If you have been seeing interesting articles about the upcoming Windows 7 or if you haven't ( I apologize because I haven't covered it much) you might want to check it out. Anyways, I came across this article and it made me think a lot about media coverage and what an impact it can have. Basically the author writes that Windows 7 does look interesting but it may have been as simple as media coverage why Windows 7 seems so appealing while Vista got such a bad rap. As he points out after using Vista from the start, what the media covered and what was actually true were two very distinct things. I can attest to that as well.
I was one of the first early adopters of Vista. I installed it on 3 machines, 2 desktops and 1 laptop, the very first week it was officially released. Guess how many of those machines I have had to fix or reload windows in the past two years? (It was released January 30th, 2007) None. It was the first operating system I have ever installed on a computer that lasted this long. Usually after only a few months of having XP on a machine you were stuck reloading it and formatting your drive to fix all the bugs and get it up to speed again.
But how could that be true? Vista is full of bugs, everything I read says so!
Yup, everything you read probably did say that, and the majority were “testers” or people who didn't use it for an everyday OS. Some people installed this on an older machine thinking it wouldn't matter. Now some argue that an OS shouldn't need a lot of resources to run, but how many software products release new software that doesn't require faster system specs to run? Its rare. So expecting an OS to behave differently is hardly fair. Likewise installing Vista on a 5 year old Dell that is outdated by almost every standard and expecting all the bells and whistles is unfair.
The other big stink I always heard about Vista was drivers were hard to come by and that all your hardware would cease to be if you updated to Vista.
Well this was just completely untrue. Some manufacturers failed to have fully tested drivers in time for the release of Vista, but is this the fault of Microsoft? I don't think so. And when I say some, how many manufacturers did this really happen to? I bet you cant even remember a single one. I installed it on 3 machines like I said and I never had an issue with any hardware. One of the machines was a 64 bit version and finding drivers for that used to be hard but I never had a problem even with that. Honestly for how many articles I saw repeating this same bad information, it really just wasn't fair. I just saw the other day someone still worrying if they could update or not! Come on media get it right. Don't say a problem is widespread or affects everyone or even hint that it does. It might make for good ratings but its really unfair.
Did you know that the wonderful XP that everyone praises so highly, upon release, was perhaps one of the most hated OS's to ever come out? Every person I ran into back then told me what an idiot I was for installing XP. I got a free copy so I figured why not try it? Everyone told me it was unstable and I was stupid. “Wait until the first service pack comes out”, thats what everyone said! Compared to Windows 2000 and its famous stability maybe it was crazy switching. But for me it was night and day between the two. Installing was a breeze and it was so easy to get drivers working. Which is also one of the things so great about Vista. I have never had to manually install a driver, not once. Out of the box it is so much easier to install than XP its crazy to think back. You used to have to install a display or graphics driver even to see the desktop good when you first installed XP!!! Yet people say Windows 2000 was better than XP and XP is better than Vista. Maybe everyone should install Windows 2000 to get some perspective?
So windows 7 is coming sometime probably in fall of this year. Will I install it? Maybe. Price will be an issue. Plus my Vista is rather great. I still cant complain about it. It handles all new hardware really well and can handle every geeky gadget I plug into it. If I come across something that it doesn't handle well maybe I will upgrade. But the tech geek in me really wants to try out the new Windows.
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