Windows 7 Home Investigated
A fundamental of Windows 7 for home users is the new HomeGroup feature. HomeGroup brings the tricky concept of network sharing in a more accessible interface. Windows 7 offers to join a group as soon as you get Windows 7 computer on to your home computer network and is an annoying barrier to just getting yourself up and running. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that once you’ve set up a HomeGroup, it will show up on other Windows 7 PCs, but not XP or Vista machines, as being available to join in the Network and Sharing Centre. Once you’ve joined up, an icon for the group appears in the left-hand pane of Explorer, containing default library categories that mirror those of local document libraries and you can add files and folders in the same way. This feature is simple and user friendly.
HomeGroup also avaoids the hassle and need to install printer drivers on every machine in the home. Once the printer has been installed on the first PC in the HomeGroup, the drivers are automatically installed on any subsequent Windows 7 PC that joins the network.
The document libraries in Windows 7 are in some ways an extension of the file shortcuts that have been around since Windows 95 – they allow you to organise files from different locations via a link, without the need for multiple copies of the file. There are huge benefits to the use of libraries. A large media collection o can be housed on an external hard disk, and doesn’t have to be tied to the system disk. This makes organisation and backup easier. You can also create as many custom libraries as you want.
Once you’ve associated two Windows 7 PCs with an online ID, you can sign in and stream media from your home PC across the internet to the other PC. The second streaming option is to allow remote control of the Media Player. Once that’s activated you can push media from one PC to another on the home network. So if you have a PC connected to your hi-fi, you can push music from your laptop to it, instead of playing it through the laptop’s speakers.
There are plenty of backdrop images to choose from with Windows 7. You get six themes by default, Architecture, Characters, Landscapes, Nature, Scenes and a local theme for the UK, which gives you views of heritage sites such as Stone Henge. The themes seem to be much improved than the equivalents on Vista. There’s also a good desktop background sideshow option with a configurable time delay.
Windows 7 is heavily based on Vista, so if a program fails to install and run, a dialog box pops up automatically and offers to try and run it in a special compatibility mode. The Program Compatibility wizard then starts up and attempts to identify problems automatically. Windows 7 will then try to launch the application in an environment resembling close to an old Operating System as possible. If it doesn’t work it offers to try again, giving you the chance to simulate a different operating system.
