For those of you who haven’t heard, Microsoft plans on releasing the next version of Windows, Windows 7, on October 22 of 2009.

This is going to be very exciting. Simply Googling the phrase “Windows 7″ will return countless rave reviews, and as a tester, I can back up every last one of them. Windows 7 runs faster than Windows XP on my 2004 Dell Dimension testing machine. It’s quick, pretty, and easy to use. It’s clean, and smooth. If you haven’t had a chance to try it, you may want to scuffle on over to Microsoft.com soon and give it a shot before the Release Candidate is no longer publicly available.

As for me, I will be purchasing it the day it is released. I have never been this excited about a Windows release before. Actually, I don’t think I’ve been this excited about ANY software release. For serious!

One of the primary reasons I am so excited about Windows 7 is that it is Microsoft’s chance to slap Apple in the face just as equally as Apple did to them with the Apple Switch commercials of 2006-2009. Windows Vista was not a bad operating system. I promise. I have been using it since a few weeks after it was released, and I have never experienced a single one of the problems that everyone says it has. Granted, I bought a computer that met the damned hardware requirements. Apparently those mean nothing to some people, and running a brand new OS on a 6yr old computer should be no problem at all.

I mean, look at it this way: You can’t drive a Ferarri on a dirt road. Well, I guess you can, but it’s not going to be fun. Unless it’s someone else’s Ferrari, of course. Then it’ll be a blast! Am I losing the point here?

Seriously. When you upgraded from Windows 98 to Windows XP, you needed more RAM (and a faster processor helped significantly as well). When you upgraded from OS9 to OSX Tiger, you needed a whole new friggin computer! Snow Leopard will not work on any computer built before 2006 (Yeah, I know. It’s ridiculous.). How is this any different from needing a computer with a 1Ghz processor and 2GB of RAM for an upgrade to Vista? it’s not.

Windows 7, however, has the same hardware requirements as Vista did. That’s what it says on the box anyway. For those of us that have tried it, we know better. It runs just fine on a computer that’s not half as good as the “required” hardware. This is where Microsoft will win. While Apple is dropping older hardware, Microsoft is actually picking it up. A computer that wouldn’t run Vista will, in many cases, run Windows 7 just fine.

Kudos, Microsoft. You’ve done us well. Please please please please keep this philosophy. I’d like to see what you ahve in store for future versions of Internet Explorer and Windows Mobile 7. I’m really getting tired of my iPhone.

So it’s finally here. After over a year of Windows Vista, Microsoft has released Service Pack 1.

Available for download here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/sp1.mspx

After using SP1 for about 2 weeks, I have to say, I’m impressed. I have not had to reboot my computer yet! As I’ve outlined before, I use the crap out of this bad boy. At any given time, I have all of Adobe CS3, most of Microsoft Office, Firefox, Internet Explorer, 2 messengers, Outlook, Thunderbird, Apache, Filezilla, and any number of other specialized apps I need for work. I do this for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

So, stability… yes. They have definitely improved stability. I’ll get back to you with more…

So you want to switch from Windows Vista back to Windows XP, eh?

I have one thing to say about that: You’re dumb.

I know your “computer whiz” friend and the Apple Switch commercials want you to think it’s what everyone is doing, and it’s the best decision. But it’s not. Windows Vista has been out for almost a year (Business release date: 11/15/06; Consumer release date: 1/25/07), and I’ve been using it since March. Sure, it has some quirks (takes longer than desired to finish booting, looks/works a little different than XP), but what version of Windows doesn’t? It also has it’s advantages (better memory management, better multi-processor/64-bit support, faster API).

Chances are, if you’ve upgraded your computer to Vista, the reason it “sucks” is that your computer was built 4 years ago with the intent of running Windows XP, and simply doesn’t meet Vista’s requirements. If you’ve bought a new computer, and it sucks, I’m willing to bet you bought the bottom-notch model to save money, and you have a miniscule amount of RAM to work with, and probably only Windows Vista Home Basic.

Am I right? I bought an HP Pavilion dv9230us in March. Sure, it was a little pricy (after all, it is a high performance notebook), but a desktop with the same specs would have been dirt cheap. It came with Vista Home Premium, which I promptly upgraded to Vista Ultimate.

Since I have gotten Windows Vista:

- I have never seen a Blue Screen of Death
- I have NOT had to reinstall
- I have been able to leave my computer on for weeks on end, only putting it in standby to travel between work and home.
- I have had exactly 3 programs that were not compatible with Vista, and since then, all three have new versions that are.

All of these things would have been only pipe dreams with Windows XP.

And you know I’m right.

Stop being a pansy, get more RAM, get a new computer, tell your computer whiz friend to bite it, and don’t listen to the Apple commercials. I know Apple would have you believe that it’s what everyone else is doing, but it’s not. Look at the stats. According to w3schools, the amount of people who use windows Vista on the web increases by nearly 1% every month. Wanna know how much Apple’s users increase every month? Fractions of a percent. Fractions. As a matter of fact, their usage has increased by 0.1% since January. Eat that, Apple.

And your computer whiz friend probably doesn’t know what he’s talking about. As a matter of fact, I’d say it’s safe to say that most of those guys have no idea what they are talking about most of the time. If you really want to know something, either use your brain and look it up, or pay a professional to fix it.

Seriously.

And while you’re at it, switch to Firefox. Internet Explorer sucks. And so does Safari. Trust me, I’m a web developer, I know these things.

Holy crap…

This must mean that the apocolypse is near…

http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

It’s actually available for Windows now. Now I can test in almost every common browser, with the exception of Konquerer.

We’ve got IE6, IE7 (prev. versions don’t count), Firefox (1.5 & 2), Safari, Opera, and Netscrape! Hooray!

Okay, so I have been using Windows Vista for just over 2 weeks now, and i am pretty satisfied. I have run into some issues with program compatibility that have irked me a bit…

Macromedia Fireworks 8, for example, is not compatible with the visual styles of Windows Vista. When I open Fireworks, windows reverts back to the standard, boring, not-pretty look to accomodate for Fireworks. This is a great idea, however on a few occasions, Windows has had some difficulty returning to it’s normal state when I close Fireworks. I have had to manually end and restart Explorer.exe a few times because of this.

Also, I am happy with the speed at which Windows Vista can boot when hibernated, however it takes a god-awful amount of time to go into hibernate, and unlike Windows XP, there is no bar telling you how far along it is. You get a blank screen. This is a bit unnerving to say the least.

There are also a lot of little things that they have changed that have gotten my attention. Stuff that I’ve been waiting for for a very long time. For example, instant and automatic setup of dual monitors. If the computer is on, and you want a second monitor, you plug it in. Windows automagically detects your monitor and it’s resolution (provided it is a standard resolution), and sets it up. It asks you which side of your primary screen you would like your secondary screen to be, and then it’s done. From that point on, it never asks again for that monitor. Pretty impressive.

Windows Media Center, although not a feature i really cared about when I decided to get Windows Vista, is also much improved from XP Media Center Edition. Although the interface is different and takes some getting used to, it is much more streamlined and smoother than the previous MCE. It is definitely aimed at ease-of-use and a true Media Center environment.

Another thing that I am pretty happy with is the visual styles. Now all you Mac users want to say Microsoft stole the idea from Apple, but I have used both, and they are nothing alike. If you want the truth, all of this transparency and pretty transitions business was actually available first to Linux users, not Mac users. Anyway, what impresses me most about the visual effects is that no matter how mush stuff I’ve got going on (and trust me, I usually have a lot of stuff open. Like, all of Macromedia Studio 8, most of Adobe CS2, most of Microsoft Office 2007, Firefox2, IE7, Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 for IE6 testing, iTunes 7, a background virus scanner, two messengers, the Windows Sidebar, Filezilla, and anywhere from 5-20 local and network folders), it all seems to work seemlessly. Not once have I had to wait for a visual effect to happen or dealt with choppy or jumpy transitions. Now, this is partially due to the fact that Windows Vista depends on the graphics processor for this instead of the CPU (which previous versions of Windows depended on).

All in all, Windows Vista is a good thing. It has broken free of my prediction that it would be a repeat of Windows Me (Millennium Edition).