Mike Southby

It’s been over a year now since Windows 7 RTM came to market, a year which unusually for a newly released Microsoft OS has been in the main, trouble free.  The transition for many business users from Windows XP to Windows 7 has been easier than with previous incarnations, certainly surprisingly simple considering there is a decade separating the two operating systems which let’s face it in the ever changing world of IT, is a huge gap.

Overall Windows 7 has been a massive boost for Microsoft generally with the latest figures telling us that more than 150 million licences have already been either installed or at least sold.  So what does this tell us (apart from the size of Microsoft’s bank balance)?  Well, importantly it means that Windows 7 has now effectively overtaken the installed user base of Windows Vista during its first year of sale which let’s face it is huge for Microsoft although for us; not at all surprising given that Vista is far from perfect (or even good actually).

I was an early adopter of Windows 7 and moved my primary machine to Windows 7 Ultimate prior to the official release (I was fortunate enough to be given an official copy by Microsoft prior to the public release date) and was genuinely surprised by the ease of installation compared to prior versions; things like driver installation and compatibility checks are now fully managed by the system.  Owing to Vista being – well – actually quite rubbish, I didn’t transition via Vista and came from using Windows XP on my machines.   Windows 7 is definitely the most stable and robust all round operating system I have used to date for my day to day use, both at home and work.

It’s not all great though, on my T61p battery life is not as good as it used to be and there are a few other areas which have been made unduly complicated compared to Windows XP.  But of course Windows 7 is designed appeal to all, including consumers who demand the fluid, GUI improvements and work arounds which I would historically have done manually via the command line; that’s not to say that this can’t still be done, in fact with PowerShell this is even more powerful than ever.  Let’s not forget that we are still in the infancy of the OS though, with SP1 under development and due to be released soon I am sure some of these annoyances will be addressed making the OS even better.

Of course in the meantime, now manufacturers have more experience of Windows 7 too, updating the BIOS to the latest version will undoubtedly help with any hardware issues such as the increased battery drain, and updating drivers will iron out any system glitches, although they are few and far between.

For sure though, Windows 7 is Microsoft’s most polished operating system to date (although I do still remember Windows 2000 fondly; it just worked!) and it’s safe to assume there will have been some questions raised in the Microsoft hierarchy as to why Vista wasn’t anywhere near as successful.  I’m sure some eye brows were raised.

I look forward to testing Windows 8 at an early stage – I believe the public release date is tentatively set sometime during 2012 – when it becomes available on TechNet, it is most likely to follow in the ilk of Windows 7 and will be Microsoft’s most ambitious project to date, really making full use of cloud and mobile computing whilst fighting off the ever nearer threat from Apple, Linux and most recently Google.

Microsoft finally seems to be heading in the right direction again.

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