Testing Windows 7

Today I found some spare time to check out Windows 7 Professional; as our university offers free licenses under an MSDNAA agreement I thought I could give it a try (I even installed Windows Vista once, but that "Operating System" only survived about an hour on my system before I got too embarrassed of the perceived slowness and nagscreens they called security enhancements...)

I started with a fresh 250 GB hard drive I had lying around (I didn't want Windows tampering with my boot sector and the Debian installation on my normal drive), and after about half an hour later Windows 7 was installed and running fine so far. I was quite surprised to get a freshly released version of a Windows operating system installed so quickly.

The first thing I did was to adjust the DPI settings of the screen; the default settings rendered the fonts too small on my 24" monitor w/ 1920x1200 pixels. Not being a fan of fancy graphics I tried to set the theme back to "Windows Classic" (i.e. Windows 95-ish), but that looked crappy (maybe because of the increased font size), so I reverted to the "Basic" look. Well, after more than 10 years of the Win95 look... maybe some change isn't too bad after all :)

After having installed some free antivirus tool (AVG 9 - no real decision involved here, I just read about a new version having been released today, so why not give it a try while I'm at it...) and a media player (VideoLAN client) I sat there, staring at the desktop - and now?

Here I was, with my new Windows 7 - and nothing more. I felt like there was nothing to explore, it just seemed like Windows Vista - albeit with not even a single nag screen and really fast "user experience" (UI reacts fast and as expected, and boot time is also adequate).

So, with nothing to explore, I shut down my new system and rebooted into my elderly Debian, with my gnome environment and its four virtual desktops. Maybe I'll dig deeper into Windows 7 the next days (or the "upcoming" weekend), but for the moment I'll stick with the comfy, fully-featured Linux system.

Given a performant-looking base and its advancements, Windows 7 is definitely worth a try, especially over Windows Vista, and even Windows XP might finally have met its successor. Nevertheless, compared to the bandwidth of applications and usability a modern Ubuntu system delivers for free out of the box, Windows 7 is still lacking some things - after all, it's just an operating system, little more useful than a Linux kernel without the GNU tools.

My (first-glimpse-)conclusion: Given the choice between XP, Vista and 7, I'd go for Windows 7, as it's way better than Vista and - obviously - more advanced than the nearly abandoned Windows XP. But a decent Linux system (or should I say "Gnome/KDE environment", as there is also *BSD and solaris and whatsoever out there that runs these desktop environments) still trumps them all in my opinion.