If you are looking for an article that will bash Windows, this is not the article you are looking for and also if you dont have much time, I can sum my experience of Windows with a single word – Wow! I am a very strong “follower” of Apple and have removed Windows and PC’s from my life in general. However, I was interested in seeing what all the talk about Windows 7 was about. A good friend of mine (he is sold of Windows) convinced me to install it as my main operating system on my designers computer, which I let him do.

Although it is still in Beta, it has proven to be brilliant in every aspect of the word. In general it has the same clean and dynamic looks as Vista, but it is better. They have added many minor tweaks which makes it easier to make use of. One of the issues for me at first was the ugly start bar, but now that I am using it, it aint ugly anymore. When you delve deeper you also realise how much work they have put into something as simple as the start bar.

An application when running is displayed in a small square along the start bar. When moused over, all the active open windows running with the program show in a small thumbnail above the icon. Also when mousing over, you will notice that it takes the most used color in the logo and makes it the highlighed icon color. See screenshot below;

The start menu is alot like Vista, but the main thing that is so wonderful about this one is that the shut down button is the first button – unlike Vista where you had to click and go into a small menu to shutdown. It is that kind of minor tweaking which makes it so much better in my opinion.

On a more intellectual note, Windows 7 is by far more stable than any other Windows OS that I have ever used (with Windows ME or Vista ranking as the worst). As far as software compatibility goes, Windows 7 runs like a charm. One of the huge put offs for me with Windows Vista was the fact that I could plug a memory stick in and it would not be able to locate the driver and therefore I could not use the memory stick. It was terrible, I could not use devices that I needed to do the work that I do.

The computer that I am running Windows 7 on was built to run Vista. It only had a gigabyte of ram and Vista was heavy on the system resources. Windows 7 on the otherhand starts quickly and runs fast in general and also shuts down very quickly in comparison to my experience with Vista on the machine.

They have built in many useful small things such as libraries. This makes it easy to share files with other Windows 7 users. The networking controls have been improved dramatically – one of those things that many Vista users hated about Vista.

In closing, it is the same beautiful look of Vista, but this time it is backed by the stability and speed of OSX. What do you think, have you tried it – what will you be willing to pay for it?

Noel Harrison