Windows 7 pre-beta: it really rocks!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 03 November 2008 16:52

Opinion and Analysis

Windows 7 is still in pre-beta, with the official beta yet to come. There is meant to be one official beta, then a release candidate, and if everything goes right, the rumour is of a Windows 7 release in the middle of 2009.

Just as was heard exclaimed at the PDC, Windows 7 looks like Vista done right. I still think, as I said in a previous article, that an excellent “Ultimate Extra” for Windows Vista Ultimate users would be a free copy of Windows 7.

There doesn’t appear to be any firm word on how many versions of Windows 7 there will be, but the pre-beta I’m using is called Windows 7 Ultimate.

We can only hope that Microsoft decides to issue fewer versions of Windows this time around – do we really need so many versions?

Microsoft has annoyed a lot of people with Vista, and while I much preferred it to Windows XP, plenty of people in the worlds of consumer and business have stayed with XP.

Some have gone to various flavours of Linux and others to Mac OS X, but many have stayed with XP in preference to a Vista upgrade, whether on their existing or new computers.

So, Windows 7 is “Vista done right” as has been claimed by others, and the work Microsoft has done to “fix Vista” is really paying off in this version, with several months of customer feedback still to shape Windows 7 even further.

And on the topic of netbooks once more, given how impressive Windows 7 is so far on two separate netbooks I’ve tested, the future of Windows on the netbook platform looks to be very much assured, despite the threat of Linux.

Microsoft is said to be working on a netbook specific version of Windows 7 as well, so the future is looking good, but it clearly needs to be to convince people that spending a little extra on Windows 7 is a better choice than a netbook with a free Linux distro – time will tell on that front, with the undeniable threat of Linux really pushing Microsoft hard to do better.

At this early stage, Windows 7 is very impressive, and just as I was a Vista user since RC1, it looks like I’m now a Windows 7 user from the pre-beta onwards – it’s really that good!

If it continues getting even better, Microsoft will do a lot to redeem itself from the "Vista years" and will have an OS that its users will be as proud of en masse as Mac OS X and Linux users are of their operating systems, and so far, they're definitely on the right track.