From the Engineering Windows 7 blog from the post Engineering the Windows 7 Boot Animation:
From a design perspective, we know that the visual presentation of a feature plays a key role in the user’s perception of performance and quality. Our objective was to make Windows boot beautiful and was inspired by our Windows 7 personality of light and energy; and the way these forms reveal themselves in nature became our design palette.
What does this mean? It means it’s spruced up a bit.
Here’s the Vista boot screen:
And now the potential Windows 7 boot screen (no sound as of yet):
To note, the blog article specifically states that the Win7 boot anim is absolutely not the same ol’ 640×480 schtick that’s present in Vista. It will be 32 bpp along with better resolution and optimized performance code.
This is just a glimpse into the fact that Microsoft is taking the user experience very seriously, even when you first start your computer.
Said honestly, this does look better than Apple’s Mac OS X boot screen which is nothing but a plain Apple logo on white background. While that may not be a big deal for most people, bear in mind that Apple puts a very large effort into design and style. To have Microsoft actually have something that looks better than Apple is rare. The current revision of the Win7 boot screen as seen above makes OS X’s look old and obsolete.
I’m all for pretty graphics as long as it doesn’t make boot times longer.
Amen to that, although for this, I wouldn’t mind to much of a longer boot time. Especially if it will be customisable out of the box! That would be awsome!
It doesn’t add to the boot time at all. Win7 Beta 7000 boots complete on my current machine in at least half the time that XP does.
This OS is pretty impressive.
I would like the boot screen to give more information, what is the system doing? How far along is it? Does MicroSoft always have to take total control? I know, not likely to happen.