*First, a qualifier: This is just an opinion based on my limited experience and the documentation available from Microsoft themselves and various reviews. Feel free to comment, but give me a break allright.
The only constants in life have always been death, change and abundantly buggy Operating Systems from Microsoft that require months to actually work after shipping. It looks like that might be changing with the newest offering in Windows OS. Windows 7 was put out there as a beta quite a while ago, with the hopes that this time the bugs would be found and fixed by the time it was pumped out to the masses on every new computer.
I must say that I was quite taken by surprise when I heard nothing but good reviews, discounting all the die-hard MS haters and proponents of the other comparable operating systems. And, on that note I must concede that no matter how functional and usable a piece of software is it does not detract from the “Evil Empire” status Microsoft has earned. But, I digress. I haven’t heard a single person use all the common epithets that were associated with the releases of ME, XP or Vista. People like it. I actually like it a lot too.
The features that were mixed up and tricky in Vista have been altered slightly, new features were added and general performance has been improved. Windows 7 was purposefully created with multi-core processors in mind to better allow for multi-threading, assuming other software developers implement the same functionality in their apps. Touch screen capabilities were also built in. The look, feel and performance of 7 really seems like a fixed version of Vista with some Linux and Mac touches.
For example: you can dock open windows, there is a keyboard shortcut for almost anything you could want to do, you can burn ISO files without third-party apps, run any program as admin, and even open OpenDocument (.ODF) files with Notepad. I think that my favorite feature is the Problem Steps Recorder.
The Problem Steps Recorder
With this handy little utility the user is able to record a series of events in an HTML based slideshow to display the exact replication of any errors they are running into. Being in the help-desk field, I see this as an extremely useful tool for troubleshooting difficult to explain incidents.
There are also lots of new eye-candy touches added or improved upon from the previously released versions. This not only helps to make the system look nice but also lends itself to a more customizable environment. The opacity of the windows, shading of icon text, the “gadgets” on the desktop, the start menu and task bar can all be modified and personalized. Of course the real benefits of the new version come from under the hood modifications. I am in no way qualified to explain or compare the kernel, multi-threading, UAC, Branch Caching, security or the rest of this stuff so I’ll leave it to you to look into that if you’re interested. I can however tell you that I have read a few things about how all of those things I just mentioned had been re-tooled.
What I think it really comes down to is that Microsoft saw the light and with their latest OS release they fixed what they already had working and improved it instead of creating an entirely new system and in the process making the users deal with all the issues that arise from unfinished QA. So if you already use Windows I would highly encourage you to upgrade your PC to version 7.
Below are a few links to pages that describe how to use the features and how to more easily customize your Windows 7 experience and a Cnet spotlight from YouTube.
• http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx
• http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/features/desktop.aspx?tabid=2&catid=2
