Silicon Shecky

This Thursday is launch day for Windows 7. The question is what are you going to do about it?

Myself I’ve been using Win7 for almost 2 months now, thanks to having the Action Pack for work. It is a pretty robust system, loads fast and for the most part, just works.

Now, I’ve seen a bunch of the “official publication reviewers” talk about how the new taskbar is awful. The mini-previews make life more difficult. I have to disagree with them, cause hovering over any one of the previews brings it to the fore front as long as you hove over it, so its not as bad as people might think.

The only complaints I have about Windows 7 have to do with needed to upgrade a few pieces of software I use (audio editing stuff), which is to be expected, and the issues I have with BFGs lack of support for a known issue with the 9800 GTX+ OC card they put out (it locks with newer drivers, and the same card from other manufactures has an updated BIOS you can download to fix the same issue).

The UAC tends to go off more with older software that does require Admin access to run properly, at least with the UAC in the initial setting. I honestly don’t mind it too much, maybe because I do have some Ubuntu systems, and like the idea of knowing that something is going to run as Admin.

The real question is, will people finally embrace change, or is it going to be another case of, ‘We don’t wanna change,” killing what is really a good OS.

Windows 7 is coming later this year. Ubuntu is on 9.04 with the next version due out later this year. Mac has Snow Leopard coming out later this year. Then there is Red Hat, SUSE, and many other Linux flavors around. Has the day of the OS come to an end? The obvious answer is no, due to software that is written specifically for certain OSes. The answer is also yes because so much of what people do is done through Web Browsers and e-mail clients.

The OS is always going to have some relevance to the world, especially in the business world, where apps have to be created to run on the OS. Windows has different API calls than Linux or Mac. Most software companies will only write a piece of software for Windows, which limits peoples choices on what OS to use. Of Course, Linux has WINE and Mac you can load Windows in a virtual machine (same on Linux). So, unless the OSes all start using the same API (Which Mac and Linux are getting closer on cause of Mac’s Unix underpinning) calls, there will always be fragmentation and less choice.

The answer is more toward a yes on the home front though. Most home users are basically doing e-mail (Webmail can be used), Surfing the Web, and doing Word Processing (There are web things such as Google’s word processor). Course the gamers will have to watch out on what OS they use, but overall, all of the above items can be done on any OS rather easily.

So the real answer is that the OS choices will still be around, but for those who don’t need a lot, you can get a free OS that will do what you want. For the corporate world though, the OS still does matter, at least until all the apps become web based. Then all bets will be off.

So at Tech-Ed yesterday, it was announced that Microsoft plans on releasing Windows 7 in time for the holiday season this year.

The question is what shape will it really be in, and will it be worth it. A lot of good has been said about Windows 7 since its beta came out. Requirements of systems are known also at this point, including needed a minimum of 1 GB or ram 2GB if you are going to use XPM.

Speaking of XPM you do need to make sure that your processor supports the hardware virtualization for it. Both AMD and Intel have software that will check your processor and let you know if it can support XPM.

As it is, one of the online DJs I know did his show from a Windows 7 machine last night, and running the software for DJing in XPM mode worked great for him, which does give some hope that  Microsoft got it right.