So, the fight between Mac fanboys and Windows fanboys continues, with all the linux fanboys standing over on the side mocking them both.

I'm typing this up on Windows 7 right now, and I've gotta say...not bad, Microsoft. Not too bad at all.

Now, don't get me wrong, I've found some things that I don't particularly enjoy. For instance, when trying to upload a photo from my desktop, it's terribly annoying that there's no shortcut to the desktop itself, making navigation somewhat of a nightmare from within explorer. To fix this, if anyone wants to know, go to C:>Users>YourUserName>Desktop. Right click desktop, and click to "include in libraries" or something like that. That will put it where I think it should have been from the start. Ugh.

I also didn't like that it automatically hides your utorrent icon so that I have to click to get to it. This wouldn't be a big deal, but with the new way the taskbar works it doesn't show utorrent at the bottom, so I had to click that thing every time to open it up. You can change it, so it's not a huge deal, but it's minor annoyances like that that make people hate operating systems.

Windows 7 is speedy, though a bit of a ram consumer compared to what I'm used to. I scored a 3.8 out of 7.9 on their performance tests, and yet it feels perfectly fine to me. Pages load quickly, programs come up fast, and the boot process seems much shorter than Vista's. By the way, for the sake of comparing, I have a Vostro 1500 laptop with 2 gigs of RAM and a 1.2 ghz Core 2 Duo processor. The Aero effects are pretty nice, though I had better ones with linux. Windows 7 uses almost three times as much ram as Ubuntu Linux on my computer, but I haven't noticed any lags in speed yet, so I'm not going to call its usage a bad thing...yet.

One thing I'm still not sure about is the battery life. It really seems like this operating system has no f-ing clue how long my battery should last. I've gotten readings from anywhere between 3 hours and 5 hours 20 minutes, those within ten minutes of one another. It reminds me of a broken gas gauge, in that I don't know how far I'll get before I'm all outta juice.

7 is a prettier, slightly more intelligent Vista. Vista really wasn't that awful, at least for me. But, in ten days when the new version of Ubuntu comes out, you can bet your bottom dollar that I'll be dual booting, at the very least. In all honesty, the only thing keeping me from running Linux as my sole operating system is the difficulty I have had with .docx files, Virtualbox, and trying to install certain windows programs with Wine (try Microsoft Reader under Wine, I dare you).

So, there you have it. Windows 7 is nice, and is a move in the right direction for Microsoft, but there are still some things I'm not a huge fan of.


Just my two cents. What do you guys think?