A computer operating system is like a desk. It should be comfortable to work at; sturdy and stable; handsome to look upon, but not distracting; it should be able to store files and tools away when not in use, but keep them accessible when you need them. But above all else, an OS should get out of the way and let you get your work done. Now imagine if your desk were enormous—taking up a significant portion of the room you keep it in. To get started working requires unfoldings, knob-twistings and other complex procedures. When you finally are seated, you open a drawer on your desk to get a new pen and the drawer instantly snaps shut on you, saying "Do you really want to use that pen? It's new and I don't know where it came from." Then you say, "Yes, I bought the pen and I'd like to use it. I know where it came from." And then your desk replies, "All right, fine. Use the pen, but before you do, I want to make sure that I've expressed my reservations about that pen. It's a fountain pen and those have been known to explode and shoot ink all over the place. You've been warned."

It sounds silly, but that's exactly the problem with Windows Vista, a big, creeping, cumbersome embarrassment for Microsoft the past few years. The worst part is that Vista was an honest attempt to deal with the consequences of the success of Microsoft's Windows XP'. The ubiquity of Windows has made it a frequent target of cyber attackers and criminals, and the reviled User Account Control was intended to create a barrier so no program could install itself on your computer without your consent. The world got more dangerous, so Windows got more protective. The slow boot time and bloated size of Windows were consequences of the system's need to be a photo viewer, media player, e-mail client and movie editor. And because, unlike Apple's Macintosh OS, Windows is built to support thousands of potential computers with millions of potential peripherals, it must have generic support for most of those things built in.

The problem is that we, the consumers, don't and shouldn't care about all of this. Because the more an operating system gets in the way, the less useful it is in the first place. And for all of its noble intentions, Vista was terrible at this—a profoundly uncomfortable and awkward desk, indeed.

So today Windows 7 officially hits the market, and I know I'm not the only reviewer out there who thinks it is a welcome relief. It may come as a surprise to most users that it doesn't look that much different from Vista at first glance. Desktop icons and gadgets are all still there, the Start menu and some quick-launch icons, the Control Panel looks familiar and there is a system tray in the lower right corner. As you use Win 7, however, everything seems considerably snappier and an order of magnitude more refined than in Vista.

For instance, the former quick-launch bar has been transformed to a far more useful taskbar, which displays both running programs and commonly used programs that you pin to it. Running the cursor over a running program in the taskbar gives a small thumbnail preview of all open windows in that program, allowing you to jump instantly to any one of them (especially useful if you have multiple web windows open at once), and mousing over any one of those thumbnails gives you an "Aero Peek" full-screen look at the window.

All searching can be done instantly from the start menu, and right-mouse clicks on programs bring up Jump List menus of common or frequently used tasks for that program, letting you get right back into work that you were doing recently. There's plenty of other navigational tweaks to Win 7 that are very smartly done and reward experimentation: A quick click in the bottom right corner makes all windows transparent for a quick look at the desktop; pulling a window to the top of the screen instantly resizes it to full screen; pulling it to the side resizes it to take up half your monitor, allowing for a quick comparison of documents. The list goes on.

But perhaps the most important thing about Windows 7 is that it has a feeling of a truly finished product (no small feat in the computer software world). Printers, scanners, MP3 players and phones all installed and interfaced easily, with few driver issues. This is thanks to Microsoft's ingenious massive public beta trial of Win 7, which let its software engineers work out most of the kinks in the real world before release.

Networking is also improved, with some nifty features such as Windows Connect, which allows you to simply type in a PIN printed on a router to connect to it; HomeGroups, which lets multiple computers easily share files and folders; and Play To, which lets you push content from one device on your network to play on another. But these features only work with other Win 7 PCs or Win 7-compatible equipment. Over time, this will make setup and file-sharing easier, but most new customers will be bringing a Windows 7 PC into an existing network, and that means many of the confusing networking headaches have not gone away. For the record, I still believe that both Apple and Microsoft have a long way to go before networking is made easy for the common user.

Also, many users will be surprised to find that some of the integrated software that came with Vista, such as an e-mail client and photo- and movie-editing software, are not automatically loaded with the OS, but can be downloaded for free from Microsoft's Windows Live site.

All in all, I'm enthusiastic about Windows 7. If for no other reason than that it is faster and far less annoying than its predecessor. Faster is an obvious benefit (in our tests the same computers booted an average 50 percent faster with Win 7 than with Vista). Less annoying may not seem that impressive, but it is the most admirable thing about Windows 7—it's far from perfect, but for the most part, it gets out of the way and lets you get down to work.

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