Comments on: Windows 7: My Question is Why? http://www.barrywheeler.ca/2009/10/windows-7-my-question-is-why/ Where Geeks can be Geeks Wed, 21 Jul 2010 01:39:47 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: Robin Majumdar http://www.barrywheeler.ca/2009/10/windows-7-my-question-is-why/comment-page-1/#comment-1137 Robin Majumdar Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:43:00 +0000 http://www.barrywheeler.ca/?p=919#comment-1137 I can see from the tone of your article that you had a nasty experience with Windows Vista. I also did - in fact, I tested it for a grand total of perhaps 10 days before giving up in frustration - and I've been in many beta / CTP programs for MSFT and other publishers and happen to have a VERY high degree of patience for beta (and RTM version bugs)... So, as much as I wrote off Windows Vista (for reasons that Steve Jobs & Apple so eloquently and humorously brought forward in their "I'm a PC" campaign) ... I approached Windows 7 with my usual "benefit of the doubt" approach. Not to mention curiosity. I was most pleasantly surprised - and impressed. All the overbearing security warnings were gone (the dastardly implementation of UAC in Vista)... the mainstream hardware baseline on modern machines was finally powerful enough to truly benefit from the new UI / Aero features. Also of note, the OS - even in pre-7100 beta versions was rock solid - I never had a Win7 crash of any sort, and this was on a variety of machines and environments (home, corporate domain, basic office automation apps & heavier tools such as Adobe CS3 etc)... While I'm certainly vendor-neutral and far from being a MSFT fanboy - QNX, Solaris, Tru64 UNIX, RedHat, etc in my background, I also think that they deserve a serious look for what they've brought to fruition in Windows 7. Is it better value (with at least a $179+ price tag) for home users, compared with say Ubuntu or other *nix packages? Perhaps not, but end user adoption of *nix systems is, unfortunately, nowhere near where it will, should, and could be. I can see from the tone of your article that you had a nasty experience with Windows Vista. I also did – in fact, I tested it for a grand total of perhaps 10 days before giving up in frustration – and I’ve been in many beta / CTP programs for MSFT and other publishers and happen to have a VERY high degree of patience for beta (and RTM version bugs)…

So, as much as I wrote off Windows Vista (for reasons that Steve Jobs & Apple so eloquently and humorously brought forward in their “I’m a PC” campaign) … I approached Windows 7 with my usual “benefit of the doubt” approach. Not to mention curiosity.

I was most pleasantly surprised – and impressed. All the overbearing security warnings were gone (the dastardly implementation of UAC in Vista)… the mainstream hardware baseline on modern machines was finally powerful enough to truly benefit from the new UI / Aero features.

Also of note, the OS – even in pre-7100 beta versions was rock solid – I never had a Win7 crash of any sort, and this was on a variety of machines and environments (home, corporate domain, basic office automation apps & heavier tools such as Adobe CS3 etc)…

While I’m certainly vendor-neutral and far from being a MSFT fanboy – QNX, Solaris, Tru64 UNIX, RedHat, etc in my background, I also think that they deserve a serious look for what they’ve brought to fruition in Windows 7.

Is it better value (with at least a $179+ price tag) for home users, compared with say Ubuntu or other *nix packages? Perhaps not, but end user adoption of *nix systems is, unfortunately, nowhere near where it will, should, and could be.

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