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Windows 7 released tomorrow - This is the future
Added: (Wed Oct 21 2009)
Vista: you may have been forced to use it on a personal machine you bought from someone like Dell. Did you like it? Did it perform well? Did all your devices hook up seamlessly? I fear the answer to all those questions would be no. We at Key Systems work closely with SME's and there isn't one we work with that has upgraded to Vista. The cost of hardware upgrades and IT headaches from incompatibility issues would have crippled most firms.
So why are we now singing the praises of Windows 7? It's true the underpinnings of the software is Vista but what they did was take the good bits and strip out some of the functionality. What that has left us with is a true upgrade from XP. We have been seriously testing Windows 7 for a few months now. Indeed, the laptop I write this from is running Windows 7 and has been doing so since we received our copy from Microsoft some three weeks ago. It's brilliant!
Gone are slow startup and shutdowns and gone are incompatibility issues. We have had this running on a client’s network for some time now - testing it with bespoke software and mainstream software - and it all works, and quickly too. The nice front end will be appealing to home users. The fact that there is an XP compatibility mode gets you over some stubborn software that may have some hiccups with Windows 7, but we have only had to use that once in all the time we have been running it.
To give you an example of how good this is, I have a printer at home that is wired into my home router This has always been painful to use. It required me to setup some IP port and most of the time XP would forget about it and I would need to start again. When I brought the Windows 7 laptop home it found the printer and asked immediately if I wanted to connect to it - no wizards, no hassle. I could print within 10 seconds. Brilliant!!
The 22nd October cannot come quick enough for some users who have suffered with Vista and its major flaws. This OS is really is a worthy addition to the Microsoft arsenal of software and we at Key Systems will be pushing our clients to follow the upgrade path over the coming weeks and months.