What a novel situation for computer users worldwide this Windows 7 launch is turning out to be! As far as I personally can remember (W98 onwards) the launch of a new version of Windows has always been met with at least some degree of disappointment (bugs, slow boot times, poor anti-virus/firewall tools etc etc), but not this time it seems, judging by the emerging reviews.
For the first time ever I actually find myself considering paying for the new version – not in 6 months or a year (when some issues are resolved) – but now. Apart from the slight disappointment that the anti-virus tool isn’t quite up to scratch (EU competition commission seems to be rendering MS a little wary of doing too much on this), the rest seems to be quite the step forward from both XP and Vista.
For a really detailed list of changes and updates, see the Endgadget review (or Gizmodo), but to summarise the core points appear to be:
1. Better performance than Vista (far more modest memory requirements for example, 1GB is quite ample while Vista struggled on less than 2GB).
2. Boot times seem unusually rapid (not quite matching Mac OS X – but close by some accounts).
3. A quite different user interface approach which looks set to greatly improve multi-tasking activities – for example, multiple windows simply turn transparent when not being used, so that you can easily relocate them again when needed, rather than sorting through the taskbar to locate them.
We’ll see how the figures actually end up looking on the sales front in the next few weeks, but considering W7 purely on its own terms as an OS, it is that ever so rare species (perhaps unseen since Windows 95): a truly reliable, pretty and intuitive new version of Windows – it’s not been often that we could so thoroughly enjoy such a Windows launch, and to celebrate i’ll be treating myself to an upgrade sooner rather than later for sure.
Dejan Levi