My Windows 7 Experience

It seems I may be extremely late in sharing my windows 7 experience, as there have already been 800 reviews posted all over the web. Then I remembered that some people don't follow the same news feeds as others, and there is a tiny possibility that this is the first time you've ever heard of windows 7. If that's the case, let me enlighten you: windows 7 is the newest version of windows, still in "beta". It will be the successful successor to Vista, which, in case you were living on a deserted island, is the unsuccessful successor to XP.

I am currently typing this in word 2007 (with ribbon and all), in an officially licensed copy of windows 7. Yesterday, I replaced my old hard disk with one 4 times the size and did the same with my RAM. I spent most of the evening loading XP on the first partition, and today had a go at loading windows 7 onto the third partition (the second partition is for Ubuntu, fourth partition is for documents, songs, videos, etc). I'm enjoying the quickness and snappy responses from a fresh install, and I must say I'm quite impressed with windows 7.

Neat little features you'll notice on the surface are that it's all about the looks, and smoothness. The "Aero" look, with fuzzy transparency along with amazing transitions will blow your mind. Another part I'm really going to enjoy is the snap-to-left or right side of the window for half-window maximizing. Great for when you want to share your screen real estate among two windows in 2 simple mouse gestures. Another fun mouse feature is the "Aero Shake"- a shaking motion you perform on the title bar of one window to minimize all the other windows. Shake again to restore the other windows. In other words it's like a "show desktop but leave this window open function".

I have not experienced any problems yet, but I've only been using it for a few hours now. For reference, my windows experience rating comes out at 3.0. This number means absolutely nothing to me; I'm the guy who's always stayed away from vista like a cat avoiding water. This score here apparently is my lowest score which was my graphics capabilities. The rest I scored 4's and 5's.

If you have an extra 20 GB on a hard disk somewhere, you might consider installing windows 7, and dual booting from whatever operating system you currently use. Granted, there is a lot of hype, but it's nothing like it was with vista.

Ok, I'm off to take a swing at Firefox 3.1 Beta 2, although Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 wasn't that bad. Let's hear from your experiences during beta testing in the comments.