Of course I’ve been using Windows 7 for longer than three days, but this is the third day having it on my old Dell XPS M1210. I just noticed recently that the poor laptop is coming up on its 3-year anniversary. It had a 3-year warranty with accidental damage coverage. The only stupid thing I ever did to it was to dump a can of soda into the keyboard. I replaced the keyboard by shopping on eBay and the touchpad buttons still have a slight issue, but I’ll live with it. Anyway, back to my story and the reason why this is relevant. The machine I had Windows 7 installed on at work was fairly new, and over its short pre-Windows 7 history it ran Windows XP 64bit and Debian when XP 64 wasn’t stable. Neither of these were installed for more than a month before Windows 7 was RTM.
My laptop, on the other hand, was used constantly for nearly three years under XP and Vista, so I have a pretty good idea of how it looks and performs. Everything seems to look better under Windows 7, and I’m not sure exactly why. I went through the cleartype configuration wizard, which may have been the reason this is better. As far as performance, I haven’t noticed much of a difference, but I didn’t really expect the speed to increase more than I just hoped it wouldn’t decrease. The laptop does run cooler now. Even when I’m doing more intensive things the fan seems to run less frequently and the bottom feels cooler.
Now I admit, these observations are not scientific. I didn’t measure the temperature of the bottom of my laptop after watching precisely 1 hour of HD content in both configurations. People’s impressions always trump scientific data anyway, as evidenced by Vista. The general impression of Vista was negative, so very few people actually tried it themselves. Windows 7 has the potential to be just as negative, especially since there are some big changes to the interface. Microsoft has done a good job of keeping the initial impressions positive, with only a few exceptions. There was an ignorant article on Federal Computer Week that described Windows 7 as Vista with only a very minor facelift, but not enough to be an improvement. It was obvious from reading it that the author either hadn’t used Vista or hadn’t used Windows 7.
Just as with Vista, people who don’t try it for themselves on decent hardware have no grounds to talk on it. Win 7 is a vast improvement over Windows XP and a valuable improvement over Vista. In my opinion there is no value in “upgrading” from Vista, however a clean install from XP or Vista is valuable if your hardware is reasonably fast. If you have a computer over 3 years old, a new computer is the best upgrade path.
Mozy has disappointed me. I have been unable to do a restore, and without a restore all the routine backups are worthless. The client has sat at “Connecting to backup service…” since I kicked it off yesterday. I’m going to need to reboot soon, so we’ll see if that fixes things. Windows Home Server appears to be able to perform a complete backup of this laptop now, so I’m feeling better about that. I’m going to blow away my desktop and try a full system restore from Windows Home Server and if that works I’m going to start feeling a little better about trusting it.
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I should probably let go of XP and upgrade to Win 7, I just dont have the time to take care of my own machines at the moment. Im waiting for MS to force me to upgradel when they discontinue support for XP.
You will be waiting a long time. Microsoft is still releasing patches for Windows 2000. The decision to upgrade should be based on one thing: Need. If you don’t need to upgrade, then don’t. I made the argument that I needed to upgrade because my chosen career is in computers, and if I start falling behind now, then I will become as old and crusty as the career computer people I used to make fun of when I was too young to know better in college right out of high school.
If there is one obvious thing about the Microsoft/Apple/(linux?) war its that everyone has an opinion, just like politics. It is impossible to find unbiased reporting, so the only choice is to either form your own opinion with the facts or form an opinion based on what biases you already have and on the opinions of those you listen to, with the understanding that those people may not have started with the facts either.