I got my good ol’ laptop back in September 2007. Back then it came with Windows Vista. Little did I know back then that this eye-candied OS wasn’t meant to be on this mean machine. The “Windows Vista” sticker was a trick! Although it wasn’t the best computer ever made, it was fully capable of running a mainstream OS with basic applications, or so I thought... an Intel 1.67GHz Core2 Duo with 2GB of RAM is still a decent laptop, a year and a half later, but it wasn’t enough for Vista. Oh, but I can already hear the nerd hoards, blaming me for not tweaking my settings and cleaning my registries and unused program files. Shut up, I always took care of my computer like and semi-skilled computer nerd would. The OS was unusable on Power Saver settings (what can you do when you’re in a class with no electrical output for 3 hours?), Windows Explorer crashed every now and then and most of my peripheral simply wouldn’t work with my laptop, because pretty much every company gave up on Vista support from the start. I would try to plug in my HP scanner and my computer would send me to their website, thinking I would find a driver for it. But no, the only solution HP found for my Vista/scanner problem was something like this: “No driver has been developed for the OS you are currently using. Please consider our new Vista-compatible line of products [link]”. Thanks a lot, HP. Heck, even one of my optical mouses wouldn’t work with Vista. And no, Service Pack 1 didn’t fix anything.
So I ended up thinking about how happy my life was when I was using Windows XP. Sure, XP might not be as pretty, but at least it’s fucking functional. I decided to switch from Vista Home Premium SP1 to XP Professional SP3. That was probably the best decision I made that year. Suddenly, all my performance problems disappeared, explorer didn’t crash anymore, all my peripherals worked right out of the box. No problems at all. How could Microsoft create something they call an “upgrade” if it actually feels like I have upgraded from Vista to XP? All went well until about 2 weeks ago. I started getting blue screens, right when I was studying for my mid-term exams. I did try to fix the problem by looking up the blue screen error numbers. It pretty much came up as “You have a software and/or hardware file and/or driver malfunctioning and/or corrupted.” Good luck trying to find what it was. The blue screen problems disappeared as soon as I finished my exams. Ironic.
Windows 7 has been in public beta stages for a while now. I know a few people who have been using it, and I haven’t heard anything really bad about it yet. The deal is that the OS in beta is free to download and use until the 1st day of august. Of course, they stress out that Windows 7 is still “for testing purposes only”. What the heck, it can’t possibly be worse than Vista, right?
I have been using Windows 7 Build 7022 for a few days now. A new build came out, but that also means a new Windows install, so I guess I’ll pass until they get a major update out. The OS is a mix of Windows XP and Windows Vista, with an interface that strangely resembles to Mac’s OS. The Action Center makes any problem you might have disappear in an instant, probably the only feature that made Vista look like a more user-friendly OS compared to XP.
I have to say, having made a fresh install of Windows Vista, Windows XP and Windows 7, the later is by far the easiest. The only concern about installing XP or Vista is dealing with driver installations. You basically need another computer to get the drivers online if you didn’t get a CD including them with your computer (most laptops don’t come with them nowadays, companies like to pre-install all the crap) for XP or Vista, but with 7, the OS automatically detects available networks, asks for the password, and a few moments later, the OS works its magic and everything is fully functional, nothing to install, no drivers to mess with. Windows 7 wins at being user-friendly. Most people don’t like to mess with computer settings, so why not? Action Center detected a problem for my Bluetooth driver, but the “Fix it” button really did fix it. 30 seconds later, I pretty much had the same computer I had merely 3 hours earlier sans blue screens, thanks to my backed up data on my external HDD.
Compared to XP, some programs are faster on Windows 7, some are slower. I noticed Skype started up in a fraction of the time it use to take on XP and Firefox 3 (3.0.7) is a lot slower. The minimum requirements for Windows 7 are a lot higher than the ones for XP, but with my 1.5 years old laptop, it’s fairly similar. I think Microsoft finally got it right this time, but it’s still a long way until they make a final release. To quote Kevin : “ils ont encore 6 mois pour scrapper ça avant de le sortir”. Indeed.
One laptop. One year and a half. Three operating systems.
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