I read a blog post from someone who suggested that instead of reading emails in the morning, or reading the paper - you should maybe write a blog post. I figured that's not such a bad idea. I've made a habit out of making note of every subject worth blogging, so that I remember to write that blog post later on. In recent months I've been working 18 hour days, so blog posts weren't exactly my priority. Seems like I should have plenty of items to write blog posts about, but when I went over the list just now, many subjects seemed kind of old.
One of those subjects was "Windows 7, good and bad". I remember that this issue went through my head after I installed W7 Release Candidate on some relatively old machine that had to be reinstalled. I could immediately see that this IS something different - not another Vista (as a side note - I nicknamed Vista "the new ME" -named after the notorious Windows ME, yet another operating system that everyone skipped and went directly to Windows 2000).
The first thing I noticed about Windows 7 is that its name fits its Hard drive footprint. After you install Vista, 7Gb of your HD are gone (if you really must know why it's called that way - I found this post from the team). Not so long ago, 10Gb was acceptable, and 20Gb was plenty. Well, these days are over, and in the age of smallest HD being 160Gb, that's fine.
Being such a negative person, I had to find something bad to write about W7 - hence that "complaint" about footprint above, but honest to g-d, other than this W7 turned out to be my next XP (as opposed to Vista being compared to ME).
The UI finally makes sense (Mac anyone?). Seriously. Check this out:
(note there's a new Windows+tab app switcher that does this 3D effect of switching between windows)
I always wanted a Desktop that looks this cool. W7 finally takes you there very easily. I'm even persuaded not to turn off all the fancy animation bits that hurt performance. A quad-core with 4Gb of memory has its advantages. If your machine isn't that strong, the OS will decide on its own to deactivate some of the fancy-shmancy stuff.
I could go on forever, but this morning blog would become afternoon blog, and there are plenty of other reviews of W7 out there.
Just a couple more notes -
The new paint
1) I am not usually an early adopter when it comes to OS, because I need to be productive, and don't have time to deal with v1 kinks. In this case it so much happened that I started to use virtualization on a large scale, and had to move to a 64-bit OS just in order to make better use of my RAM. My brother persuaded me that there's a good chance the 64-bit version of W7 works better than the XP one, and it actually made sense to me. I installed it knowingly, thinking that I'd run back to XP if anything goes wrong. It has been up there for a few weeks now, and for all practical purposes - I strongly recommend it to anyone with a reasonably modern machine (Dual core, >=2Gb RAM). Incidentally, I don't recommend the 64-bit, unless you truly know that you need it. It works fine, but if you're not a hard-core programmer, don't bother. 95% of the software is still 32-bit anyways. Most work fine on 64, but why bother having a bi-polar machine.
2) I know that it's really hansom, but we've always been to look at what's in the box, rather than the box itself. I can honestly say that finally the UI starts to make sense to me. Windows, to me, has always been about working AROUND its UI, rather than simply using an enjoying it. I've got plenty of productivity tools installed on XP machines, covering up for things that Microsoft just didn't do so well. I'm talking about trivial stuff like the windows explorer, notepad, clipboard, and a whole bunch of others (can you smell that next blog post coming?). With windows 7, there's a bit less of that, and a bit more usage of the tools that come out of the box. That's one nice thing.
But the nicest thing for me is that the entire UI and its behavior makes sense. My taskbar never gets filled up, and yet I can find all of my open programs easily, and this whole quicklaunch toolbar thing finally makes sense in its new form (again, behavior gracefully "stolen" from Mac).
Bottom line - go get one.
If you're a startup that fits MS relatively loose standards, you can get it free, along with every other piece of Software M$ usally sells for thousands of dollars. It's called Bizspark, and it's a good subject for another blog post.
Enjoy.
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