Yes ladies and gents. Today I want to talk a bit about my favorite new OS, Windows 7. I am not coming to you as a loyal Microsoft employee trying to sell our newest iteration of Windows. I am here as a dude just excited about a new OS (and I just happen to get paid by the company making it – but we’ll ignore that ok?). So why am I excited?
For one, it works. It works really well specially considering it’s a beta. The OS is solid! I am using it at home right now on my machine. I upgraded from Vista x64 and the upgrade went pretty smoothly. It took quite a while, but eventually I was greeted with the new Windows 7 look! Here’s a run down of my initial reaction as I booted it up for the first time:
“hey! look at that! We finally put some graphic at the boot screen above the progress bar! Not sure WHY we didn’t before… but it’s ok. Looks cool”
“Hmm… boots quite a bit faster. Nice work.”
“Whoah! Check out this new Task bar! I got icons on it for the apps I use. I can drag/drop more icons.”
“Ok..that’s neat. I like how when I hover over the active icons (i.e. app running), it has this cool glow on it. Someone is paying attention to some eye candy! Hell…it’s about time! (Yeah… I still quote Starcraft II trailer :/ )”
“!!!! Windows update has what for me??? No way! NO WAY! A pre-release NVIDIA driver for Windows 7? DAMN! it works!” At this point, I near dropped dead from sheer shock. My #1 hair pulling frustration with Vista was Nvidia drivers. To actually have a WORKING driver for the beta blows me away.
The upgrade was awesome! The OS works pretty well and it is snappy! Lots of cool features I have yet to mess with are:
- Media/document libraries
- Home networking features that are supposed to make Windows 7 machines share stuff very easily. That is cool and I really wanted it.
- Other UI trickery like dragging windows to edges, etc.
Overall, I am quite happy with it. Vista had a rough start and is pretty good now in my opinion. Windows 7 improves on Vista and XP minus the rough start. I truly think people are going to be happy when the install it. Beta 1 should be available sometime in the coming few days to everyone. I’ll make sure to post a link to the download. When I do, get it… just get it. I promise you won’t be disappointed.
