Microsoft keeps the Windows 7 promises coming

Microsoft is promising the fundamentals of Windows 7 will be a noticeable improvement over Vista. The firm has spoken of longer battery life, quicker start-up and fewer crashes.

The comments came at the firm’s Hardware Engineering Conference, the second event at which officials talked publicly about the new system. Unlike last week’s announcements about new features at the Professional Developers Conference, this week’s push (logically enough given the setting) concentrated on the basics of how the system runs from day to day.

My colleague Justin Montgomery has written about the information Microsoft gave about its work to reduce compatibility issues between Vista and Windows 7 so that existing hardware drivers should carry over smoothly. It also hopes that firms are used to the major security changes brought in by Vista; there shouldn’t be such a major stumbling block in the transition to Windows 7.

According to Microsoft’s Jon DeVaan (pictured), the thinking in developing Windows 7 is to concentrate on “the scenarios that every single user cares about every single day”. That literally starts from the beginning, with a demonstration at the conference showing the new system starting up several seconds quicker. That’s apparently down to Windows 7 loading multiple drivers at once rather than one by one.

The new system should also use less memory while multitasking thanks to a more intelligent way of dividing the workload between the main processor and the video card, which handles graphics.

The firm also says Windows 7 does a better job of letting the processor stay idle when it has nothing to do, which could mean a longer battery life in notebooks. Microsoft tests show this could mean a notebook can play a DVD for an hour longer in perfect circumstances, though it says an extra 20 minutes is probably going to be more realistic.

Given that Microsoft believes Vista’s problems have been as much down to public image as the product itself, it’s encouraging to see the firm putting efforts into measures that improve the product even though they don’t lend themselves to marketing (unless it opts for a “Windows 7: It just works better” campaign).

The risk, of course, is that if the final system doesn’t live up to these promises, Microsoft could lose much-needed trust among both users and developers.

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