Now that I blasted Citrix for loosing their way I can write a post about how Microsoft found their way back. I was an early adopter of Vista. That lasted for about three weeks. I was an instant hater. Too many prompts, to much incompatibility with existing applications and the hardware just wasn’t up to the task at the time.
Knowing how much I loathed the Vista experience I wasn’t that enthusiatic about Windows 7. I read it was just a tuned up version of Vista with a little eye candy. It’s a lot more than that. It installed smoothly, it’s fast, has some cool features that are very compatible with IE8 and the eye candy does come close to rivaling Apple’s Snow Leopard, which I played with extensively last week. The main thing is that Microsoft got off their security scare and quit prompting the user into a suicidal mindset.
One of the few benefits of a down economy is that I have a desk full of returned laptops. I grabbed a three year old Dell D820 with 4GB of RAM and a 256MB NVidia Quadro video card to take the Win 7 Professional test drive. I’ll be using this laptop for a while now. It’s mine. They can’t have it back.
To sumarize the experience I’d say Windows is back. Unlike the Vista release that was poorly adopted, and rightfully so, I think users will finally abandon XP. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to say I’m enjoying using a Windows OS. I modded XP as far as it could go and I was still bored with it. Windows 7 isn’t frustrating like Vista was, it’s kinda refreshing.