After not really being happy at all with Windows Vista, I thought I would give Windows 7 a try. Amongst the many grievances I had with Vista was that you need a very powerful computer to do the smallest of tasks. My wife bought a computer at Harvey Normans about a year or so ago. Unbelievably they sold it with only 512 Mb of RAM. The first thing we did was upgrade to 1.5 Gb of RAM, which meant we could actually open more than one window at a time. Still, using Internet Explorer was such a painful experience, i ended up installing Ubuntu on a dual boot and the kids played their games on that installation instead as it is a very responsive operating system.

So, after hearing Windows 7 described as "Vista fixed" I thought I would give it a go. It was a great installation experience. From start to end took exactly half an hour which is the quickest Windows installation I have ever done. When it rebooted I opened up a number of windows and a few instances of Internet Explorer, and my wife was very happy. So now we have a computer which runs the way it always should have. We were actually thinking of replacing the machine as I had assumed there was some mismatch somewhere in the hardware, but it was Vista all along. I always recommended people upgrade from Vista to Windows XP, but after this experience I recommend upgrading from Vista to Windows 7.

As an aside, the Windows 7 release is free until March 2010. It is actually free for a few months after that but your machine will reboot every two hours from then on if you don't upgrade.

So, Windows 7 is what Vista should have been right from the start. It is still missing WinFS unfortunately. Microsoft have done a good thing in providing a free version for so long. Then again, it really is a form of compensation for having had to endure for so long an operating system that performed like an old bedford truck rather than a snappy sports car.