Windows 7

"Shreenivas, you have a packet in the mailbox" shouted my house mate from downstairs in hall. I was sleepy on Saturday afternoon and his words were almost inaudible. But, the word "packet" caught my attention and I immediately woke up from my sleep and started to walk downstairs to look at what "packet" I had received. I was suprised to see that the packet was from Dell and immediately recognized what the packet contained. I had ordered my free copy of Windows 7 OS from Dell from whom I had purchased a laptop few months back.

I started enthusiastically to open the packet to find two DVDs along with the instruction manual. It was a suprise to find exactly what I was thinking because morning I had checked their website for the order status and saw that the status was "shipped". In fact, the order was shipped just 2 days back. The instruction manual was just 1 page and had described exactly 5 steps to upgrade my laptop from Vista to Win 7. These steps involved both the DVDs.

The installation took a good 3 hours!!. The setup had to prepare my laptop for upgrade and install the OS. Everything of course was done by the setup but I had to sit there because I had to switch the DVDs whenever it prompted for them.

My first impression of Windows 7...same as Vista :-(. Although, I have heard reviews of it being a better version than Vista and faster one at that, I havent had any such experience in my 2 days of use. There are of course new features like pinup task bar, shake windows to minimize and auto snap windows etc which I am not sure how much I will be making use of it. The one tool that I like the most that has been added is a snip tool which basically allows you to take snap shot of a portion of screen. This is a huge time saving over using print screen everytime you want to take a snap shot of your screen and use mspaint to snip it.

But now with advent of ubiquitous broadband connections and most of the people preferring to be online I think OS features are just becoming redundant and OS makers need to concentrate on how one can get a user online quickly and the features that one can offer to make online browsing a wonderful experience.