Ronnie Sherard

For years, we (computer users) have been happy with Windows XP. After all, it was a grand improvement on the flop of Windows Me. Those of us who upgraded to Me from Windows 98 kicked ourselves for wasting money on such a bug-ridden release of Windows. We had a flashback to those days when we tried to stomach Windows Vista. Windows Vista was released with pomp and circumstance in 2006. I was eager to get a copy to see what all of the hype was about. Of course, I made the mistake of trying to run Vista on a laptop with a 1.3 Ghz processor and a mere 768 MB of RAM. It immediately took me back to the 386 days, as Vista’s resource hog choked the life out of my laptop. Unsatisfied, I bought yet another copy to install on my desktop, consisting of a 2.2 Ghz quad core processor and 2 GB of RAM. While it ran fairly well and there were some great improvements in areas such as networking and usability, Vista was NOT a gamer friendly platform.

I haven’t had much of a chance yet to game in Windows 7 yet. However, I did load Left 4 Dead onto my laptop and, surprisingly, it ran quite well. When I loaded it in Vista, it was so slow and choppy that I couldn’t even attempt to play it. I did have quite a bit of lag on the movement with the mouse, but I believe that is because it is a wireless mouse. I haven’t decided if I’ll hook up a USB mouse or not, as I don’t intend to do heavy gaming on my laptop. It is just reassuring to see a game like that actually running smoothly on my laptop platform.

Windows 7 has a lot of great features I like. First of all, I really like the library feature in Documents, Music, and Videos. This allows you to maintain several folders under one link. If you have your documents, music, and movies in other places, you can simply include the folder and they will show up in the library. Another nice feature is on the Start menu. Programs such as Google Chrome, Word, Excel, Firefox, and many others will show recent sites or documents you have opened. So, instead of needing to launch the program and then navigate to the site or document you are looking for, you can simply click on the link from the Start menu.

Simply put, I think Windows 7 is one of the best versions to date. I’m sure bugs will be found, which is not uncommon with Windows. However, its ease of use and speed make it far superior to what we were stuck with in Vista.

I’ve been running Windows 7 RC on my laptop for a couple of weeks now and I really like it! I think Windows 7 is everything Microsoft expected Vista to be, but fell off the bus somewhere along the way. My laptop is not a monster of a computer. It has a 1.3 Ghz processor and 1 GB of RAM. When I tried to load Vista on it, it choked. It ran fine until I tried running a lot of programs. Windows 7 is the complete opposite. It runs smoother, doesn’t bog my system down, and has some GREAT features.

Have you ever worked on a document, or several for that matter, only to find it dropped out of the recent documents menu? I’ve lost a few here and there, but was able to find them with a search. Windows 7 now allows you to see what documents you were working on with a particular program. My Word, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks shortcuts all have a sub menu showing me what is in the history. I think that is SWEET! Another nice feature is the side bar no longer exists. You can put gadgets anywhere on the desktop! There are a lot of other nice features I will right about soon!