My Experience With Windows 7

I am getting bored. Of installing Windows 7. The last time I felt this way, was when I was actively doing the System Integration for various companies and on my own, on Windows 98, Windows 2000 & Windows XP.

It has become too routine and unchallenging. It really is a bore now to install Windows 7. Pop the disc(or thumbdrive for netbooks) in and within 30 minutes, everything is completed and you can go online to check your mail. Thats how boring as it gets. Soon, anyone with rudimentary skills on computers will be able to install Windows 7 on their own, rendering IT Pros like me redundant.

If you think the above two paragraphs was a bash on Microsoft Windows 7; you must be a hardcore Microsoft-hater! I absolutely love and adore Windows 7. I’ve installed it on, 5 laptops and 1 netbook so far; and really, it works out of the box. The netbook experience, is especially wonderful! I have a Samsung NC10 and installation was a stumble in the beginning because the netbook does not come with a drive and I do not own an external DVDRW drive! A little search on the net points me towards a guide that shows in 8 simple steps, how to prepare a thumb-drive as a Windows 7 installer. Now my eyes may be deceiving me, but I thought installation for the netbook itself was pretty zippy, less than 20 minutes, beating all the previous installations I did; and the good thing is, as I have declared so openly on Twitter; Windows 7 works out of the box for Samsung NC10! Everything works; Wifi, bluetooth, sdcard reader; the works.

I am truly impressed with Windows 7 on a lot of levels; and also on how it handles crashes. Yes, it is a bane for Windows users to experience software crashes every now and then. With Windows previews; I am able to terminate an application just by clicking on the red cross; failing which there’s the task manager. The operating system itself does not hang-up and allows me to work without a fuss.

I have used my netbook as a wireless gateway during meet-ups and conferences where other free Wifi services was spotty or non-existent to begin with. My netbook was connected to a 3G connection; sharing that connection to the others took less than 5 clicks! It’s that simple!

Pretty soon, I got bored with the netbook and wanted to explore more things. It being a netbook, I could only install the 32bit version. I wanted to install the 64bit version. Out comes my main laptop; which was previously installed with Windows 7-32bit Beta. I removed that, and install the 64bit RC. Again, installation took less than 30minutes although I still have the problem I faced before; which is, I cannot get the bluetooth and the SDCard reader to work. This I think is purely a driver issue, as can be seen on the netbook, I need not have to go online to download any drivers at all. I think later, once I’m done with the chess game(I’m about 50% done), I will go ahead and search for drivers on HP website.

Now, what brought about this entry in the first place; well first of all, friends have been bugging me for an entry on my user experience on Windows 7 after hearing me raving on twitter and in person on how much I like it; and the other thing that really prompted this write-up is after hearing the experiences shared by the good guys on The IT Channel. It was not, in my opinion a positive enough sharing session so I have to weigh in my thoughts as well.

As I am the one writing this, I know my views matter; unlike, let’s say you hear it from a Microsoft employee where you are most likely to tune out automatically. Someone, Harish Pillay , have told me that I should not do the speaking up for Microsoft; let them, with all their marketing war-chest do it themselves.

My counter is, if they do it, you will not listen anyways. So why bother? I do. Try out Windows 7 for yourself today. Do yourself this favour, download Virtual PC 2007 from Microsoft (its free)and install Windows 7. Better still, partition your hard drive (Willy Foo from LiveStudios recommends Easus (a freeware)) and install Windows 7, regardless of your system configuration.

Hey, I installed Windows 7 32bit Beta on an old IBM ThinkPad T41 with 256MB RAM and whoa, the OS works like a charm. Yes, you’ve got to turn off most of the extras, but it still pulls of a DirectX 10 application flawlessly! I have friends who partitions their Macbook to install Windows 7 and they are at least satisfied with the performance on their Macs!

Try it – before you bash it.