Windows 7 released

Mac fans and perrennial critics of Microsoft may poo poo the latest version of windows but not me. In the past couple of years I've purchased two new desktops. The first and HP Pavillion Elite came with Windows Vista Home Premium and once I removed the HP bloatware and exorcised the symantec dung off the PC it ran like a dream for me. The second a Gateway i7 based screamer also came with Windows Vista Home Premium and it was a gigantic headache. It took me two weeks to clean off most of the bloat. Even so the PC had a problem, every hour, and for 20-30 mins one of the cores went to 100% CPU utilization and it was all kernel time, which meant that the PC slowed to a stagger for the duration of the event. I pounded on google and support sites, I tried all kinds of stuff, I was so desperate I contacted Gateway support multiple times; here's a hint - they couldn't even manage to point me at the proper driver set for my PC. Multiple times they asked me to install BIOS for a different, and much much older, PC model. Gateway support is so clueless they make Dell look like a precision instrument. 'nuff said, back to windows. A buddy of mine suggested that my problems sounded similar to problems he had with Vista that were cured by the Windows 7 release candidate, which was free to download. I bought a second SATA drive and downloaded and installed the final RC kit. I set it up to dual boot Vista. I haven't run vista since. Windows 7 is everything Vista should have been. It's fast, it's smart and it frigging works on the Gateway without issues, without errors and without a hitch for the past couple of months. I love it and can't wait for my free upgrade to arrive. But don't take my word for it

William Stanek, author, Windows 7: The Definitive Guide

Favorite feature: "My favorite Windows 7 feature is not so much a single feature, rather it is a super-set of features called Windows Recovery Environment (aka Windows RE). Windows RE is a safety net that you can use to repair your computer if it fails to start. The single-best thing about Windows RE and the reason I’m such a big fan: a Windows RE partition with all the related tools is created and configured automatically as part of Windows 7 installation. This means every computer running Windows 7 has Windows RE."

Biggest shortcoming: "Asking me to name the biggest shortfall about my favorite release of the Windows desktop OS ever? Ouch, that’s tough and it’d be a let down, not a shortfall, and it’s this: another one of my favorite features is found only in the Professional and higher editions. The feature: Windows XP Mode. Another sticking point for me is that the some of my favorite Vista included-in-the-box applications are now available as download only. You have to get the apps from Windows Live now and they’re very different from the originals."

Michael Cherry, analyst, Directions on Microsoft:

Favorite feature: The ability to run Windows 7 on low-priced netbook computers. "I am now running Windows 7 Professional Edition on a netbook with only 1GB of RAM, and I love its performance. ... If they can improve the performance profile at that end, then I'm going to love it even more on my Dell with a 64-bit processor and 4GB of RAM."

Biggest shortcoming: "I still don't like all of these versions, the different versions," Cherry said. "Too many, and too (difficult) to draw a line between them." He cited the example of BitLocker, a corporate data encryption system available in Windows 7 Enterprise Edition but not in Windows 7 Professional. A better approach, he said, would be for Microsoft to offer one low-priced version that can be configured for different "roles," as the company does with Windows Server, installing only the features needed by a particular type of user.

You can read the rest over there....now lest you tag me as a MS fanboi I work in IT, I use Linux enterprise servers almost exclusively, and much prefer Linux as a server platform for Oracle databases than windows. I was also a UNIX and VMS system admin for decades, I know how a good operating system behaves.

meesah like Windows 7