripped off in the past, you can signal your displeasure by choosing a competing product now; but arguably it sends a clearer message to invest in a fixed product than to boycott it. Plus, this way you get the thing you really wanted, albeit late.

So when Windows 7 finally comes knocking next Christmas, I won’t be turning it away. Sure, there will be admonishments about how long it took to get here. And I’m sure it will bring new faults as well as benefits.

But deep down we’ll both know how much I’ve been looking forward to its arrival. And together, at long last, we’ll once and for all close the book on Vista.

Follow-up: Benchmarking Windows 7