Surprisingly Pleasant Adventures Using Windows 7

So posting has been a little light lately as I've been upgrading my home computers to Windows 7. It's not necessarily been the most seamless update given that I have Macs and the process has a few kinks still when you try and make Leopard and Windows 7 cohabitate. I also skipped Vista because it was a piece of poorly written code and refused to use it.

That said, I hate to admit it but I think Windows 7 is currently better than the Mac OS. It's incredibly fast, easy to organize information and slick as hell. I went from running 32 bit XP to 64 Bit OS 7 and the performance increase made me think I had just bought a new computer. Across perhaps 10 metrics of ease of use and performance the only edge Mac OS had was the ease of use around the Time Machine Backup. With Windows 7 it wasn't as easy and the software seemed to have difficulty seeing my network drives.

The easiest part of the upgrade was importing over by browser bookmarks and passwords. The add in I use -Xmarks stores all my settings "in the cloud". Upgrading here was seamless.

I am a big fan of the cloud, and I wish a lot more applications were stored "in the cloud". Why not administer things like Microsoft Office and OS via the cloud? If you administered things this way, it would cut down on copy protection problems and also make upgrading to a new computer a lot easier.

One red flag. Compatibility of old windows software is definitely an issue. While Windows 7 allows you to run in various old modes--it really doesn't work. However, it does have a "Virutal Machine" which basically installs a version of XP on your system. It may be the most impressive piece of software in Windows 7 because the programs basically run right off the start bar with only a minor delay and you can float back and forth from various windows quickly and easily. You only get that with the Pro version or higher though.

I have not seen the latest version of the Mac but I think this makes the fight between Apple and MSFT a bit more of an even contest. In an economy without debt inflated wages and spending will people pay a 20-40% premium for hardware when the OS is more comparable? If I could get a form factor of a Macbook Pro in a Dell, I might switch back.

Just for disclosure I am long Microsoft and think they should see at least a short term improvement in their fortunes with Windows 7 and the success of Bing which is actually pretty good.