Seven-ed

Nothing’s constant but change…and Microsoft decided to keep this mantra alive. You may call me whatever you like, but I have been a true MS fan except for their IE series. So when they decided to roll out their Windows 7 beta, I was there. These guys seemed to have gotten their strategy right – create a buzz and keep the world waiting. At the CES 2009, Ballmer announced that the beta will be available for only the first 2.5 million users. And then began the frenzy. The servers could not bear the load and began to smoke out.

Not very strangely, the Windows 7 homepage behaved very funny on Firefox and I had to resort to IE and as you would already know that’s excruciatingly painful. Nevertheless, after continuously pinging their server for almost 3 hours post midnight, I could not get through the download button. Droopy eyes got droopier and I decided to crash only to realize that MS had tendered an apology (yet again!) confirming “huge demand” for the beta and mysteriously increased the cap to unlimited downloads for 6 weeks!!

The pipe at my home is not that fat. At a basic 256kbps/unlimited it’s kind of slow for today. And it took me a whopping two and half hours to push the mammoth installer to my desktop. A quick rip of the image to the DVD and I was ready to install it on my machine. The caveat was that it had to be on a new partition. Partition Magic 8 did its bit and I was sorted. In less than 25 minutes, my AMD dual core with a 2-gig memory absorbed it smoothly.

And there it was – a ‘spanking’ new OS, was it? Maybe, Vista a little jazzed up and considerably low on resources. The UAC has been done away with and that helped a lot. In the late 90s, a very famous software by the name of Webshots became an instant hit – for it could change desktop background at preset intervals. Take a bow MS - Windows 7 “incorporates” this feature as well. There is a buzz that the second beta and the RTM will feature an inbuilt AV (a fortified Windows Defender, maybe!!). IE is now on its eighth iteration with Web Slices and Accelerators built it. A download manager can still be missed. The Media Player is version 12 but that looked like nothing more than cosmetic. I missed the ‘Show desktop’ feature although there. MS now takes feedback seriously. The ‘Send Feedback’ link now is devoted to accepting feedback – suggestions, complaints, wants and all the brickbats that the user can throw at the developing team for them to consider and build in. All in all, a very smart move by MS to solicit all shortcomings from a wider group of worldwide audience and refine a product at zilch cost.

All in all, aficionados could probably try it. It could be real fun with some nifty little features thrown in. Mouse gestures, touch flows have been incorporated and that makes it a head turner but that comes at an additional cost, for it will not work with your current set up. Networking and adding new hardware is a breeze unlike Vista.

At the outset, Windows 7 may seem like a revamped Vista and nothing more – so much so that one might want to accord it the Windows Vista SP4 moniker. Despite its humongous market share, MS badly wants to beat Apple’s Snow Leopard due this winter and also better their image dented by Vista. Whatever it is, it’s fun, its jazz with a little bit of tweaks here and there.

In case, you need to catch up with this OS, hit this link, experience it and let me know what you think of 7. Get there, get ‘seven-ed’!.