ALERC Forum

I've been using Windows 7 since early in the release candidate phase and I'm delighted with it. Windows XP is now nearly 10 years old and it's showing its age. Compared to Windows 7 it feels creaky, clunky and, well, old. I use XP here on my work machine, which is a powerful Xeon quad-core workstation with 4GB of RAM and it just doesn't take full advantage of the hardware available to it.

Whereas Windows 7 on my home laptop feels so much better to use - faster, smoother, less prone to random freezing. I've yet to find an incompatible application. I don't need to use anti-virus software because UAC provides enought protection for me (I do a weekly anti-virus scan, but that's it). It's generally much more pleasant to use, I find. Overall there's no one feature I would point to as being worth the upgrade alone, but the whole feels greater than the sum of its parts. There are lots of little features that are a pleasure to discover, like the preview icon, which gives you a panel previewing the currently selected file; or the much improved Resource Monitor; or Jump Lists and the improved Task Bar.

It's also a forward looking OS. Much better 64bit support gives us the ability to use more than 4GB of RAM.

There are still things I don't like. Networking is unnecessarily complicated. I'm not keen on the design/look/feel (I prefer OS X). Mostly, I dislike the fact that there are so many versions of it and that it costs so much. If it had cost £20 and come in only one version (the Ultimate version), that would have been just right.

Would be interested in knowing what those performance registry tweaks are Tony. I've found it to be very performant out of the box, even on my Samsung NC20 netbook.