I just upgraded my Windows machine from Vista to Windows 7.
To be fair to Microsoft, the upgrade was pretty painless, other than some scary sounding messages about backups and iTunes needing removal (actually that’s probably a good thing). I did a full backup just in case, but it wasn’t needed, everything seemed to work. Naturally after installation it still spent the next couple of days doing updates at seemingly random intervals, but hopefully that’s settled down now.
Also on the positive side, I can now run the software which I am supposed to be testing for someone (it mysteriously failed to startup under Vista, despite working well on various geriatric XP machines). So that’s another plus (of sorts; the real mystery is why it barfed with Vista, other than the obvious point that Vista was just not fit for purpose).
However… (as the saying goes)…. why oh why does it still take about 2 or sometimes 3 minutes just to boot up and log on on a 1 yr old core 2 duo laptop? And almost as long to switch off, too. My MacBook with almost the same hardware boots up Mac OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) in about 15 seconds, and shuts down in 3.
Windows 7 seems to have ripped off couple of ideas from MacOSX like the task bar at the bottom, but they’ve missed the important aspects of MacOSX – like the fact that the Mac recognises my wifi printer automatically and Just Works. The ugrade to Win 7 deleted the bloatware HP drivers (hurray) but it now doesn’t recognise the printer so I’ll probably have to install them again (actually I may not, and just grab my Mac if I want to print something – that’s how much I hate the HP bloatware).
So, nice try Microsoft, but no cigar. Basically, using Windows makes me angry. I have to have a calm down afterward. But I have to use it for work. For years I thought it was me, but no, it really is that Windows is broken; after all, I used to love the Sun and Silicon Graphics unix workstations I used at work before PCs took over. And now I can turn on a Mac and do what I want to do without breaking into either a sweat or bad language. But the latest and best version of Windows is still just better than other versions of Windows. You wouldn’t start from here.
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