I have been using Windows 7 daily for the last 6 months now, and I can say this is the best OS Microsoft has ever developed. I installed Windows 7 on the same laptop on which I had Vista, so as to make for a fair comparison.
You might say it is easy to be better than Vista, the latter being such a complete disaster, but I think Windows 7 has not only fixed what was wrong in Vista but gone further and improved stuff that was lacking in all previous versions of the Windows OS.
Cold boot-up time is very fast compared to Vista. I did not bother to time this with a stopwatch, because statistics like 5.4 seconds faster does not mean anything to people, unless they are geeks. But I can confidently say it is fast because you will manage to do less in the time it takes to boot than you would have before with Vista. Windows 7 is also faster to hibernate and wake up.
Stability is awesome. It did not crash even once in the last six months, and I am not an easy Word user. I develop software on this machine, whilst having at least six other applications running, including a browser with on average 7-10 tabs open. Most of the time I just hibernate the machine. No crashes and few reboots in the last six months are both huge pluses.
Memory consumption is another winner here. Windows 7 on initial install consumed roughly 500MB. With Visual Studio and a browser running the system hovers around 1.2GB. This leaves decent space to load a virtual machine or two. Vista is a memory hog, consuming roughly 750MB on initial install.
Not to mention the subtle but oh so productive tweaks done to the task bar. I just love the small live window preview when you hover on top of the task bar icons. It is such a time saver. No need to switch applications to glance at the progress of a rendering or download. Just hover, glance, move the mouse and your work space is back to normal to continue working.
Docking a window to the left and another to the right to view side-by-side can be done without thought with mouse gestures. Drag one window to the left, the other to the right, and voila!
With Windows 7 Microsoft are back on the right track moving full speed ahead.
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