Friday, July 31, 2009

Windows 7 Review - Should I Buy Windows 7?

Windows 7 may be one of Microsoft's greatest operating systems, if it fulfills the guarantee shown by the unlicensed test version we have been testing for the past couple of days.

Let me preface these fast impressions of Redmond's latest opus by saying that I came to Windows 7 after having happily run the much-maligned Windows Vista on my Intel Core two Duo-based PC for the past 18 months .

I found Vista to be a deserving upgrade from Windows XP SP2. Despite its plain flaws ( can you say'resource hog'? ) and the acknowlegement that some of its features need to be disabled by default, Vista at heart is a far more stable and serviceable operating system than XP, which was initially released in 2001.

I found the Windows 7 beta a painless install. The 33MB of updates quickly came down the pipe on loading the desktop.
Click for gallery

Definitely, Windows 7 had no problem at the same time installing and launching applications, downloading files, perusing the Web, and carrying out other jobs on our modest 2.8GHz Pentium 4, which has only an 80GB IDE hard disk and 512MB of RAM.

Vista's most visible annoyance, User Account Control, has been pared right back on its default setting, and we encountered it only 2 times throughout a complete morning of installing applications. However, if you feel sentimental for UAC's old behaviour, you can easily change it back via Windows 7's new Action Center, which now centralizes all of the safety updates and caution alerts that Windows throws your way.

Windows 7 commended that we install a 3rd party antivirus package ( it recommended Kaspersky and AVG ), but its antispyware package Defender comes preinstalled.

I particularly like the new photo-realistic device icons, and the overhaul of the way Windows handles and ejects USB storage devices. Microsoft appears to have wiped out a lot of the Windows XP-era interface quirks of Vista ; the result's a more simplistic, unified experience for common tasks.

I also loved the overhaul of the Windows taskbar, particularly the slick graphics, but a bug prevented us from having the ability to use the preview function ( it showed a black rectangle instead ), and you'll be wanting to play with the taskbar settings to get this piece of the Windows 7 puzzle just right. It's easy to get minimized windows mixed up with launcher buttons, for example.

For example, we couldn't get Adobe Systems' Creative Suite 3 to install on Windows 7 beta ; the installer told us we needed to give up Internet Explorer first.

But maybe the most vital thing to notice about the software is that initially glance, it has much more of that nebulous'Windows XP feel' than Vista ever did. Even on our modest machine, Windows 7 did not beat the hard disk or ever feel non responsive, except when we were installing Apple's iTunes, a scandalous pain on Windows systems.

Windows 7 is currently available for pre-order from Amazon in all its shapes and forms. Upgrades are available for Vsta users, and stand alone installs are available for partitioned drives, or new computers.

Buy Windows 7 Now from Amazon

No comments:

Post a Comment