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.