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Saturday May 17th, 2009 I installed Windows 7 RC1. I had used Windows 7 Beta 1 for a brief time testing out some compatibility issues, however I did only scratched the surface of Microsoft’s new Operating System. 

I tested Windows Version 6 (Vista) from its first Alpha release straight through the latest service pack. I adopted Vista on my main machine when it was a Beta 2. I am one of the few that thinks very highly of Windows Vista. I laugh at virtually every review of Vista since it is a rehashed criticism of the operating system that has been around ever since Apples marketing campaign sniped the platform at its onset. 

In almost every review of Vista the security alert annoyance is brought up. If everything went according to Microsoft’s plan the user would almost never see that prompt. The idea was to divide the operating system into two spheres, one sphere would be the simple day to day use of software. The software should not be touching the “guts” of the operating system. This is the best way to prevent malware and viruses from taking over your system. It is also a way to ensure that the sea of software available for Windows does not change your system without you knowing about it. I do not believe the policy was poorly implemented, I find it to be poorly understood. Not as much by the end user but by software developers. The best example is the Amazon Video Player of 2008. When installed it prompted no less that ten time that the system was being changed. Microsoft had an enormous amount of pressure to make the system compatible with poorly written software. If it were not for the numerous lawsuits already filed I am sure that the engineers of Microsoft would have insisted that the software give better accounts to what it was doing to the system instead of saying something to the effect that it needs to change a setting. 

A great deal of Vista’s problems were due to the large amount of vendors that feel that they have a right to the operating system and they were going to continue with their lazy practices in which security holes were exploited in order to meet deadlines.

Unlike most people I designed my system around Windows Vista 64 bit. This is why I feel comfortable converting my main machine to Windows 7 while Windows 7 is still in the RC1 phase.

The key areas I hope to explore is Speech Recognition, Libraries, Vitalization, Gadgets, Driver Support, and application compatibility. I am doing what I believe everyone should be doing and that is using the 64 bit version. Though most people outside the world of gaming and multimedia programming do not need the ram made available to the 64 bit operating system. However, since the cost of RAM is low and the parts to build a 64 bit machine are identical the consumer market should transition to 64 bit operating systems and spare the developers the headache of making a 32bit and 64 bit version of their software. Though 64 bit operating systems enjoy much more compatible programs that XP 64 bit or the early days of Vista 64bit, there are still some issues that remain. 

The only compatibility issue I found to date was with Google Chrome and Windows 7 64 bit. Fortunately there is a quick  fix to the problem. 

While people appear amazed at the quickness Microsoft has had in releasing Windows 7 it is important to note that the reason for this is that a lot of the issues in driver development and software vendors have been address over the past 3 years of Vista. It is important to realize that Windows 7 is not an XP successor but a Vista successor. My guess is that XP users will have a similar issue in upgrading as the Vista users did. This is because major changes have been done to the principles of the operating system. Remember XP is to Windows 2000 as OSX Leopard is to OSX Tiger or OS 10.5 is to OS 10.4. It is was an incremental upgrade not a version upgrade. The core of XP has been around for almost a decade. Needless to say there have been some fundamental changes to technology since then. 

The only saving grace for the people that waited to transition to Windows 7 by forging Vista is that Windows 7 has an XP Virtual Machine in it. I am guessing this will work better than the “run as” mode in Vista. The reason the “run as” never worked right was the fact that it only applied to the initial executables and the initial executable rarely had the compatibility issue. 

In part 0010 I will discuss Speech Recognition in more detail.