End of Day 1 running Windows 7
Let me prefix this entry that a typical day for me involves me spending 60% of my time in Windows, 30% in Mac OS (Yep, I’ve paid my share of the Apple Tax) and 10% of my time in Ubuntu – I use ALL of the current operating systems so I’m pretty open minded when it comes to OS choice, oh and not forgetting my iPhone. Sure I sit there hitting refresh in my browser during Apple events, just as I sit there doing the same when MS hold such events – but I’m not firmly in either camp.
In all fairness to Vista I seem to have been one of the lucky ones (if you believe what most people will lead you to believe) I have a laptop (Dell XPS1530, Centrino Duo, 4Gb RAM) that came with Windows Vista installed and for exactly the year that I’ve been running Vista have not had any bad experiences. Sure UAC is damn annoying but when it comes to hardware support etc I’ve not had any real issues and I wouldn’t hesitate to advise anyone to buy a PC with Vista installed. I’ve had family asking me about Vista and if they should buy a PC but just like the Mujave experiment revealed their fears were unfounded and after a while enjoyed their experiences with Vista.
On Saturday I took the plunge and installed Windows 7 on a new hard drive to have a ‘true experience’. If you’ve ever tried a previous Windows beta you’ll immediately notice the difference – what Microsoft have delivered is a pretty polished release, installing in under 20 minutes followed by a single reboot after Windows Update to fix the mp3 problem and to install updated NVidia drivers.
It’s a beta but not as we know it – what’s made it to this release are classed as complete – Microsoft even go as far to label it ‘feature complete’ but I don’t think that’s quite the case as there are a number of features still missing. This is not the usual half baked mismatch of OS’s that MS have previously delivered in their beta’s. It is ‘the beta’ of Windows 7, there will be a release candidate then the product will go Gold – the beta expires 1st August, the time between the previous private build of Windows 7 was 3 months so working to those time scales the release candidate will be around early April putting the expected release somewhere around the middle of 2009. Microsoft cannot afford another publicity disaster like Vista, failing to deliver so many features, the delays and then launching post holiday season in January 2007 missing the Christmas sales oh and the ‘Vista Capable’ debacle so don’t be surprised if Microsoft actually meet or even exceed expectations with the delivery of Windows 7. They certainly won’t be able to beat the Q1 expected delivery of Apple’s Snow Leopard so will have to take second place on that front.
Microsoft term it a ‘minor release’ in that it DOES NOT require a full rewrite of drivers – Vista drivers will/do work. There’s an argument that it looks like Vista, yep – it does! In fact it looks very much like Windows!!! Stop the themes service on XP and that will look like Window 2000, which looks like Windows ME, which looks like Windows 95. This is very much like how Apple’s Leopard looks like Tiger and why Snow Leopard will probably look like Leopard – speaking of Apple – where are their public beta’s of OS X? In fact, the only public beta of OS X was almost 7 years ago. Let’s not forget here, that if you took the number of combinations of PC hardware that are available on Dell website today – you probably have more than the total number of hardware solutions Apple have ever produced so for Apple to deliver an OS that works flawlessly on all their hardware is probably not too hard – for Microsoft that’s just not possible.
Should I expect to run the latest OS from any software manufacturer on hardware that’s more than a few years old, I don’t think so – I want to have the best experience so I expect to run it on new hardware and not to be running an OS that has had to make sacrifices in order to support older hardware. As our requirements move on, so our hardware must – especially with computers being as cheap as they are today!
So far my Windows 7 experience has been flawless, it’s much much leaner that Vista, on boot I’m using 641Mb of memory (hey, memory is cheap these days), Vista was using almost double. It’s way snappier than Vista, I’ve seen the UAC prompt a few times but nothing that begins to trouble me. My every day apps, Aptana, Digsby, Cygwin, Adobe AIR, Firefox, Live Writer all installed without hitch. I’m actually liking the new task bar – I didn’t like the default behaviour but find ‘Combine when taskbar is full’ option much more user friendly. The behaviour of the start button is subtly different to Vista – I especially like the sub menu of ‘recent items’ that hangs off a particular program after you’ve opened files in it.
I’m not going to convert people after they read this post – I don’t expect to. Operating system of choice is just a sensitive subject as your programming language of choice. They all have their merits, they all have their weaknesses – just as a programmer in one language is always quick to defend his language of choice the user of a particular OS is usually quick to justify why their OS is better than the next or more usually to simply ignore any suggestions that there is an alternative out there.
Will I be booting Windows 7 tomorrow morning – ABSOLUTELY!
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It does look as if Microsoft are doing something right this time. This is one of the most stable first betas I’ve used. As you said, they *know* they can’t afford to fail this time. The last thing they need are corporates sticking with Windows XP a year or two after the release of Windows 7. (As they did with Vista)
I have had similar experiences with Vista- some annoyances but no problems (certainly none as grand as most would have you believe). I’m actually running Windows 7 on a five year old Dell laptop. It runs awesome!