Windows 7

Description

Windows Vista appeared in January 2007 with a lot of hardware requirements, common driver incompatibilities, and a User Account Control system that gave users permission dialogs so frequently that many disabled the system completely, canceling the security advantage it was meant to provide. PC sales slowed. Enterprise customers refused to migrate from Windows XP. Microsoft had two years to respond, and Windows 7 was that response — a release built on the architecture of Vista but with every friction point the previous version had introduced either corrected or removed.

Windows 7 was released on October 22, 2009 to instant positive reception. It ran faster than Vista on the same hardware, was shipped with a redesigned taskbar that users picked up quickly, fixed the driver compatibility issues, and adjusted UAC to a level that was effective but not intrusive. In six months it had outsold Vista’s entire run. It became the most-widely-installed version of Windows in the world, a position held until Windows 10 surpassed it in 2018 – nine years after launch.

KEY FEATURES

Taskbar and Jump Lists

Windows 7 replaced the Vista taskbar with a redesigned taskbar that combined the Quick Launch tool bar and running applications buttons into a single pinned applications system. Pinned applications were large icons with no text labels, with a thumbnail preview of open windows when the mouse is hovered over them. Jump Lists emerged by right-clicking a pinned or running application, and displayed a context-sensitive list of recently opened files, frequent tasks and pinned items for that application — a browser’s Jump List showed recently visited sites; a media player’s showed recently played tracks.

Aero Glass and Visual Features

The Aero Glass interface was continued from Vista and included translucent window chrome, smooth animations for window open/close/minimize operations as well as live taskbar thumbnails. Aero Shake reduced the number of windows displayed except the window being shaken by grabbing the title bar and shaking the mouse. Aero Snap resized windows by half the screen when the user dragged them to the left or right edge, or maximized them by dragging them to the top edge — and this is the window snapping behavior all later versions of Windows retained. Aero Peek made all windows temporarily transparent so as to display the desktop by hovering over the Show Desktop button, at the right end of the taskbar.

Homegroup

Homegroup made it easier to share home network files and printers between Windows 7 computers. Creating a Homegroup on one machine created a password which was used by other Windows 7 computers on the same network to join it. Joined machines shared documents, music, pictures, videos, and printers automatically without having to configure sharing through network settings.

Device Stage

Device Stage offered a central management page for connected devices such as printers, phones, cameras and portable media players. Connecting a supported device brought up its Device Stage page which displayed available tasks, device status and links to manufacturer tools, instead of the user having to navigate to separate manufacturer software.

Libraries

Libraries gathered content from multiple physical folder locations under a single virtual folder that is listed in Windows Explorer. A Music Library may use folders on both the local drive and external hard drive, displaying all the music files in a unified view without having to move the files themselves. Libraries for Documents, Music, Pictures and Videos were created by default and users created custom libraries of other content types.

Improvements in User Account Control

Windows 7 introduced a slider into the UAC settings with four levels instead of the on/off of Vista. The default level prompted only when applications tried to make changes to the computer, and not when the user manually opened administrator tools — addressing the chief complaint about Vista’s UAC behavior while ensuring protection against software that tried to change system settings without explicit user initiation.

Windows XP Mode

Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate versions came with Windows XP Mode — a licensed Windows XP virtual machine running via Windows virtual PC. Applications which required Windows XP for compatibility ran inside the virtual machine but appeared in the Windows 7 taskbar and Start menu as if installed natively, providing a migration path for businesses with legacy software dependencies.

Performance Improvements

Windows 7 decreased startup time, optimized memory usage on machines with less RAM and was more careful with background disk I/O to keep foreground applications responsive during background operations. The ReadyBoost feature, inherited from Vista, permitted a USB flash drive to be used as a supplement to RAM for disk caching purposes to improve responsiveness on systems with limited installed memory.

End of Life

Microsoft dropped mainstream support for Windows 7 on January 13, 2015, and extended support on January 14, 2020. After the extended support end date, Windows 7 does not receive any security updates from Microsoft. Systems still running Windows 7 are at greater and greater security risk due to unpatched vulnerabilities. A paid Extended Security Updates program was available for enterprise customers until January 2023 but is no longer available.