wow, windows 7 isn't bad
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
I was using a "Windows Vista" laptop at work. It had incessant problems.
Two or three times a week, it would losing the video configuration and I'd be staring at a blurry and low-res screen. It lost network connectivity all the time, and generally suffered from poor network performance. It didn't seem to be able to recognize any peripheral that I plugged in. And so on.
So I installed Windows 7. Having built a couple of dozen of Windows XP systems over the years (PC's aren't my thing and tangling with the OS is not what I consider fun, be it Windows, OSX, BSD, Linux, or Solaris) and I expected that the process for 7 would be the same. Instead, I simply burned a DVD, rebooted, made two choices and it started to do its thing. It looked like I had plenty of time, so I went for lunch. And when I came back .. it was finished.
Since then I've been rebuilding the thing with all of the software I was using on the old OS, and I have to say I'm damn impressed. For Microsoft, this is a revelation. They've fixed so much of the BS in Vista it's simply night and day. Peripherals just work; I don't have to fiddle around with MTU's and other TCP/IP arcana to stay connected with network drives and the !%^&#$ Exchange server; the external monitor is more clear than it ever was under Vista, and I didn't even have to provide a driver. And in a gigantic improvement over the latter versions of XP, there are none of those constant insulting pop-ups ("you've disconnected your f'n headphones").
I don't know who's responsible for this new Windows but after seven tries they finally seem to have got it right. They've changed the menu system in Office again for some reason, once again swapping "complex and non-intuitive" for a new flavour of "complex and non-intuitive". I guess old tendencies die hard.