So far, my experience with Windows 7 has been positive.
All of my files on the old computer, including images, copied over to the new computer painlessly through a wireless connection using the “Windows Easy Transfer” wizard. Of course, most of my files are on three external hard drives – photography files replicated on each of the three –, so there was no need to transfer most of them.
Still, there was 13 gigabytes to transfer wirelessly, and that took several hours. I spent that time reading, watching TV, and sleeping, since it wasn’t done by bedtime.
There are a number of ways that Windows 7 is significantly different from XP. It’s going to take a while to get used to some of the ones I’ll be using.
I realize, of course, that most of the features of Windows 7 first appeared in Vista. In fact, one article I read complained that Windows 7 was little more than a service pack for Vista. The argument was that, for the price of Windows 7, there was no reason to upgrade Vista to Windows 7 and that the only good reason to go to Windows 7 was if you were buying a new computer.
However, going from Windows XP to Windows 7, many Windows features are very new to me.
The biggest change is the way the task bar at the bottom of the screen is used.
I usually have a lot of windows open at one time. In XP, I would have the entire bar filled with application icons and I would use the bar to navigate between them.
In Windows 7, a newly open application’s icon will appear on the task bar if it’s not already there. In this instance, when you close the application, its icon also closes.
One of the features that I like is that you can “pin” useful applications to the task bar. Then, to open the application, all you have to do is click on it’s icon on the task bar.
When there are multiple windows of an application open, holding the mouse’s pointer over the application’s icon in the task bar displays all of the open windows for that application, as shown in the image below, which shows 7 open Firefox windows .
Microsoft has had some real flops over the years and I understand how a lot of IT professionals are going to be hesitant to move to Windows 7.
Large companies, though, are often slow to adopt new platforms. The company I worked for had only just moved to XP about the time that Vista was coming out.
I still have not loaded Office on to my new machine, though I probably will install Office 2003. I have installed Open Office and want to play with that for a while before I decide.
This blog post my first WordPress post written using Windows Live Writer.
