Geek Warning! Why I'm liking Windows 7

I was lucky enough to have our tech services department put Windows 7 on my work notebook a couple of weeks back. It has been a pleasant surprise, and outside of a couple of issues, I'm liking it quite a lot and believe it will do wonders to help erase some of the bad blood generated by Vista.

For starters, this is a much lighter weight OS than Vista. It takes megabytes less space on my hard drive. I mean, this is a dramatic difference in terms of the space it freed up. Recently, I had to do a house cleaning because I was reaching the limits to a rather smallish hard drive. But, now, I've got acres of free disk space.

But, the real benefits are how much better it works. Start with start-up and shutdown. Both have gone from agonizingly painful minutes long experiences to something you can actually watch happen while you get situated. I used to go get coffee and even then, it wouldn't always be booted up. Shutdown is equally fast. It also hybernates properly, giving it a much greener footprint. This will be very noticeable to Vista users.

Then there is the new task bar across the bottom of the display. (Hmmmm, wonder where they got that idea.) It's not as dynamic as OSX, but it's super functional and in many ways better. Not only are all your most used apps there, but when you hover over the icon, up pops a list of open and recently used documents. In the case of your browser, you will see all the open tabs.

I also found that saving, finding and organizing documents and files is much easier and faster than in Vista. Not sure what's actually going on here and I think the tweaks are more on the minor side, but they are all good.

My overall impression is that this is a very solid OS that users will like a lot and that will be very competitive. It is simple and solid and "just works." It doesn't seem as fancy as Vista, but much more utilitarian. It took me no time to get used to it and start working faster.

So, if you're in the market for a new computer you've got two choices -- either buy a Vista machine now and upgrade it or wait a few months and get a Windows 7 machine. There is no release date announced yet, but since the release candidate is out, it shouldn't be that long and it would make good sense to get these computers out for the back-to-school guying season. And, paired with some of the super duper pricing out there now on new computers, you will have yourself quite a bargain.

Windows 7 is going to be big and is going to help Microsoft a lot.