What Has 2 Thumbs & Is Excited About Windows 7?

Answer: This guy!

I’ve been following very closely the press and reviews on the early peaks of Windows 7. I’m not as big of a Vista hater as some people out there. In fact I like the OS. I recently had to reinstall XP on another machine and was absolutely astonished how old it looked and felt. In fact I couldn’t stand it, I had to reinstall Vista on the machine right away.

Being a MS employee and shareholder I have double the interest in Windows 7 being successful. But I’m also a critic. I look at each of our products with a scrutinizing eye. If you read my blog you’ll find two MS products that I absolutely love: Windows Live Writer (which I use to write this blog) and Windows Live Mesh (which I use to synchronize files between machines). I’m also a huge fan of SQL Server (duh!) But I am a critic of the product and I know first hand it’s not perfect, especially in the manageability space, but I’m working tirelessly to improve it one release at a time.

Back to Windows 7. Part of me felt that Windows 7 wouldn’t have a chance of being successful. Granted it would almost be impossible to cause a worse impression than Vista but I felt people would hold it to an unfairly high bar and nit pick every last square inch. Everything I’ve read thus far is very favorable. On top of that there seems to be some excitement for it!

One of my very good friends did a clean install and an upgrade from Vista without a hitch. He’s super critical and even he had great things to say: GUI enhancements, power management enhancements, etc.

I’m starting to believe that Windows 7 is THE OS everyone wanted Vista to be. Windows 7 will likely be to Vista what XP was to ME.

Next week I’m going to do a clean install of Windows 7 on my main laptop (Lenovo x301). I have 4 GBs so I’m going to do an x64 install. I’ll report back on my experience.