As I talked about in my last post, recently I set up 15 computers for an office. What a heist — we ran into all kinds of errors and incompatibilities, mostly caused by legacy software running on a new OS, Windows 7. Along the way of setting up and tweaking Windows 7, I ran into a lot of interesting discoveries — moments when I thought to myself, “why the hell does this look this way?” Poking around in the registry, checking out directories of crap, and drilling down into folders and folders of program configuration, there were instances where I needed to customize something a certain way, and after poking around in Windows 7′s innards, I realized that a lot of “stuff” hasn’t changed too much.

Here’s a funny program: The Agency Manager. It’s a record-keeper used by insurance agencies that does all kinds of very useful things. The only problem is that its backend structure feels like it was something created pre-2000. Applied Systems, the company behind it, just released a new version last Friday, so when we upgraded to it, I was getting ready to see a nice shiny new modern interface. This is the modern age of programming; surely they updated the visuals, right?

Try this one: Ever wanted to configure the taskbar and startmenu in a certain way for users on a domain? Bet you’re familiar with the insanely long file path to the Quick Launch folder buried in AppData. But, computers are computers, so anything within sane limits is possible. To do this, I had to configure the start menu and taskbar the way we wanted it. Then, I copied the shortcuts out of that buried directory, as well as registry entries that dictated the order of the items.

I gotta say, I found it funny that I had to look in a folder underneath Internet Explorer and Quick Launch to find pinned taskbar shortcuts. I guess Microsoft engineers were too lazy to move off of their old nomenclature of Quick Launch, and separating the functionality from Internet Explorer. I mean, I wasn’t too into computers in the Windows 98 days, but I believe Quick Launch and Internet Explorer were pretty tight back then. Now it’s 2011 and we still have these funny little ties left over from the early Windows days.

Another Microsoft-ism. Some shortcuts you cannot pin to the Start Menu and Taskbar. According to a Microsoft help article, not linked here because the author (me) can’t find it on Google again, you can’t pin a network location to either. I don’t care what their thinking was — a security issue, perhaps? There’s no good reason that you shouldn’t be able to pin a shortcut to a network location on your taskbar or startmenu if you can do so perfectly well as an icon on the desktop.

If you’re a writer, you may be wondering what my point is. By telling you these things I want you to see Windows 7 in a new light — an operating system that is clearly Microsoft’s best (after the Vista disaster), yet struggling to also be backward-compatible and maintain the status quo, to some extent at least. It introduces flashy new interface quirks and rearranges functions and buttons, but it’s also clearly the same as the last two under the hood. Don’t jump down my throat — there are breakthrough leaps and bounds in 7, most notably networking that actually works (and makes sense to non-IT administrators). The thing is, you can’t tell me more than half of Windows 7 was re-engineered when not three levels down into the belly of the beast you see dialogs and functionality that hasn’t change since XP.

But hey, it all still works. And will work for many, many years before we see something new and exciting. Gee, what’s going to be my operating system when I’m 65?