Sunday, November 29, 2009

Windows 7 - Finally something done right

About a year ago I dove into MS Vista with ugly results. I finally bailed completely on Vista in February of this year and blogged several different ways to remove it and replace with something else. When Windows 7 Beta released this year, I initially avoided it thinking the MS team couldn't possibly recover from the disaster known as Vista. I was wrong.

When I finally took the plunge and installed Win7 onto test box I was pleasantly surprised by the quick and clean install. Then I was even more impressed by the quick response to a restart and reconnect back into the network. After running Win7 through it's paces it appears that all the problem issues that were chronic with Vista have disappeared with this new version. In fact it is very clear that this isn't just a new version, this is a whole new ball game.

I was so impressed that I upgraded a number of systems to Win7 and have not looked back. That was a month or so ago and I have not had a single BSOD, network fail, inexplicable random restart or anything else I can really complain about. When it does break, it's completely acceptable and it does it with grace.

To put it in a nutshell, Win 7 is like all the great functional things from XP with all the cool views of Vista but all in "turbo" mode. The same box with Win7 runs considerably faster then on Vista or XP. Startup and shutdown both work faster and cleaner and applications respond faster.

I still love my Mac, but I'm not afraid to install Windows 7.