Windows 7

So everyone and their dog has done a review of the Windows 7 beta. Results says it is the best thing since sliced bread™. Since the beta was free to download I gave it a wee spin.

First off, I will say that I ran the beta in a virtual machine on my laptop and not on a physical machine. This did limit the review a lot and made the whole experience very slow. The network interface was not supported by either Windows or Virtualbox which obviously prevented me from doing a lot of stuff.

Windows 7 doesn’t come with a lot of software that is useful to mainstream folk. There are a lot of utilities for admin type folk but I seriously doubt your average Joe is gonna play with the iSCSI utility. Generally the preinstalled software is limited to the games (yay, solitare) and some misc stuff like the sound recorder. Compared with Ubuntu which comes with a full office suite, chat software, scanning tools, graphics stuff and a voip app.

I will say one thing. Win7 does look somewhat nice. A bit flashier than what I’m used to. Whenever I use Windows, I set it to the classic theme. That option has aparrently been removed. What has been added is the new taskbar which a lot of folk like. I don’t. In fact. I don’t like the whole limited to one bar thing that Windows has used since 95. I find the Gnome way of 2 panels (fully configurable by the way, able to have up to 4) to be far superior.

In summary, looks nice, not a lot of useful software. Think I’m gonna stick with Free Software operating systems which respect my freedoms.