Windows 7: Excited or could care less?
And it made me think are there that many people out there salivating for it's release the way they were with the release of Windows95? (which I never understood).
But, from what little I've read about Win7, it doesn't look like there's much of a change from Vista to 7. I could be wrong, as I haven't been following the blogosphere on this topic. But, I know for myself, I'm torn.
I liked Vista but after a while, I went back to XP Pro. I'm happy, but I feel that I'm missing out on the "latest and greatest". When XP was released, I too held back from upgrading from Windows 2000. Now that I'm fully adopted into XP, the whole "upgrade" history is starting over.
Aside from you Mac zealots, is anyone looking forward to Windows 7?
Having said that, I've been a happy user of Vista since it RTM'd. Those who have skipped Vista have been missing out on IIS7 goodness, plus the new start menu and DirectX 10 (if you're a gamer). To be honest, the upgrade process of going from XP to Vista was much less painless than from 2000 to XP. Back in the day, video drivers were royally screwed on XP for the first few months and I had to put in an *old* sound card to even get my PC to boot initially since there was major driver issues with my Hercules Game Theater XP sound card at the time. In comparison my experience with Vista was rock solid from the get go (even on older hardware). It looks like Windows 7 should be a painless upgrade for the masses this time, considering that drivers should be less of a worry and the networking stack issues that many people had were sorted out in Vista. At least we can hope :)
We'll know by the end of next week if it's a dud or not, I think. I don't think Microsoft is stupid enough to release a second horrible version of Windows in a row, even as a beta, as that would all but kill them in many markets.
When Vista came out, it seemed a) to have pretty much negative press all around and, b) to be unbelievably expensive in both dollars and hardware required to run it. It doesn't really DO anything that justified (to me) the price, so I took that opportunity to switch my setup:
My main computers are now all running Mac OSX or Ubuntu (with one exception - that being my Win XP box for playing games). And ya know what? It works just fine. :) Firefox and Thunderbird are great for web/email, between VMWare, Mono and Win, I can get to an Windows specific apps if need be, and even after buying VM Ware Fusion AND Mac OSX, it's still cheaper than a copy of Vista. :)
hth