After the Vista fiasco, I was very skeptical about Windows 7. But then, I tried the Release Candidate and thought it was good. I mean, really good. So I decided to give it a chance, and here it is.
Today I installed Windows 7 in one of my machines. Installation was becoming a nightmare until I realized the media was bogus (tip: if you get the download version of Win7, burn the DVD at 4x or less – that’s Microsoft’s own advice, really). After solving that, installation took surprisingly 15 minutes only (ok, this machine is a quad-core with 4GB of RAM, high-end video card and almost 2TB of HDD space, but that’s fast nevertheless). Just finished installing the basics for my daily use and everything seems to be working fine. No hardware incompatibilities as well.
The new interface shows a very Vista-like Start Menu and a very Mac-like bar in the bottom, which works almost the same as the Dock in Mac OS X. The graphics are surprisingly beautiful for a Windows OS, but the text labels are still very MS-ish – dense and unnecessary.
Performance is also good, both in 2D and 3D applications. Photoshop runs like a breeze and I can’t find any problems in gaming as well. No lockups, no driver incompatibilities, no nothing. As I said, my machine is far beyond mainstream specifications, but in XP, I saw many BSODs on it.
Overall, my opinion about Win7 remains the same as for Win7 RC – it’s nice, fast and probably the best Windows I’ve used. It doesn’t mean it’s the best OS I’ve used, of course… there are a lot of MS-ish things that I hate, but it’s far better than Vista and XP.