Windows 7 improvements keep coming

 

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Posted on 16 Mar 2009 at 08:46

Microsoft has unveiled another raft of improvements that it will implement in the Windows 7 Release Candidate.

Only last month the Windows 7 engineering blog announced over 30 changes that would make their way into the Release Candidate from the beta.

It was always assumed that would be the lot, but now the engineering team has posted up another 27, claiming it will continually drip feed improvements to the public as they are implemented.

The change that immediately springs out is Microsoft's decision to tweak the behaviour of the much-maligned Safely Remove Hardware, now dubbed Eject.

"During the Windows 7 Beta, customers still had the Safely Remove Hardware functionality available on the taskbar as well as an Eject option on the context menus of applicable devices in Devices and Printers," writes Windows 7 lead engineer Steven Sinofsky on the blog.

"Based on feedback, we have integrated these two separate pieces of functionality... We have simplified the options by eliminating the drop-down submenu and made the semantics for eject functionality more consistent across the different kinds of media."

While many of the features are tweaks rather than wholesale changes, it's impressive that on the whole they're direct responses to user comments. Perhaps the most useful result of this is the introduction of the new multi-touch zoom to Windows Explorer.

Elsewhere, this acquiescence to user demand just makes it sound like Microsoft is making more work for itself. Take the decision to trim the opening and closing sound schemes to help performance, for example.

"We know our customers care about performance," says Sinofsky. "We discovered that by just trimming the shutdown and logoff WAV files, we could save up to 400 millisseconds. Every little bit counts."

Author: Stuart Turton