Ga-ga over Windows 7?

Ga-ga over Windows 7?

I’m kind of intrigued by the praise, upgrade fever, and unfortunate fan-boy-ism over Win7 coming out.  The basic talk on the forums/street is this:  That Vista blows *ss, is completely useless, and a train wreck.  Win7, however, is the messiah come to rescue Microsoft.  I however, find this really weird.

See, I adopted Vista when it first came out.   And yes – it had problems.  The primary being because they changed the driver model, you were at the whims of your hardware vendor to come out with a working driver.  And many vendors (Creative Labs being one of the worst offenders) simply never made working drivers for their old hardware.  They either simply didn’t make them, or you were stuck with crippled or wrong drivers that just happened to sort-of work.  I had lots of trouble with sleep/wake/power problems, but honestly, I had about the same number of problems with Windows XP.  Sleeping/waking has never worked well in Windows in my experience.  There were a number of niggling annoyances with my sound card not switching to Dolby correctly and so forth – but I got them sorted out well enough to be happy with it.  After all – the actual stability of Vista, and the Aero effects simply made it worth it to me.  When things did work – I could sleep/wake my machine for weeks on end without a reboot.  However, it didn’t really reach that stage until we hit Vista SP1.  And with the latest updates in SP2, it’s just about right.

Now when I put win7 on a test machine, outside of the much faster speed, I’m not noticing a lot of differences between it and Vista SP2. Sure there have been little tweaks, but honestly, out of the box – it felt and looked just like Vista to me.  It feels more like an upgrade from Win95 to Win98 than the all-out amazement that the forums/popular opinion seems to be.  Maybe it’s just because people wrote Vista off so badly and haven’t seen it lately.

Oh, I’ll get a copy and upgrade when I need to do an OS re-install.  Just kind of surprised where the public opinion is.  She’s fickle.

2 thoughts on “Ga-ga over Windows 7?

  1. Yeah, from my perspective it looked liked people just hated vista so much out of the gate that it’s got the Scarlet ‘Me’ attached to it. I’m not sure I would’ve paid for it personally but I ended up with a free copy from MS and stuck with it as it matured. Post SP1 I was actually recommending it to people. So what will probably happen is people will move from XP to 7 that will be an impressive change for folks. Even though they’re working with 90% of the same OS as vista, they’ll think they’re on something totally disconnected for never having seen the original. I went ahead and ordered the pro version during the half price pre-order period and I’ll be getting another free copy in October from the ‘The New Efficiency” tour that MS is doing, so I should be able to get the whole house up to 7. I just hope the two-finger scrolling on my Macbook works better in RTM than it does in RC.

  2. Good tip about the ‘New Efficiency Tour’. I hadn’t heard they were doing one for Win7. If you want to attend, you can sign up here:
    http://www.microsoft.com/business/thenewefficiency/Portland/default.aspx

    These events are great. I went to one that they rolled out the new Visual Studio 2008 to get a free copy of that AND Vista Ultimate. Ended up doing other work while in the presentation hall, so didn’t even lose much productivity…or have to take it as a ‘day off’. 🙂

Leave a Reply to matt Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.