I installed the long awaited RC to Windows 7 last week, finally upgrading from Windows XP. I didn’t particularly loath Vista as most people did, but I never felt the need to upgrade to Vista. But Windows 7 blew me away in the first few minutes of using it. I’m probably not going back to XP ever again.
I installed 7 on my Dell Vostro 1500, and the first thing that amazed me was that it downloaded and installed all the right drivers. And not generic OEM drivers, official vendor drivers that I had had to manually install in Windows XP.
The new taskbar in my opinion is the best of both worlds; the Mac dock and the old taskbar. Pinning applications to the taskbar is really handy, and now I never have to worry about how many windows I’m going to open.
HomeGroups and the ability to share and stream media across Windows 7 machines is something that I’m looking forward to using on a home server setup. The concept of libraries is also very handy, although perhaps a little unintuitive at first.
Performance, especially hibernate and restore times have been vastly improved, especially if you compare with XP.
Microsoft has been working on some really cool stuff lately. Live Mesh, Windows Live Essentials, IE8, MEDV, and now Windows 7. I’m waiting impatiently for their vision of 2019 to come true. 🙂
Jaffer Haider 