After spending a few days with the Windows 7 beta, I will admit that overall it proved to be vastly better than I expected on a few important fronts. The biggest front proved to be the speed front. From installation to the first boot, the OS release did really well when compared to a full release of Vista Ultimate.
This being said, I fear that there will be those out there who are going to see Windows 7 and exclaim that basically, it is a faster version of Vista. True, there are some significant differences under the hood, but the fact remains visually it feels like a Vista release.
Drivers. I have noticed a number of beta testers feeling like the existing driver set is lacking. True as this is, we need to remember that by and large, the Windows approach to drivers is to get them from hardware vendors. The big question in my mind will be legacy support. I have seen mixed views on this with Vista, whereas some said legacy hardware support was fine while others found it to be terrible. I found Vista ready hardware to show problems, most namely with videos cards, usb wifi dongles and bluetooth hardware. With any luck, this will not be a problem in Windows 7 after it has been out on the shelf for a few months, but the legacy issue is one that Microsoft has been trying to find some stable ground on. Thus far, I am not sure how confident they will get it right with the Windows 7 release. But hey, they totally blew me away with the speed improvements. So who is to say that they might not really be ontop of the driver side of things as well? Guess only time will tell.
Are you going to try Windows 7 when it is released? If not, are you sticking with XP, using desktop Linux (like I do) or perhaps following in Pirillo’s footsteps and go OS X? Hit the comments and tell me about it.
Tags: Technology