You can’t deny you’re a geek family when you can offer a visitor their choice of a linux, mac or Windows (7 or Vista) laptop when they need to get on the net.
Life between coffees.
You can’t deny you’re a geek family when you can offer a visitor their choice of a linux, mac or Windows (7 or Vista) laptop when they need to get on the net.
The Windows 7 UI is light-years ahead of both Windows Vista and XP in terms of overall usability and general operator productivity. Many users will likely upgrade based solely on this feature — it’s that compelling. Windows 7 is slightly faster than Vista on identical hardware. It’s also still significantly slower than Windows XP, while generating almost twice as many threads and consuming nearly three times as much RAM as XP to run the same application load. The numbers speak for themselves. Windows 7 benefits from the maturing of the Vista-era Windows ecosystem. As such, it fares better than its predecessor in terms of initial reliability and should quickly approach Windows XP levels of stability with the first 12 to 18 months of general availability. The days of uneven hardware support under Vista are over. Windows 7 inherits a well-rounded ecosystem of mature drivers that should enable it to achieve Windows XP (current generation) levels of initial customer satisfaction. Windows 7’s new UI paradigm provides a number of unique capabilities that Microsoft’s application folks can tap into to make their products more compelling. As such, it offers a significant integration advantage versus Windows XP and even Vista. Windows XP remains the Gold Standard for application compatibility, a fact Microsoft has fully embraced with Windows 7. Customers can expect a better compatibility experience with the new Windows, and when they do encounter an application that refuses to behave under the native runtime, they can always fall back to Virtual Windows XP Mode. Windows 7 is no better and no worse than Vista in terms of developer tools support. However, given the popularity of the beta version, Windows 7’s ultimate success in driving the post-XP migration may allow it to achieve what Vista couldn’t: making .Net the new development standard for Windows applications. Windows XP was born into a world of single-CPU systems with memory capacities measured in the megabytes. Windows 7 arrives at a time when dual and even quad-core systems are the norm, and 2GB to 3GB of RAM is considered a good starting point. Simply put, Windows 7 is better positioned to leverage new hardware technologies and to support future application and workload growth over the long haul. Windows 7 is faster than Windows Vista, but not by much — and it’s still slower than XP. It’s less secure than Vista in its default configuration, but it’s also light-years ahead of both of its older siblings when it comes to usability. Reliability is up, as is compatibility, but these trends have more to do with an industry that is finally catching up with the Vista security and driver models than with any new Windows 7 capability in particular. Windows 7 is still very much Vista at its core, and no amount of tweaking or UI paint will change that fact. But Microsoft finally did get it right.
Hats off to Windows XP — it had a great run. But change is in the air, and it smells like Windows 7.
Operating systems are irrelevant. Can you give me a choice of IE7, IE8, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari or Lynx? 🙂
You can have IE4 and IE6 as well if you’d like.
ooh, IE4. So retro.