Windows 7 -- Just Vista in disguise? Don't look now, but here comes Microsoft Windows 7 -- the latest, greatest, and oddly quick-on-the-heels-of-Vista operating system release. It, like post-surgical Steve Austin, is bigger, faster, and stronger than poor ol' Vista. But this is not your cursing, angry, Microsoft-hating cousin's Vista. Microsoft's Vista has had a very pratfall-filled existence. It has quickly become a Bad Word, and appears to be the biggest OS release gaffe since Windows ME in 2000. Okay, it's impossible to ignore that Vista had issues upon release. The short list includes the horrid file system performance, oppressive User Account Control security prompts, and some other negative adjective to associate with its extremely high system requirements. Add to that the utter failure that is Vista 64 (the "purely" 64-bit version of Vista), and it's been a tough 13 months for Microsoft.

Since the release of Vista's Service Pack 1, its issues are fewer and further between. File system performance was improved by 25%, UAC prompting has been reduced by 50%, improved power conservation on laptops, improved hard disk caching to cut wear and tear on your hard drive, graphical optimizations that lower the minimum requirement bar for users, and many other improvements too numerous (or that I'm too lazy) to mention. Microsoft could've called Service Pack 1 good enough and pushed ahead. However, the damage has been done -- Vista can no longer be sold as Vista, since, thanks to word of mouth and Apple's advertising, the word "Vista" is synonymous with "Flaming Radioactive Monkey Poo". Along comes Windows 7 -- announced this week "officially" by Microsoft at their almost-annual Professional Developer's Conference in Los Angeles. No one expected Microsoft to have their "new" OS ready to rock and roll so soon, but here it is.

Some of the new highlights, in no particular order, include the following.  Steer down even further for some groovy screenshots of the new operating system and some of its more colorful features.

Improved UAC -- Microsoft has made the process of seeking user approval for high-privilege operations much smoother. No more jarring black screen with a beeping prompt after every two clicks. There's now a standard Control Panel applet with a user-friendly slider allowing you to set it to prompt from not at all all the way through "full aggravation".

Improved Windows Desktop Search -- Microsoft has completely rewritten the way the OS indexes your files for searching. While Vista's system-wide search is a fantastic feature (once you get used to using it, it's hard to go back) it came at a very high price and was the cause of a lot of the file system sluggishness. Windows 7 now re-prioritizes the searching indexing processes, and they've also done a ton of rework on the search database formatting internally, vastly improving its performance -- Query speed is 37% faster, CPU utilization is down 80%.

New Task Bar -- the bar at the bottom of the Windows desktop has been the same for 61 years, and it's both useful and horridly cluttered and cumbersome. MS has redesigned it from scratch. From beta users I've talked to (and myself... I have great conversations with me), they initially hate the new task bar (change is bad), then get used to it and can't stomach going back to Vista or XP. The buttons that appear for open windows on the bar are replaced with large icons only. As you mouse over them, a "thumbnail bar" appears above the taskbar, allowing you to see a thumbnail preview of several windows at once, and allowing you to click them to bring them back up. It sounds clumsy, but works very well. In addition, other items will appear in that icon list -- connected devices like digital cameras and scanners, highly-commonly used applications, etc. also appear there.

Tweaked "Start" menu -- The menu that appears when you click Start in XP or "The Orb" in Vista has been optimized based on millions of bits of collected user data. They now put a heavier emphasis on quick access to recently used/viewed items. The menu is also more customizable, allowing people that prefer the "old way" to go back, or for purists to tightly control and limit what appears.

Customizable Notification Area/System Tray -- That little area full of annoying icons by your clock on the taskbar is now completely customizable. Does your printer's icon notify you every 2 seconds? Tell it to shut up. Could you care less that your Ethernet connector is never connected? Hide the icon (or any other task bar icon) permanently.

Fully integrated touch support -- Microsoft has learned a great deal from both Apple and their own Surface technology. As such, touch/multi-touch features are now built-in from scratch into the OS' user input methodology.

Rejiggered Wi-fi support -- Vista was horribly broken in this regard. Windows 7's wireless connection logic has been re-written from scratch and is now more akin to the super-user-friendly experience seen on Apple's devices.

DirectConnect -- A much more user-friendly Remote Desktop capability that's basically a no-brainer way for you to access your Windows desktop remotely.

Greatly improved stability -- This comes from the fact that it really is the Vista kernel under there, and that kernel has been stabilized now after a full year of live field data.

Reduced quantity of system software -- A long standing issue with Windows has been its Kitchen Sink philisophy. Vista loads a ton of services (close to 50 on my system) during start up -- that's basically 50 applications running when I'm not even doing anything. The Win7 team is looking long and hard at stripping that to a bare minimum, allowing the user to opt-in to additional features and services, either through web based apps or add-ons.

Faster boot up and shut down time -- Along with fewer services comes the fact that without those services, Windows 7 boots quite a bit faster -- about 20% faster than an equivalent Vista SP1 system. From my experience with Win7, it definitely is faster than expected -- when I see the desktop in Win7, I'm able to actually use the machine within about a minute, whereas my Vista box has about 4 minutes of "dead time" when the desktop appears.

Tweaked Sidebar -- Many users immediately turn off Vista's Sidebar because it uses up a lot of real estate, and because it was a pain to minimize windows to even see and interact with it. There's now an area by your clock display to click and cause basically a full-screen sidebar to appear -- the applets appear right on top of all of the existing windows, allowing you a quick one-glance look at the applet displays, and allowing you to then click on them and interact, or wave your mouse away and they disappear quickly.

This hodge-podge of new features and tweaks is not to be taken lightly. I've been using Vista in one form or another for two-plus years, and have always had a general dislike for it, forcing myself to get along with it like some bratty little step-sister. But I find myself more and more drawn into Windows 7 -- I easily prefer it over my Vista box, even in beta, and now find myself annoyed when I use my wife's XP box. Will Windows 7 "save Microsoft"? It's hard to say, but I think it is safe to say Windows 7 will be our golden carriage away from the dark age of Vista.