“Snap” and….”I’m a PC”…both slogans we now know fairly well….but “Snap” really was the correct word……as I think they really have broken it!
I liked XP…..when loaded on some decent hardware and setup correctly it’s smooth, slick and generally performs most tasks required of it very well. It fits well in both the home and business environments and coupled with a solid Microsoft Office version (2003) the combination works well. It’s only when you freak it out by being impatient and clicking the link in Internet Explorer for the 40th time in ten seconds because your Facebook page hasn’t updated quickly enough for you, it breaks! (in reality it was probably the web site that was slow and not your PC).
Microsoft Windows 7 (or Windows Armageddon as I like to refer to it) has come hurtling towards us without so much as a “By your leave” and to be fair in the wake of Windows Vista (or “Visitor” as it’s hardly been here before it’s been pushed out of the door for breaking the best china) it needed to!
Everyone who uses Vista or 7 will have their own opinions of it based on their experiences of Windows XP. Does it turn on quickly enough or shall I put the kettle on? Do I have to wait for the dawn of a new ice age while all the services start before I can actually load Word and start typing? The answer in short is “No” you don’t as it does load quite quickly. But it does take longer to do things once loaded as everything has been changed and moved around from what was logical and worked! Of course there is an element of learning something new here but I just don’t understand why we should be subjected to learning something that was intuitive all over again? It’s like having your arms and legs ripped off and have them put on backwards and stuck to the side of your head! You now have to force a migraine upon yourself to find the icon you want and will probably end up with a nose bleed out of frustration. The speed of Windows 7 loading will shortly become an issue if you like to mix and match your IT as Google’s new Operating system (based on Google’s Chrome web browser) is soon to come to market. Recent demonstrations show this offering booting up in 7 seconds with Google aiming to make that time even shorter in the near future. This is mainly due to the fact that Google’s operating system is essentially just a web browser and all applications run in that. More to come on this in another Post!
With the introduction of Windows 7, I do find myself forced into using keyboard shortcuts a lot more to do the same tasks I could do with my mouse in XP. “Start”, “Run” for eg is no longer straight off the start menu as it was in XP but the quickest way to get to it in Vista and Windows 7 is to hold the Logo Key (the flag) on the keyboard and press “R” . This isn’t a bad thing and generally speeds up how you work and so I get the impression that if we all used more keyboard shortcuts for Windows 7 then we would all save on tissues and nappies.
A lot of the time IT Technicians like to be able to get to the networking setup of the PC and in Vista this was all hidden behind a myriad of mouse clicks and unnecessary icons. In Windows 7 they have simplified this location so it is obtainable more or less direct from Control Panel as it was in Windows XP and now takes only three mind numbing steps to get to it.
Although to be fair once I had got to the networking section in Windows 7 the computer went for a “Physical Dump” after trying to run the Network Troubleshooter and presented me with the obligatory “Blue Screen of Death”.
I decided to show Windows 7 to my teenage daughter and I asked her to make some comments on what she thought as she would be looking at it from a non technical perspective. Some of the things she liked about it were the “Sticky Notes” function. She loved the updated “Paint” and also the way IE displays one single tab on the bottom of the task bar which expands on clicking it to show the various instances of IE you may have open. She also commented on how “Pretty” it all was. I think this response just goes to show that Microsoft do seem to have hit the spot with that demographic!
The aesthetic look of Window 7 is all very nice and glossy but as a “Techie” I’ve always thought that computers in the work place should be used for just that purpose….work. This would mean that all the Gloss and shininess of Windows 7 is just a total waste of resources and computing power as most users I know just want the thing to work properly first and look good second. Why attempt to battle it out with Apple on style? They should never try. Let Apple have their glory on style…..and Microsoft should concentrated on the getting the insides right.
As Windows 7 develops and the obligatory 5 million patches come out to resolve “known” security issues and hotfixes, it may improve but in its present form (as you can probably tell) I don’t particularly like it. Windows Armageddon!
