Vinnerne: Del din Windows 7 Story Contest

I awoke with a jerk, head pounding, it was Lara’s drive screaming in my head. She has served me faithfully, took-up scant space on my desk, and has been fearless to walk where most XP machines fear to tread. Though her time is close, ram dwindling, no choice but to ask her help one last time.

Tock, Tock, yet shortly we track down a great machine at a bargain price, dual core, four Meg, Windows 7 32 bit- oh no!

Nothin’ for it, no time to despair, just buy it man! Her temperatures rising, error rate’s up, power cycle nose-diving. The data’s coming baby – just hold on.

I’m unpacking, and it’s disaster, x64 (plus 8 rams), my programs! Only faith between us and the chasm now, she barely comprehends. I call them and it’s a free upgrade – you say.

A new day… who are you Seven?

We work fast and when it’s done, everything is ok, anxiety is passed, and all of my applicary works great.

Seven, you are from heaven, and you bring with you the spirit of one who is close to my cores.

My most profound experience with Windows 7 was with the first public beta release. I specifically purchased a new machine just before Vista’s general release because my beta experiences with Vista were so bad, I knew it was going to be poorly received and I knew I certainly didn’t want it.

When Vista was release a few months later I was entitled to a free upgrade so I got it, created a dual-boot setup and installed it but never used it. Half of my hardware never worked right including some specialty stuff I used for home automation from X10. To top it off, it was slow. So, I just continued to use Windows XP.

When the public beta of Windows 7 came out, I figured it was the perfect time to blow away the unused Vista partition and give it test run.

To my amazement – shock actually – Windows 7 identified all of my Hardware, including my X10 hardware and installed every driver without ever prompting me to intervene. Everything worked exactly like you hope but never really expect. I mean comeon, most of us have been at this a long time, we know how to deal with disappointment and work-arounds. I’m yet to be disappointed with Windows 7. It’s the OS we’ve all waited decades for.

Before Windows 7 The last OS I bought the moment it was available was Windows 95 (remember those days).

So, figuring if Windows 7 was that good on my desktop, I wondered if it could possibly be that good on my old laptop. It’s an old Dell Inspiron 8600 with an paltry Pentium M 1.5. I’d already ungraded it years ago to a full 1gb of RAM so it me the minimum requirements but I figured it would be a dog, just like Vista had been when I had tried it on the same machine years ago.

Again, I was totally shocked. Not only did it run great, it actually ran better than XP ever did on the same machine. The only downside is the video card isn’t powerful enough to run aero but that’s not even really an issue since it’s given an old laptop that I had all but given up on, a whole new lease on life. Amazing actually.

I’ve yet to be disappointed in any respect with Windows 7 and quite frankly can’t imagine ever going back to XP ever again. In fact, I’ve got to get my mother’s machine updated for the security enhancements alone. Despite having the latest virus protection she managed to get the “Anti-virus XP 2010? infection that took me 4 hours to clean up. Windows 7 would have helped keep that from happening. XP has become just too insecure to keep running at this point.

I have been a fanboy since Windows 95. XP has been a favorite for as long as I can remember. Vista was not exactly perfect as nearly everyone feels. I was dead worried about the direction in which Windows was going.

My experience with Windows 7 started when Microsoft started their E7 engineering blog. That blog gave me insight into how Microsoft builds Windows. It impressed me with the level of thoughtfulness and rationale that goes into the decisions the teams make to please as many users as possible and bring whole OS together.

Right from the earliest builds to RTM, it has been a smooth ride. There are innumerable small enhancements everywhere that delight you. Sure, the new taskbar, HomeGroup, desktop slideshow, Libraries, SSD TRIM support, updated accessories are all features nice to have. But for me, the single most feature that nailed it down was the improvement to Start > Search. Although it debuted in Vista, it wasn’t as comprehensive and pervasive as it is in Windows 7.

I never have to go browsing through long lists of settings, media or my documents. Simply type a few letters, and the OS magically manages to find everything I am looking for. Install more iFilters and it becomes even more powerful. I just can’t stress enough how much this single development has changed my daily use of computers.