Hands on with Windows 7. Should you upgrade?

Let me be frank. I don't know if I like Windows 7 because it's genuinely good or because it simply looks so good in comparison to Windows Vista. I also don't know if that matters.

Windows 7 officially arrives on October 22, so in just a few days you'll have a tough decision to make. Should you shell out up to $300 for a copy of the software? Or stick with the Windows you already know -- one which may very well be Windows XP?

If you have Vista, an upgrade is a no-brainer. XP users have it rougher. If you've been using XP for the entirety of the decade, you'll find Windows 7 quite a shift from what you're used to. It's an even bigger jump than the one from XP to Vista, in fact, and I expect the learning curve will be quite steep for those who are finally making the switch.

The good news is that a lot of Win7's changes are for the better. Here's what to expect.

The redesigned taskbar is probably the OS's most noticeable change. It's bigger, icon-driven, pretty, and works as a surprisingly intuitive combination of permanently docked applications and stuff you're running live. You get used to the (often enormous) switch from the old XP/Vista system rather quickly, and the big thumbnails displaying each window in use are especially helpful. These design ideas translate as well to window management, though none are as killer in execution as the taskbar. I do enjoy being able to automatically size a window to take up half the screen by dragging it to the right or the left -- but be aware this doesn't work so well if you have a small monitor.

Windows 7 security is a big upgrade over Windows Vista. The ability to throttle down the pop-up alerts (no reboot required, even!) is massive, and managing security settings in Windows 7 is far simpler than it is under Vista. Sharing printers and files is no longer the massive headache that Vista created, and households with multiple PCs will likely find Win7 a must-have upgrade for this fix alone.

Application compatibility is fairly good. I've encountered a few apps which won't run on Win7, but by and large anything you could run on Vista should work here. Win7's compatibility mode, which lets you emulate older versions of Windows back to the Stone Age, takes care of any lingering compatibility problems. I've not personally encountered any devices that won't work with Windows 7, though from numerous third-party reports I know they're out there...

Installation, for me, has been pretty seamless. Upgrading from Windows Vista is pretty much a click-and-wait affair... though it can take hours to complete (up to four or five in my experience). If you're coming from XP or want to do a more complicated upgrade like jumping from a 32-bit to a 64-bit OS, be prepared to do a clean install, which will wipe out everything on the hard drive and leave you to your own devices to reinstall your apps and copy back your data. Workarounds exist (more on this later), but most users moving from XP to Win7 will be digging out tons of old CDs and corresponding serial numbers this weekend to get their apps back in place.

Performance under Windows 7 is good. Not great, but good. It boots noticeably faster than Vista, loads apps more quickly, and just generally seems more responsive. Most benchmarks show little to no difference in performance, though. If you have a slow PC, any benefits will be mitigated -- Windows 7's graphical requirements are just as hefty as Vista's were -- but fortunately more computers today are outfitted with enough under the hood to power the OS's operating needs. And yes, Windows 7 still crashes. I don't have enough data to determine if it's more or less often than Vista, but it seems stable enough even in the pre-Service-Pack-1 era to merit installation today.

Numerous Windows features have seen small, but useful, changes. While the new Windows Media Player and Windows 7 version of IE8 offer virtually nothing new, Windows Explorer is cleaner and a little easier to work with than it is in Vista. I'd still kill for an "up" button to go up one level in the directory structure (no, this is not the same as the "back" button, which takes you to the last folder you looked at), but overall it's a decent upgrade.

I haven't worked extensively with some of Windows 7's other changes, particularly the new Windows Media Center, as I have no real call to use it. Also be advised that Windows 7 ships with no mail application. You can download the new Windows Mail for free -- but I haven't tried it.

Windows 7 isn't perfect. The Control Panel is worse than ever. IE8 is a tragic mess. The system for pinning files and folders to the taskbar is inconsistent, and the lack of some preinstalled apps which I used to actually use -- Windows Movie Maker, especially -- is a strangely dumb decision. Yeah, you can download them... but why force the user to do extra work?

It isn't perfect, but that may not matter. Why? Because it's better: So much better than Vista, in fact, that you'd be a fool not to upgrade. That said, if you're an XP user and really don't need more out of your machine than what it's already giving you, I can certainly see waiting until you get a new computer before you make the switch, if for no other reason than to save yourself an immense hassle... and few hundred bucks.