Windows 7 is Tragic

Today we start getting all the usual hype you expect on a Windows pre-release. And hey you can pre-order it but nobody knows when it will be released. Thats odd. I always thought doing this was illegal in the UK and very against consumer law here.

Personally I dont understand how anybody would even consider windoze of any sort as an operating system. I was brought up on windows 3.1, managed the terrifying transitions via 95,98,ME,XP,XP Pro,Vista complete with data loss and hardware changes and then got extremely pissed off with it all.

Windows is a software/hardware treadmill. I bought (un-necessarily) 5 new PC's to try and keep some sort of speed in my computing life. Each upgrade slowed me down. Then Microsoft FORCED me onto Vista by releasing a mod for XP that completely screwed both it and my hard drive. Well sorry guys that was a bridge too far.

I bought Vista - yes. I installed it and after 3 months when things began to get slower somebody suggested 'Oh you need to get a better motherboard and processor, oh and another gig of memory would help'. Errm right. The onboard computer on the Apollo Moon Landings was basically about one thousandth the capacity of the machine needed to write a letter, send email and surf the net? No I dont think so.

I downloaded Ubuntu - a brilliant FREE linux desktop OS. Yes I still have vista on my main machine - but my preferred use is Ubuntu and its been 6 months since I used Vista. Guess what, after reading the hype about Windoze 7 I am going to uninstall vista - bet I dont miss it. After all using a program called Wine (also free) I can run all my serious PC applications under Ubuntu anyway and Openoffice (also free) handles all my old microsoft office files. Oh and the PC runs like greased lightning and never slows down.

Also I now have resurrected two of the OLD PC's I replaced and am running Ubuntu on them too. Hey thats not fair - my 5 year old pentium machine is now nearly as fast as my ten month old AMD Dual Core ... and they are all faster than Vista! Now I have a webserver of muy own running Apache and a spare machine as a backup...for FREE!

Free computing. Try it before you buy Windows 7 - you know it makes sense! My top tip is to download the latest version of ubuntu (it self-updates just like windows) and try it for one week. It comes complete with openoffice but you can load any other programs you need for free (from the Applications|Add Programs sub menu) and dont use windows for that whole week. Notice how much stress you are not getting? How the machine is much faster? How it now never crashes? How much easier things are? I doubt if Windows 7 will match it.