Well, after the excesses of the Christmas and New Year break, I decided to switch on my ‘geek’ mode and have a go at installing Microsoft’s new trail operating system, Windows 7.
Announced at the recent CES event in Las Vegas by Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO , Windows 7 is the replacement for the much maligned Windows Vista. It’s come around faster than previous Windows upgrades – only three years in development, where the norm is around four. For those in the development community, Windows 7 beta has has been around for a few months, but the general public was given the chance to download from the 9th January.
The release had a bumpy ride, with Microsoft servers being overwhelmed, but from about mid-Saturday the download was re-instated. So, I decided to give it a go – after all, it couldn’t be any worse than my experiences with Vista Business Edition (too many to go into here!).
It took about 1 hour and a few restarts – but it works; and for a beta release it works incredibly well.
I love its speed and the new taskbar, where you can pin your favourite applications but also jump straight to opened documents and also pin favourites, too. I’ve not found any application that doesn’t run apart from needing a little tweak to Google’s Chrome browser.
So, in my limited example, it looks like Microsoft have a winner here – the next job will be to attempt to persuade those who have paid for Vista to upgrade again and to undo the negative press around the Vista story.
Let’s see how it goes.
