Balmer's 7

After many months of tolerating and suffering Vista I could take it NO more. I wanted to retrograde back to Windows XP as soon as possible. However, after investigation I was to be told that XP did not have drivers for my newish laptop, so going backwards was not possible. 

Faced with the intolerable current o/s - that would be Vista - and the impossibililty of the past, I opted for the only remaining option; "to boldy go where no one has gone before". Well the future anyhow in the form of Windows 7 build 7000 with the lovely "for testing purposes only" warning.

So having ventured into this pre-release version of windows 7 on my work laptop I have the following to report after almost 2 weeks of continuous usage... 

Windows 7 is what vista should have been! Even as a beta it is more stable, more reliable and considerably faster even compared to XP. 

Connecting to wifi with Vista was a black art, it might work instantly or you could be flaffing around for an hour having to reboot the laptop. With Windows 7 it works seamlessly even from hibernation onto another network. Shutdown (which could take hours on vista) is perflectly fast as is startup and hibernation.

Its not all perfect and there has been a few issues with a printer driver and installing one application, but otherwise everything has installed (including drivers) as it would with Vista. So it looks like they have maintained quite a degree of compatibility. 

Searching is also fast and there are no unexplained slowdowns and freezes that would occur with Vista. This mixed with a mostly improved GUI is quite impressive given that I am comparing a pre-release beta verison of Windows 7 with a post release Service Packed (SP1) Vista. 

7 is certainly lucky for Balmer and particular in relation to version 6 (Vista). Funny though that actually Windows 7 isn't really Version 7, but actually 6.1.7000 which you could argue is a bit of a point release on Vista. I'd agree in this respect that Windows 7 major differential to Vista is not functionality but quality and performance. It is Vista working.

I certainly won't be going back to Vista and am looking forward to the full release of version 7. I believe it just may help settle the nerves of the Microsoft fellowship. It of course isn't Midori nor is it anorexic when it comes to size but it definitely has been on some kind of atkins diet with vastly reduced memory requirements. 

Microsoft says it will even run on netbooks which generally have 1GB or less of memory and Intel Atom processors. Will it run well though? With the performance comparisons i've seen of Windows 7 versus XP I suspect it may actually pull this one off as well. However, it is yet to be clear whether only specific versions or all versions will run on netbooks.