The Windows 7 Inconvenient Truth

The Windows 7 Inconvenient Truth

Author JoeDigital

If you have been following any of the recent Windows 7 news, you are aware that the Windows 7 Beta is available for download to anyone, through the 24th of January. But the question one must ask is this: is Windows 7 going to be a significant improvement over earlier versions of Windows? And this, of course, can be followed up with more subtle questions, like Is it going to be stable? and Is Windows 7 more secure?

Here’s a quote from one review:
“Let’s just cut to the chase here: Windows 7 is built on top of Windows Vista. It doesn’t roll back the major changes that Vista made; it doesn’t reduce system requirements (for example, it still needs Direct3D graphics and 1 GB RAM to be worthwhile), it doesn’t undo security decisions like UAC, and, except for specific scenarios like booting, it doesn’t really perform significantly better.
However, Windows 7 shouldn’t make anything any worse.”

Okay, so you are being asked to purchase an operating system that doesn’t make anything better, but at least it doesn’t complicate the existing flaws. This kind of marketing forces one to recall the endless string of updates and security patches that has always surrounded XP.

Interestingly, the Windows 7 browser, IE8, is still unstable, and will be along a little later. This has always been the case with Microsoft web browsers, and is generally a good indication that they have not yet copied the competitor’s code. ‘Rather sad, considering nost of Microsoft’s competitors these days are Open Source projects’, I heard someone say.

The screenshots we’ve seen for WIndows 7 look really nice, but considering the security lapses and patches we’ve seen for full releases, installing a beta copy seems to be taking some very large risks.

If you’d like, try the Windows 7 Beta for yourself, and let us know what your reactions were.

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