Working with videos, photos, and music can be a frustrating experience on a Windows machine. That’s really a shame seeing as how so many people buy computers specifically for that purpose.
Windows 7 is finally caught up with where it should have been about 10 years ago. It can display thumbnail previews of pictures and videos and it can put to use the embedded EXIF information in photos and embedded tags in music files in ways that XP never could. For years, Windows included Media Player, but didn’t provide the necessary drivers to play DVD movies; now Windows can play DVDs (but not many other types of videos). And it’s never been easy to add or manage the software required to do so.
Thankfully, many of the buggy media features in Windows Vista—some of which are responsible for the green ribbon of death—have been improved enough to be useful in Windows 7. But Microsoft has a habit of taking a few steps back every time it staggers forward. For instance, Movie Maker, the Notepad of video editors included with Windows since XP, is absent in Windows 7, available now only as a download (free at http://download.live.com/moviemaker). The fact that it’s not in the box (and that it’s no match for Apple’s iMovie) is one of many cues that Microsoft still can’t grasp what people want out of their computers.
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