Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Windows 7

My friend Pete has a theory that alternate versions of Microsoft’s operating system are good and bad. He’s right; Windows 95 was awful, 98 SE was much better, Millenium was a dog’s dinner, XP turned out to good. The current version is Vista which has received a lot of criticism. In its early days it was prone to crashing and was simply not compatible with a lot of device drivers. Now it is a lot more stable and works fine with just about every device you might want to install.

My timing must be awful because my previous computer came with Millenium installed which I dutifully upgraded to XP. My current machine has Vista Home Premium installed which caused me a lot of problems when I first got it. It works fine now.

Two years after Vista ‘s introduction and Microsoft are near ready to start shipping its replacement – Windows 7. It isn’t available to buy yet but you can try it out by downloading and installing the ‘release candidate’.

There’s a lot of fancy footwork in the new system but the real question is, “will it be stable and will it work with all the programs and devices that you have installed?” It’s no good having a slick MacOS style taskbar if the computer crashes every five minutes.

Microsoft advise you not to install the RC on your main computer. Further more, the release candidate will expire October 2010. In March 2010 your computer will start to shut down every two hours. At that point you will have to install a valid copy of the operating system.

1 comment:

Pete said...

My guess is that it will probably be OK Keith. In much the same way that XP was built on the Windows 2000 platform, it seems that Windows 7 is basically Vista under the hood.

Most of the changes are likely to be in UI bells and whistles. We'll see how it goes, but I won't be in a rush to start installing it!