Windows 7 review

Compatibility 9/10
Before the official release date on october 2009 for windows 7, the RTM have already been released to the tech community for testing.But the drivers is already stable, most non driver level application is already working without modification.Its a far cry from Windows xp at launch and of course the more recent nightmare for redmond,vista.Those that have issue could either work by running compatibility mode or patched by its author or microsoft compatability patches during the RTM testing period.It actually shows microsoft have finally understand what is the most important factor when consumers consider a OS migration.Or it could also result of a OS closely similar to Vista...

User Interface 5/10
Imma big fan of all the bell and whistle on my desktop.Having a highend system idling isnt best way to reap benefits of those hefty investment i made into my hardware.Technically, the UI have not advanced other than tweaking of its response time, which is superior to all previous OS.
Newly introduced is the new taskbar which i m no big fan of.Yes i know some poor sod is still using mini 15" LCD somewhere and those mobile warriors with 12" laptop.But by grouping all those related application into 1 single textless tab become extremely counterproductive to plain irritation.Image you open 2 InternetExplorer tab in a single instance of IE application.Normally you could just click on the tab on the taskbar and IE would be restored on your screen estate.If you wants to switch between the 2 IE pages, you do it within IE interface.Now you dont, everytime you try to minimize your IE whenever your significant other enter your room and you hide your adult webchat(just an example,lol), you have to hover over the IE tab on the taskbar, wait for the 2 pages preview appear, then click on them to select.May be useful if you want to jump between different IE pages while switching different applications too, but that dont happen often does it?Next is all WindowsLiveMessenger is group into 1 tab too.A textless one that is, where the main contacts windows and your chat windows got lump together.So if you have 10 chats going on,and when you recieve a message,the tab would blink for attention, but you no idea who text you.Luckily, you could revert to a certain extent to the old taskbar, but the show desktop icon still a pathetic little translucent rectangle at the extreme corner of the taskbar beside the time and date, excellent design concept indeed.Its so bloody small, a gaming mouse designed for RTS from razer and a average FPS gamer like me have 15% of clicking the time and date applet instead of the show desktop rectangle, now think of your poor folks with far sighted and shaky hand will ya.Yes they are trying to make life of small screen estate user alittle easier but soem of them is totally impratical and have major impact on power users like me.Yes ME, the type of people at the forefront of technological advances and the target group most likely to migrate to your OS early.
Something that vista did right is its game explorer, which group all your games together with tons of management tools.One of the most useful feature is allow you to dictate the application run when you click on the game icon.Things like forcing resolution or directx renderer command line can be done in a nice gui interface and selected as default executon or a simple option accessible with a right click.Welcome to Windows7 , the 7th version of windows, because its gone!
There are alot of fails in windows 7 interface but they can be easily changed back to the older, more pratical previous version of getting things done other than the 2 issues mentioned above.Those that can be altered is done with GUI options or the new GroupPolicy editor.Its something that look and use like regedit with description and tooltip to change how microsoft component behave.But wait, its only limited to higher versions of win7, so students upgraded to windows7 home will be so happy to realize they are limited to GUI options only and some options like returning the control panel to classic look can only be done through GPedit.msc, so unless someone found the magic registry controlling that particular function, you are screwed dood!

Peformance 9/10
Probably the best reason to upgrade to windows7.Gone are the days of staring at windows xp green bar disappearing to the left and emerging from the right for a minute or vista loading to the desktop quick but still unusable for more than a minute when you just boot up your system.Windows 7 boot up fast with drivers fully loaded and usable in less than 10 second after you see the desktop appear.
As mentioned earlier, interface reaction is responsive to the state that its closed to instantaneous.RAM usage have fallen slightly compared to vista but still monstrous compared to XP.Remember superfetch? The feature that loads all your available RAM with all the junk on your HDD to load your application faster but ended up so aggressive that it causes HDD overhead every boot up and seconds of delay when running memory intensive applications as vista have to free up all those junks to make space for what you really wants to run.Good news , now its fixed but i dont really dont know if it really work though.With 4gb of RAM, i could open most application quickly but all those negative effects of superfetch seems to have be fixed and it have not caused any slow down to my desktop experience so i will be keeping it on for awhile till i do a thorough test to see if it really carries real benefits.
CPU and GPU performance remain typically around vista lates built, which is pretty competitive at its worst compared to XP.But whats best is vista and 7 is built to take advantage of multi cpu system, so if the application is multi threaded, XP is usually 10% slower in those instance.Yes 10% performance increase with a OS for the most demanding multi threaded applications, if thats not enough to convince you to upgrade, i dont know what will.

Overall-8/10
Vista took 1 year from official release and a service pack release to make it stable and compatible enough to become my main OS.WIndows 7 did it the moment it becomes RTM, which is extremely remarkable.If you have vista, you probably have 99% chance of migrating successfully with all your applications working smoothly.Windows XP have to ensure you have all your drivers downloaded and some research on other legacy programs before making your move.But my recommendation is that if you have no foreseenable compatibility issues, move to windows7 now to reap the benefits.This is what Vista should be,after 9 years of wait,3 years late,but its here.