We’ve installed Windows 7 on four machines here now. One on a big Opteron server and the rest on very desperate Toshiba Portege tablet PCs. By very desperate I mean they were barely usable. From new they ran so slowly and in such a cumbersome fashion that you could have forgiven the operators for taking a big hammer to them rather than using the more standard touch-screen interface.

I have heard some commentators alleging that the project managers for Windows Vista insisted that everything should be testable automatically rather than using people to test the programming. As a result, though Vista does not even pass the ’sniff’ test (i.e. as soon as you use it you can tell it’s off) it was released as if it were a great step forward for the industry. And in some ways it was, particularly in security and robustness. But you could tell it wasn’t built with human users in mind.

Things have changed philosophically with Windows 7. The name; nothing pretentious or romantic, just a minimalist number; and that, in some ways, tells us much about the new OS. They’ve tidied it up. Made it put the user first. Cleared out that sense of bloat so prevalent in Vista. Reduced the amount of resources it uses. The tablet PCs we installed it on now have new life, they are fast, responsive and are a pleasure to use. The Opteron server goes like a rocket.

After 10 years of amazing changes in hardware and software Microsoft have finally delivered for Windows; a sound OS which has been crafted with care.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous, vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.