Fruitbowl - Fresh Ideas from Hawke's Bay

So we’ve had the new operating system from Microsoft for a few weeks now and to date it all seems fairly positive.

We haven’t noticed huge demand so far but that is probably more a comment on the previous less than ideal launch of Vista than the capability of Windows 7 – the hangover from all the problems that Vista created is still there and people seem to be a little hesitant to be the bleeding edge trialists of a new OS.

It’s also possible that users may also be hanging out for the launch of Google’s new operating system – Google Chrome OS – which is expected to be ready for release in late 2010.

Windows 7 seems light years ahead of Vista – although Vista probably received a lot of undeserved criticism, Windows 7 does appear to be most things that Vista was going to be but never was. Where Vista was glitzy and invasive for the user, Windows 7 is unobtrusive and stands in the background until needed.

And it’s stable, fast and lightweight. Windows 7 went through very extensive user testing in the market where it was released in various versions to the public for almost a year and this seems to have ironed out most of the bugs.

One nice feature of Windows 7 for business is the new XP mode – if you need access to programs designed for Windows XP that have not been upgraded to Windows 7 then you can run a virtual environment with XP which is a nice insurance policy and should void a lot of the problems that Vista suffered on release (only available in the Pro and Ultimate versions).

Another positive is Windows Media Centre which comes with the Home Premium and Ultimate versions. Whereas in the past it has been problematic, the Windows 7 version is easily operated and miles ahead of previous versions in terms of compatibility and competes with the likes of MySky for functionality.

If you’re buying a new PC we would strongly recommend Windows 7 over Vista and indeed XP (which is still fairly widely available on business PCs).  However models with Windows 7 have been fairly slow coming onto the market – there still being a fair bit of Vista loaded stock around.

If you want to upgrade your current PC from Vista or XP, the costs are fairly high (for example $499 for an upgrade from XP or Vista Pro to Windows 7 Pro and $249 from Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium) but in our opinion worth it.

Finally - and this is pretty shallow - it just looks nice  :)