I know I’m suffering from it, and so are a lot of other PC users. Heck the whole PC industry is still trying to shake it, and even Microsoft itself may be afflicted. Is there a cure? Maybe so–in the form of Windows 7, Vista’s successor. Microsoft has been surprisingly mum about Windows 7 until now. But most of the secrecy ends today: The company is introducing the upgrade to its developers today at its PDC conference in Los Angeles. I was one of a bunch of journalists who got a briefing on it last Sunday and hands-on time with a preview version since then.
And it looks…quite promising, really. As in “Isn’t this a lot closer to what Windows Vista should have been in the first place?”Forgive the cliche, but Office 2010 turned out to be a sort of a bull in a china shop of an OS: a behemoth that slammed its way around users’ PCs, breaking things without providing anywhere near enough benefit in return. Windows 7, from what I’ve seen of it, looks like it may be a different breed of upgrade–one that starts by doing no damage, and then goes on to be quietly competent and genuinely useful.
Office 2007 suffered in part because it seemed to be an operating system that didn’t know what it wanted to be. (You know an OS is in trouble when translucent window frames are its signature feature.) But the Windows 7 I’ve been exposed to over the past 48 hours is surprisingly crisp and coherent:It aims for compatibility. As in, stuff that works with Vista will work with Windows 7, no updates or fixes required. That’s because W7′s technical underpinnings are not a radical departure from Vista’s. (Steve Ballmer’s description of the new OS as “Vista, but a whole lot better” may turn out to be an accurate way of encapsulating what this product is.gilmore girls dvd)
It tries to stay out of your way. Microsoft has a long history of creating products that are sometimes bizarrely disrespectful of their users’ need to focus on getting stuff done. (friends dvd.) Windows 7, on the other hand, is full of features that let you tell the OS not to bother you with notifications and warnings. It doesn’t even offer to give you a tutorial when you use it for the first time, for fear of distracting you from diving right in.It’s surprisingly original. It ain’t just Steve Jobs that has contended that Windows Vista was a warmed-over knockoff of OS X 10.4 Tiger. Windows 7, however, is its own OS–you may end up loving it or hating it, but its new features have little in common with OS X 10.5 Leopard(ghost whisperer dvd).
