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Windows 7 is a big deal for Microsoft. A very big deal.

Almost three years ago, after a much ballyhooed launch event complete with a human billboard and millions of dollars in advertising, Microsoft delivered a flop. Consumers and businesses never warmed to Windows Vista and instead stuck with the old standby, Windows XP, exercising their downgrade rights when XP ceased to be available for separate purchase.

An now, the pressure on Windows 7 is twofold: not only does the new Microsoft operating system need to wash away the bad taste left by Vista but it also launches at the tail end of a global recession. Oddly enough though, the timing couldn't be better. Consumers and businesses are more likely to be investing in PCs over the next few years as the world's economies recover; IDC has already noted increased shipments.

The big question is, can Windows 7 handle business and consumer expectations or will it flop like Vista?

The good news – for the Redmond giant in the immediate sense and for everyone else who might pick up a copy in the larger – Microsoft appears to have pulled it off.

I've been working with Windows 7 since November, 2008 when it was handed out at Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference. Most programs at that stage of development are clutched tightly to developers' chests because they're nowhere near stable enough for the real world. Not so with Windows 7. Even in those early days, it was stable and performed well. Only once since last December, through pre-beta, then beta, then release candidate and through to the shipping version, have I suffered the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (a complete crash of the OS), amazing when I remember that, within my first hour of use of the shipping product, I managed to blue screen Windows Vista.

No doubt it helped that a lot of the core code for Windows 7 comes from Vista, so it's had a couple of years of stress testing and fixing. It also helped that the company finally got its ducks in a row and made sure of driver support for many devices before release. I've put Windows 7 on several machines of varying vintages, and have run into very few hardware support problems; where I did (on a shiny new HP netbook), the Vista driver for the device plugged the gap. For an unreleased operating system, that is impressive.

That's not to say that Windows 7 is perfect. But it's a great leap forward that should even lure Windows XP diehards into the fold.

Here's a quick glance at some of 7's better features. Read through the accompanying sidebars for more of a focused view on what consumers and businesses might get out of Win7, what it'll take to upgrade and how the new OS may affect gaming.

At first blush, Windows 7 looks a lot like Vista. It has the same round start button, and the same basic desktop. However, if you look more closely, the updates emerge. The Sidebar that cluttered the side of the display is gone; now you can place Gadgets (the funky clock, news ticker, etc) anywhere you want on the desktop.

The Taskbar has been morphed into a combination of taskbar and toolbar. Icons for commonly used programs or shortcuts to common tasks can be pinned to it (a drag and drop operation, or if the program is active, a right click selection on its Taskbar icon), and are visible all of the time, ready to run with a click. And if you decide you'd rather have the Taskbar icons in a different order, just drag them to the right place. If an item is active, its icon is highlighted, and if it is minimized and needs attention, the highlight colour changes and undulates.

Hover the cursor over an active icon, and you'll see thumbnail views of every document it has open. Hover over one of the thumbnails, and it expands to full size so you can identify the document more easily (this is known as Aero Peek). Click on the thumbnail to make that document active, click on the red x in the top corner of the thumbnail to close the document, or just move the mouse away and the thumbnails disappear.

Tabbed browsers give varying results in Aero Peek, however. With IE, you see thumbnails of each tab, while Firefox 3.5 only shows you the tab currently in focus, regardless of how many you have open in the browser. That will likely be corrected in an upcoming release.

The Taskbar fun doesn't stop there. If you right-click on any Taskbar icon, you get a context menu on steroids known as a Jump List. Depending on the program, the Jump List's contents may include a list of recently used files, recently viewed Web pages, or commonly performed tasks (eg: Play All Music for the Media Player, or Start InPrivate Browsing in IE).

The Aero graphical interface has some additional tricks up its virtual sleeve. Aero Peek also lets you see the entire desktop if you hover over the blank spot on the Taskbar to the right of the taskbar clock. Click that spot, and it minimizes everything. Aero Shake lets you minimize all but one running program by, yes, clicking on its title bar and holding the left mouse button and giving the window a shake. Shake again to restore the minimized programs. To compare two documents, drag one to the right edge of the screen and one to the left, and they will snap to, each occupying half the screen. If you drag a document to the top of the screen, it will maximize; pull its title bar away from the top, and it will return to its previous view. And, by the way, the cutesy naming is continued in the re-christening of our application switching old friend Alt-Tab as Aero Flip .

Windows Explorer has been revamped, and may in some ways be the most difficult piece of the OS to get used to. It's well worth the effort, however. It introduces a new concept called Libraries : sets of files and folders on your PC or elsewhere that share common characteristics. Think of it as an extension of the Shortcuts we've known in older versions of Windows. Windows 7 creates four default Libraries for music, images, documents, and video and gathers links in each to files it has found on your machine or on network computers indexed via Windows Search.

One bit of silliness perpetuated from previous versions and which can create a security risk exists: the setting to hide file extensions for known file types. Bad guys have used that “feature” in the past to introduce malware onto systems and likely will do so again. I turned it off.

FEATURES

Here's a quick look at the various versions Microsoft is offering with the release of Windows 7
	Home Premium	Professional	Ultimate
Upgrade	$129.95	$249.95	$279.95
Full	$224.95	$329.95	$349.95
Make the things you do every day easier with improved desktop navigation.	X	X	X
Start programs faster and more easily, and quickly find the documents you use most often.	X	X	X
Make your web experience faster, easier and safer than ever with Internet Explorer 8.	X	X	X
Watch, pause, rewind, and record TV on your PC (additional hardware required).	X	X	X
Easily create a home network and connect your PCs to a printer with HomeGroup.	X	X	X
Run many Windows XP productivity programs in Windows XP Mode.		X	X
Connect to company networks easily and more securely with Domain Join.		X	X
Recover your data easily with automatic backup to your home and business network.		X	X
Help protect data on your PC and portable storage devices against loss or theft with BitLocker.			X
Work in the language of your choice and switch between any of 35 languages.			X
Family Pack: Starting October 22nd, customers will be able to buy a Family Pack which allows users to install Windows 7 Home Premium on up to three PCs for $149.99 in the U.S., $199.99 in Canada. It’s an easy and cost effective way to get customers entire household on Windows 7.

One new feature I do like a lot is Device Stage . Where before you'd often end up managing a device from several places, especially if it had multiple functions (a printer/scanner, or a smartphone, for example), now you can see everything in one place. Hardware vendors can even provide customized content for the Device Stage, including a photorealistic image of the hardware and utilities to view its status and manage it.

Security has been tidied up considerably, to the point that it's actually usable in its default state. It's a vast improvement over the Vista version, which annoyed people to the point that it was easier on them to leave their machines vulnerable. More on this later.

There are many other goodies in Windows 7 for consumers and business alike, in networking and multimedia, management, compatibility and security. It's a compelling story, and a welcome one for customers who were loath to venture into Vista-land, but who realize that XP is on the way out.

Gartner analyst Michael Silver said in the company's Windows 7 blog that, for Microsoft, Windows 7 is the most important release of Windows ever. He wrote, “A second consecutive bad outing for Microsoft would probably be enough to shake the confidence of the market and could potentially lead to the decline of the company.”

Based on my experience with Windows 7, I'd say the company has dodged that bullet.

Lynn Greiner is a freelance writer and techie who has been chronicling and working in IT since 1971. She has been involved in testing and evaluating Windows since version 3.1 .