First off, sorry for my delay in blog posts - I've just moved across town and it was pretty exhausting. The new business address is 2239 SE Oak St, 97214 - and hey to all you South Easters.
Microsoft has been resting on it's laurels for some time - a massive install base, ingrained technologies like Office and IIS, and strong customer loyalty. That massive install base has been eroded a little thanks to Google and Apple pecking away at it steadily for the past few years and the critically panned bloated monstrosity that was Microsoft's last OS release, Vista. With that in mind, it was absolutely VITAL that the team in Redmond pull off a hail mary and patch a few holes in the sinking ship with a solid OS release, and that's the hope with Windows 7.
I've been running the pre-release version of Windows 7 on my production machine now for almost 3 months, and I've got to say - I LOVE it. This is truly the OS that Vista should have been, and finally gives the layperson a good reason to upgrade from the 8-year-old Windows XP.
The good:
The UI - It isn't just prettier (although it is REALLY pretty), it's far more functional. The new taskbar is one of my favorite things. Each icon is not only used to launch the program, but also to keep track of files you've opened most frequently, to show you programs that are curently running in miniature little windows for easy and rapid access to the one you're looking for (I'm notorious for having like 4 different browser windows open with various streaming content - watching them all run in miniature is fun in a way that's hard to describe), and to show you at a glance what programs are currently active. It's a comination of the old Windows XP "quick launch" bar and task manager bar, and it's awesome.
The Speed - compared to Vista's 77 pinto, Windows 7 is a Ferarri. It's obvious the team at Redmond has been focusing a lot on making necessary services start up faster, and unnecessary ones take less resources while coming to life in the background. It boots up much faster than even my barebones XP installation, and seems ready to use almost immediately without the usual Windows "Start lag" where it may LOOK like your icons are up and ready for action but in reality the hard drive and processor are being worked so hard that clicking on Firefox is a wasted effort for at least 5 minutes.
The Compatibility - so far, I have yet to run into a program that worked well in Vista that hasn't worked in 7. In fact, the few games I play installed without incident and ran faster than they did in XP, which is the opposite of Vista. On top of that, if you have a REALLY hard core Windows XP program that you need to run, and for some reason it just isn't working in 7 (which means it probably wasn't working in Vista, either), Microsoft has harnessed the power of processor-level virtualization technology to allow you to run a full-fledged version of XP from WITHIN Windows 7 and run all XP-compatibile programs on it without incident. This "virtual XP" is completely unaware that it's running within Windows 7 and behaves exactly like XP, so anyway you look at it your covered.
The Future - some technologies that are still maturing but readily available in 7 are totally sweet. Want to stream all of your media from your home computer to your laptop or handheld device? Simply open up the new Media Player, click "Allow Internet Access to my home media" and bam, you've got your movies / music / TV library with you wherever you go. Makes you shed a tear for the poor paperback novel. Add to that the bevy of available multi-touch options and we're one step away from the eye-popping radness of those screens in "Minority Report". Sure, it's going to require that everyone buy a multi-touch enabled monitor or a screen to put on top of their old monitor, but damn, if you've seen any demos of this and not drooled all over your shorts you're a stronger man than I (or at least, a lot less of a giant dork).
Windows Multi-Touch Tech Demo
There's tons more I could mention but suffice it to say that if you're buying a new computer today, make sure it comes with a "Windows 7 Upgrade License". Windows 7 is set to hit stores on new computers in the next few weeks and be available to end users very very soon. Being a computer repair guy, I can upgrade your systems for you of course. Just give me a ring!
That's all for now, Justin out!
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