Oh Thank Heaven for Windows 7

Redemption for MS? -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Hello geek-readers. It's time to do our Operating Systems retrospective/review. When Windows Vista came out in February 2007, I was spellbound by it's Mac-inspired aero interface and it's Mac-filched gadgets. These baubles distracted me from serious functional issues -- long boot up/shutdown, long file loads, driver compatibility issues, DRM issues, and highly intrusive permissions checking. My Vista experience was deplorable -- I was shocked because I’ve used MS products for 20+ years and never had so many issues. A year or so later, I had to report that Vista was a dud -- roundly and soundly rejected by the business community as well as home users.

Dubbed Longhorn, during its long development, Vista was a giant change from XP, and it did actually bring some interesting new visuals and functionality (e.g., Windows Media Center). In the 11th hour before release, Microsoft had to devote major resources to anti-virus engineering -- that may have diverted them from the primary purpose of good customer experience. I’m very happy to say that they saw the light on the road to Diminished market share. Windows 7 has corrected many of the Sins of Vista.

So what do we have with Windows 7? Some people have likened 7, code-named Blackcomb, to a giant service pack improvement to Vista -- maybe a Vista service pack 3.0. In fact, it is a largely new-from-the-ground-up OS, but Microsoft set their sights on making Windows 7 the avenger of Vista’s top complaints and problem areas. It’s at least 500mb less bloated and installs faster (although my own Vista upgrade still took @ 3.5 hours). Where Vista took a whopping seven-plus minutes to boot, I can be happily typing data on Windows 7 within 2 minutes of pushing the On button.

Windows 7 has a clean, tidy interface that will cause very little training issues or upset to users of XP or Vista. There are some new ‘paradigm’s’ (pinning icons to a Mac-looking dock, showing Control Panel in different views) but most of that is optional and only-if-you-want-it. Windows 7 is mostly a terrific under-the-hood fix to everything that plagued Vista -- it really is the child that Vista should’ve been.

I actually bought a new HP laptop and also upgraded my existing Vista laptop. I’d be remiss not to mention the amazing features you can get now for way under $1000. My new HP has 4GB memory, 500GB hard drive, faster processor, bigger screen (etc etc etc) for $200 less than what I spent on the Vista machine. The list price (not even the sale price) was $679.00. To me this is all amazing -- and I’ll be amazed if a lot of Acer, Sony, Gateway, DELL, HP and other such devices aren't snapped up this holiday season.

Windows 7 has already been very successful with pre-orders stacking up prior to its October 22nd release date. Net Applications reports that Windows 7 already achieved 4% market penetration in 3 weeks where Vista took 7 months to achieve the same. Maximum PC, CNET and other publications have lavished praise on 7 (and some revoked the premature praise they gave to Vista -- worth mentioning). I myself think that Windows 7 is great -- it should be a much-needed shot in the arm for MS. I do wonder why my 4GB Windows 7 HP still takes about twice as long to boot as my 1GB Macbook running Snow Leopard, but that’s another blog. At 2 and 1 minutes respectively, both boot quickly enough to avoid triggering the “blogSpotter impatience threshold” which no sane operating system wishes to provoke.


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