It seems Windows has learned a lot since the horrifically terrible release of Vista. I have been running Windows 7 Professional for the last two weeks and will attempt to sum up the 5 reasons why Windows 7 Rocks! It no only installs quickly, it also runs like a dream … so far anyway.

Windows-7-screen

  1. The Task Bar- Windows 7 features a totally redsigned task bar. It like grouped icons on steroids. The task bar now only has a handfull of icons- one for each running application.

    2. taskbar
    Multiple instances of a running program are grouped together and you can preview the window by hovering the mouse over the task bar icon. This features is great when web-browsing. IE and Firefox both support the preview of each open tab.

    tab_preview

  2. Media Center- Media Center seems to get better and better with each release. The UI is more smooth and usable then in XP and Vista. Amazingly Media Center is included in the Professional Edition of Windows 7!media center
  3. Driver Support- I have installed Windows 7 on my MSI Wind u100 netbook and desktop, both of which are newer systems (less than a year old). An interesting thing happened after the install- All of the drivers were detected. I can truly say that this is a first. The driver support in Windows 7 is rock solid. I plugged my phone in and Windows automatically found and downloaded a driver from Windows Update (granted it was a Windows Mobile phone).
  4. Speed– Windows 7 run much smoother then Vista. I saw a great improvement in usability on my netbook and my desktop was much more stable. Windows 7 requires less memory which frees up resources for your applications.
  5. Battery Life – I have not done extensive tests, but am seeing a much better battery life on my netbook. So far I have seen around a 15%-20% longer battery life.

In short Windows 7 is a great improvement over Vista. That said there are still some caveats. The most major one being the price. Yeah its nice, but $200 nice – in this economy probably not. I have also found a few applications that worked well under Vista that refuse to run in Windows 7.

Computer Review Windows Windows 7