PETALING JAYA: With the Windows 7 release candidate freshly downloaded from the Internet, we installed it on a desktop PC to see what this new version of Microsoft’s operating system (OS) had to offer.

The installation process took about 25 to 30 minutes and felt similar to what we experienced when we installed Vista, the previous version of the OS, two years ago.

What this means is that installing Windows 7 was a relatively hands-off affair, requiring little user input.

That’s a far cry from when we installed the even older Windows XP, which needed the user to enter all sorts of system information during the installation.

This is a plus in our book for Windows 7 RC. You still need to input some system info, but that’s only at the beginning and end of the process.

Installation on our quad-core AMD Phenom PC, with its ATI Radeon 4850 graphics card, went without a hitch and Windows 7 had no problems recognising every component on the motherboard and installing the proper drivers.

Warning: Don’t expect Windows 7 to look radically different from Vista. Some of my colleagues were disappointed that the new OS version looked very similar to its predecessor.

But there are a few obvious differences. For one, Windows 7’s gadgets do not appear right from the get-go; you need right-click the desktop and enable the ones you want.

Furthermore, although the gagets initially appear in the same area as in Vista, they are no longer bound by the so-called “sidebar” and can be dragged to any part of the desktop. They will remain resident in those spots until you close them or move them.

The other obvious difference is the redesigned taskbar — it’s a little wider than the taskbar in Vista and now combines the Quick Launch bar with the general taskbar.

Sounds confusing? It isn’t, really. When you launch a program, you see its icon on the taskbar at the bottom and if you want to pin this icon for a quick launch later, just right-click and choose the “Pin this program to taskbar” option.

Resident icons

The Windows 7 taskbar has had more tweaking than this, however. Icons now resident on the taskbar will show more information than before.

For example, if you have several tabs open in Internet Explorer, hovering your cursor over the IE icon will show thumbnails of all your open tabs. Clicking on any of the thumbnails will bring that tab (or any window for that matter) to the front.

There are also a few very useful tricks you can do with open windows — drag a window to the far left or right of the screen and Windows 7 will give you the option to re-size it to fill the screen or to re-size it to fit half the screen.

This makes it easier to, for example, open two windows at once and display them side-by-side without having to drag the corners of each window to re-size it.

Oh yes, one major change in Windows 7 that we noticed is the built-in support for DivX, xVid, MPEG4 and H.264 video file formats.

Windows 7 can now open and play these files in Windows Media Player without the user having to download a compatible third-party player.

Windows 7, however, does not support the other increasingly common video format, the so-called Matroska file format (or .MKV for short).

Overall, the OS seems to be working quite fast (or is it because Vista worked slow?) and we can report that Windows 7 starts up in about 30 seconds. Also, the user interface seems more intuitive that is does on Vista.

That’s all for now. We’ll keep you posted on what we find as we play even more with Windows 7 over the next few days.