Thank You Microsoft!

For the last few years I've been slaving under the yoke of a ruthless dictator who forced me to do everything it's way and constantly proved to be a pain in my arse. It's name was Windows Vista, and it started out so promisingly...

When Vista first arrived it came with some fanfare, it was a departure from XP, it gave you little windows showing you each program as you hovered your mouse over it, it had see through windows, it could do anything you could think of. Unfortunately it was also slow, power hungry and the least intuitive OS that i have used in many, many years.

Way back when (about 4 years ago i think) i had a Toshiba Satellite with Windows XP pre-loaded on it, it was a great machine and did everything i wanted it to, but it's newborn sister Vista had me getting all broody for a new OS of my own. Ever the pragmatist (and skinflint i might add) i decided to resist Vista with it's attractive menus and pointless bells and whistles since my Tosh was a single core machine with only 1.5 Gig or ram. This was fine for XP which happily ran on much less resources than those in my Laptop, but for Vista it wasn't nearly good enough.

Fate would, however, play a cruel hand to me sooner than i would like. One night while wasting some time on YouTube my beloved little Toshiba made a horrifying noise and froze. It never worked again. It would boot up and you would get as far as the loading screen, but then the screen would go black and nothing worked. Eventually i would suck it up and accept that i had to buy a new laptop, so off to Ebuyer.com i went.

My search for a decent value for money Laptop was a short and fruitful affair as i soon found a Samsung R60plus for sale for around £350.It was a dual core, it had lots of RAM, It came with a years free subscription to Panda Internet Security (which i would highly recommend to anyone reading this) and best of all, or so i thought at the time, it came with Windows Vista pre-loaded.

The first few weeks and months were fine, the laptop was quick and did everything i wanted, but soon the cracks began to surface. The snazzy interface was all style and no real substance, it took forever to boot up and shut down, setting up networks was still a pain in the posterior, yada yada yada. I invested in more RAM, taking the Samsung up to a very healthy 2.5 Gb, which resulted in much faster opening and closing of programs but didn't tackle the main problem, i was running out of space. I can't quote specifics, but lets just say that my Samsung was advertised as having an 80Gb HDD but once Vista had finished setting up i had less than 60Gb.

Why, you might ask, have i taken you on another random journey into my past dealings with two now defunct OS's? Well i finally got on board the good ship Windows7 today and my god how things have changed! First things first it was out with the paltry 80Gb HDD and in with a new 500Gb HDD, this gives me much more space for program files and should allow me much more flexibility when it comes the time to launch my new podcast and music projects (keep reading the blog to find out more). Next up came the change to Windows7, quite possibly the most painless install I've ever witnessed. Everything was made so simple and easy to understand.

Having messed around with the new OS for a couple of hours i am massively impressed, everything in the 8 second adverts works perfectly, 7 is much less resource hungry than Vista both in terms of memory used on the Hard drive and the amount of RAM taken up in general use. when i initially turned the system on not only was it lightening quick compared to my previous OS but it automatically searched for any drivers that i might be missing and installed them when i shut down. I'd expect this to be true of previous OS's too but only windows centric drivers...

I've been toying with getting 7 since it launched, and now that i have finally taken the plunge i am more than satisfied with the results. It's good looking, easy to use, less resource hungry and much faster than it's older sister Vista

Microsoft actually made an OS that's intuitive and does everything that people asked for off the back of their last effort? Surely not?

Surely yes!

Robinho