Windows 7 a positive step forward for PC users?

There was certainly a lot of hype and discussion about what Windows 7 would provide to PC users and how it would enhance our lives. Well I think we heard something similar prior to Vista being released didn’t we?

So does all this hype really provide an enhanced system over the flawed Vista release, well from my experience of using the beta version of Windows 7 in its various stages and now as a user of the final release yes I can say that it indeed is a step forward from Microsoft.

First Impression

Well from first look it certainly looks and behaves a lot better then Vista does the navigation makes a lot more sense and is intuitive to new users without being too simplified.

The boot up time is definitely faster with Windows 7 versus Vista which has to be a good thing for all users. Another positive I found straight away was in the area of assigning security levels and access controls to user accounts.

Home Networking

Home users, who don’t have a lot of technical know-how, will be delighted with Windows 7 as networking has been made simpler. A new feature called Home Group allows all Windows 7 computers on a network to share files, printers, and other resources more easily. Thanks to Libraries (collections of certain types of files, such as music, photos, or documents), you can access files anywhere on the Home Group network as if they were stored locally, and you can search across the whole Home Group.

Windows Media Player in Windows 7 can stream the music and videos on one PC in the network to another, and even play back songs from iTunes libraries on other computers.  Connecting to a wireless network is now also easier; you can click the wi-fi icon in the system tray and select a network from the list, instead of opening up a separate dialog box to make the connection

In Summary

Windows 7 is very much an advancement over Vista, it is packed with nice features and looks and runs pretty smoothly. It is not perfect but what operating system is and so we will have to see over time how it handles security updates and plug and play but for the moment I think that Microsoft have brought out a platform that will be eagerly received by home users especially coming up to the Christmas period.

By Aiden Curran