Windows 7

WINDOWS 7

Well, it's officially here, and I personally know many people that are eager to get their hands on a copy. Personally, I'm not convinced. I mean, sure, throughout my use these last few months, the OS has been pretty solid, but my problem is that I don't see enough of a difference between it and Vista to make me want to run out and buy a copy.

Quite honestly, I think the new "features" should have been released as a service pack, but since Microsoft let Vista be shamed and slandered so heavily, they had to come out with a whole "new" operating system.

Ok, enough griping, I'll get on to what I like.

It has a slightly smaller footprint overall, and it seems a little more snappy. The speed increase is really felt in the low end laptops and netbooks. Vista was just too bulky for them, and finally people are realizing that XP is just really old. The GUI (graphical user interface) is pretty nice, and offers some cool eye candy, however, lacks usability.

User Account Control (UAC), has really been revamped, and is much less annoying than the version in Vista. Microsoft really should have thought this one through the first time, UAC on Vista was more annoying than popup adds on the internet.

The new themes are pretty cool.

Gadgets finally don't require the stupid "sidebar" to be running all the time, thus, the gadgets use much less system recourses.

Sleep and resume functions are a HUGE improvement over Vista. When I would put my computer to "sleep" when I had Vista installed, it would often (about 20% of the time) fail to wake up. When the computer did wake up, it usually took almost a full minute to be usable again. and sometimes, it would still fail to be fully functional, requiring a reboot. So far (about 60 sleep and resume cycles) Windows 7 has only failed to wake up about 3 times.

Jump lists are pretty useful, however, I still find myself using the "search" function more.

A few programs that I use often aren't operational on Win 7 (daemon tools, adobe illustrator has some issues, but so far I have been able to find workarounds)

Honestly, I would probably not pay full price for this thing. I don't find the new features worth the $70+ that it will cost to upgrade from Vista. I would suggest it for those that are finally realizing that XP is 8 years old.

Well, that's about all the ranting and raving I have for now.