coderchris.com

I’ve been using the released version of Windows 7 for about 4 days on and off now and have to say it seems to be a massive improvement over Vista.

In my opinion it’s what Vista should have been (the whole release of Vista vs. XP being akin to the release of Windows ME vs. windows 98 i.e. a bit of a joke, with the real improvements come in the next version again – in that case XP in this case 7).

Anyway, things to note so far are:

• Battery life seems to be improved – Win 7 seems to require a lot less juice to run well
• Stacked taskbar icons make the management of multiple applications easier
• Icon themes are nicer than Vista
• Network management is much improved over Vista for those who change networks a lot
• Start up screen is fairly funky
• User Account Control and other Security options are less intrusive
• Windows Media Centre is included in the Pro Version (Vista Business excluded it…)
• So far ALL of the applications that I used to run on XP and Vista seem to run without issue, even small 3rdparty standalone tools (programs that don't require an installer to run)

That’s a fairly short list so far but just for those improvements (minimal though some of them may seem) I’d say it’s worth it.

I’d recommend upgrading for anyone who’s currently using Vista, especially on a laptop and for those of you still running Windows XP, though in your case you might also need a hardware upgrade too.