You might think it’s foolish to think that Microsoft would ever listen to someone like me and include or remove features in Windows just because I want them to.  If you’re using or have been using Windows Media Centre on both XP and Vista in your home though, with videos accessible through shared storage on a Home Server or similar, and don’t have a problem with the different operating systems wiping out the thumbnails for the videos all the time, then that was me!

Okay, it’s a minor little thing that’ll affect less than 1% of 1% of users worldwide, but Windows is full of minor little things that all add up into one big experience.  So with the Proffessional Developer’s Conference in the next couple of weeks and the first proper look at Windows 7, I thought I’d publicly announce my wish list to see what, if anything, has made it already.  I’ll come back to this occasionally until the final release and we’ll see if any of this stuff gets adopted.

Put Windows on a diet and send it down the gym

This, we know is already happening.  I’ve never been happy with the bloatware that comes loaded with Windows.  We don’t need Movie Maker, Calendar, Mail and various other utilities that fatten the operating system up better than an old woman in a gingerbread house.  Also we need the services sorting out badly, for more on this see my article the other day about a Windows Gaming Mode.  Oh!  And we need a Windows Gaming Mode, see below.

Further to the number of services that are running by default is ridiculous and needs slimming.  Fortunately we already know this is happening.  Services are little programs within Windows that handle specific jobs like network traffic or printing.  These services make Windows feel sluggish, even on really good hardware.  Performance generally needs improving to make it all zippy like XP was.

Get rid of the grey

Too many windows still have a dull, drab plain grey background ala Windows 98.  These all need to be dumped.  We’ve seen excellent implementations of semi-transparent windows since the launch of Vista and now more so with Windows Live Wave 3 that are really effective.  Can we have more of that and less of the grey please?

Sort out the sidebar

The sidebar should be what is was originally intended to be, a place to run proper dymanic applications.  We already know the sidebar is going to be replaced by a series of desktop widgets.  Thing is it might be going but I don’t think it’s going far enough!

Install software into custom virtual environments

AKA Gaming mode!  This would also replace the old compatability mode for legacy software.  No more will we have to put up with unstable old software.  On install if Windows detects, as it can, that the software has incompatabilities it will install it into a virtual environment.  Also you’d be able to specify that you can install software directly into a virtual machine too like games.  These VMs would have full control of the machine’s hardware when you run them but could also, optionally I suppose, completely suspend the computer’s normal operations when they run.  You would be able to suspend everything in memory using the same process used to hibernate a machine.  When you close the VM your normal Windows session would be almost instantly restored.

Allow third-parties to plug their software into Windows Update

This one’s been on the cards for years.  Why is it that only Microsoft software can be updated by Windows update?  I know there are all sorts of issues about things being ‘signed’ and tested by Microsoft and obviously this takes time and costs money.  Microsoft and the big software houses really need to pull together on this one now though.

Add Complete PC Backup to ALL Windows Versions

Again this seems like a no-brainer, like making bitlocker drive encryption a default feature of Vista Business or selling a multi-licence family pack.  By the way, those other two are on my list as well.

Let the defragmenter defragment the registry

Why have I only ever found ONE piece of software that does this?  The excellent PC Tune-up from Large software.  The registry is one big database that gets loaded when Windows starts and get big holes in it as you uninstall software.  Why waste time loading a file that’s got big holes in it?

Refine the search, tags and ratings features

I love this!  It took me ages to add tags and ratings to all my photos and music but damn it’s worth it!!  I might be the only person on the planet using saved searches and the stack by option in Explorer but it’s fantastic and I can recommend it to all without reservation.  They still need tweaking though to make them the killer features that everyone will find useful.  We also need Media Centre to be able to use tags and ratings when viewing and sorting photos, videos and music too.

Anyway that’s it, at least for now.  There are other niggly little things like blu-ray playback support for media centre and the fact that Windows has never been available in English (no America you do NOT speak English and know even less how to spell in it) but these aren’t so major.  I’ll feed back later to see where we end up.    For more on Windows 7 I’d encourage you to visit Paul Thurrott’s excellent Windows 7 FAQ.