As much as I tried to ignore this, my inner nerd wouldn’t let me.
On the weekend I pulled out my old PC, downloaded and installed Windows 7.
Perhaps it was just an excuse to get me moving on my plan to run Cat5 from the basement to the top floor, but what I think it really was was the idea that Microsoft would open beta an OS.
Could it be that Microsoft is actually seeing the value of seeking input from their client base?
It seems strange and unprecedented to me. A test group outside of it’s fanboi TechNet base, neat plan…
Could the titan be learning that today’s audience actually can and wants to have a say in things?
Anyhow…sarcasm aside…
What do I think after a night of using it…
Well…It’s neat, flashy, and seems to run reasonably well on my somewhat dated 3.4ghz single core box.
But isn’t it an awful lot like Vista? If you sat me down in front of it without telling me what it was I’d think that someone just browsed around Lifehacker and followed one or more of their custom desktop guides.
So far I haven’t seen anything that really makes me think they have done anything substantial to the OS. It makes me wonder if they are just trying to distance themselves from the Vista name that has been a bane for them since it’s been released and Mac dragged it through the mud with their brilliant marketing campaigns.
I’ve still to dig into the technical inner workings of 7, so I may change my mind. But using it as just a guy surfing the internet and exploring the new computer, I don’t see anything that I would upgrade beyond Vista for.
Mind you the new task bar is kind of cool…
That is the downside with 7. Microsoft basically tinkered with the guts of Vista to make it leaner and meaner. It now runs on computers Vista would avoid so in the future netbooks will be able to run Windows 7 rather than XP. They removed a lot of fat along with some other stuff. You no longer get a built in email program for one. You need to download Windows Live to get a lot of left out features. They do still have Internet Explorer built in. But as someone mentioned, if you don’t include a web browser with Windows how do you get online to get a web browser to get online?
People still use the built in mail program? Weird.
Tis true!
I still use Outlook for my Simcom and Sympatico mail but pretty much go in the ‘cloud’ for the rest.