Windows 7 is a solid buy

Many people acted like sheeple, buying into the aired-so-often Apple, Inc. commercials about Microsoft Vista, some are wondering what Apple is going to suggest about Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 7, which was released officially today.

Having used Windows 7 during its beta, as well as since release of its “Gold” or “release to manufacturing” version, I can tell you it is much more stable than any other operating system that I’ve used over the past 20-plus years; has a variety of helpful and easy-to-use features, which is important for novice or new computer users; and runs on many systems that would not run Microsoft Vista.

With Windows 7 serving as my primary operating system for more than 16 months as my primary operating system – pushing it and demanding nothing less from it than I would a retail product – I can say Microsoft has got a winner on its hands with Win7.

After installation, the system pops up a few windows to help you set up your computer to work for you, as well as to maintain itself without thought or user intervention, such as doing backups of the hard drive or specific files and/or directories, as well as suggesting anti-virus protection, and other stuff.

Do you have issues that keep you from typing? Microsoft have tweaking and improved its speech engine, allowing you to operate the machine, the system, and even type using nothing but your voice. What’s that mean for you? That you could write that great American novel by dictating it to the computer.

Putting any machine to use – whether it is running Windows, Apple, or a *nix flavor – such as Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. – the machine is going to get a serious workout almost any day I power it up.

Sure, many people talk about multi-tasking, such as being in chat or IM, being in email, and working on a document or spreadsheet, for me, multi-tasking is a little more involved. I often have two or three documents open in a word processor; a couple or several text-based files, such as PHP files, HTML files, and other files; a spreadsheet or two; perhaps QuickBooks; quite often Adobe Acrobat Professional is open and running, being used to make, edit, or add content to files or PDFs; and other programs, as well.

In the time I’ve been beta testing and running Windows following the close of the official beta test, I’ve run into only one program that had hardware driver issues, but that was for a product that never upgraded the drivers for Vista.

How about the issue many people cried about concerning Vista: “It won’t run on my computer!” Well, even my six-year-old Dell laptop with a 40-gig hard drive – a machine that would not and could not – run Vista, well, Win7 runs on it without issue, with a separate partition for Ubuntu.

With the release of Win7, Apple may feel more of a pinch – even when Microsoft played tit-for-tat (without mud slinging and getting nasty and mean-spirited, especially against the users of the competing operating system) – and ran the “Laptop Hunter” series of ads earlier this year.

Those Microsoft ads were so effective, without the mean-spiritedness of Apple’s “let’s be funny, insult Vista users, and poke fun at them all at the same time” ads, that after only a short time of the MS Laptop Hunter ads running, Apple called Microsoft and asked Microsoft to stop running the ads. It seems the Microsoft ads were cutting into its business and causing revenue losses by opening the eyes of consumers who previously may have purchased an Apple computer or laptop for some daft reason.

According to Allison Watson, corporate vice president, Worldwide Partners Group, related the story with the Worldwide Partners Group meeting in July 2009. The key part is:

From www.microsoft.com:

“And you know why I know they’re working? Because two weeks ago we got a call from the Apple legal department saying, hey — this is a true story — saying, "Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices." They took like $100 off or something. It was the greatest single phone call in the history that I’ve ever taken in business. (Applause.)”

So, when will you be upgrading to Win7?