Victor Marquez

Windows 7, not bad, not bad at all…

// May 14th, 2009 // Operating Systems, Tech, Windows

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about Windows 7 over the last couple of months. Most of it was good talk, and that’s what kept me from checking it out. Frankly, after my Vista disaster I simply stopped caring about Windows. I couldn’t hold my grudge against Microsoft forever though. So on May 9th, 2009 I downloaded the Windows 7 Release Candidate and installed it onto my laptop (Dell XPS M1530). So far, it’s been a great experience. Windows 7 has met my every need; from gaming, simply being able to use my freaking computer how I want to!

The installation was short and painless, and for the first time in my life I was able to set up my wireless while the installation was still going on, instead of having to troubleshoot, and look for drivers after the installation.  Windows 7 was able to find all of the drivers that my computer needed and install them for me (How kind!). It almost felt like the Ubuntu 9.04 installation, almost…

After making sure that it wasn’t all just a fluke and that Windows 7 had actually installed all my drivers, I proceeded to mess around with some of the new features. Most importantly, the new task bar which compacts everything into icons, allowing for some better space management. Everything else is still pretty much the same as Vista…

Except for one thing; The speed. Windows 7, has improved from Vistas sloth like speed and kicked it up a notch, to perhaps more of an agile feline speed. The way I was able to copy all 86GB of music, movies, and documents from my external, to my laptop, really impressed me. Not only that, but downloading, and installing software was also surprisingly fast.

Playing games on my laptop has never been better, for the first time I actually feel like my laptop does have 256mb video card, 4GB of ram, and a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo! I’ve played online games, from Team Fortress 2 to FIFA 08 and I’ve not had a single problem.

Overall, I am very grateful that Microsoft was able to get it together and actually produce a stable, and reliable operating system. Over the past couple of days I’ve really grown attached to Windows 7, and slowly started parting away from Ubuntu… Nothing against Ubuntu, but the amount of software, and games of high quality available for Windows is much greater.