Apex Logic

Announced at the CES event in Las Vegas by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Windows 7 is the upcoming successor  for their much maligned Windows Vista operating system.

Only three years in development, this upgrade is on a fast track (average deployment is about four years). While Windows 7 beta has has been around for developers, the general public was given the chance to download from the 9th January.

The release was also a red mark for Microsoft. While it was to be a limited public release (2.5 million public downloads) Microsoft servers quickly became overloaded and by the weekend they decided to remove the download limit altogether.

We downloaded the beta and loaded it on a test system that we felt met the basic requirements (P4 3.4gHz processor, 3GB RAM, 128 MB Radeon X700, 160GB HD, DVD) about what an average home user would have on their desktop that might be considering upgrading.

It took less than an hour to install and some restarts but it’s runs well and considering it’s a first release beta from Microsoft, it works incredibly well.

We were impressed with its speed and the new taskbar, where you can pin your favorite applications but also jump straight to opened documents and also pin favourites, too. We’ve not found any application that doesn’t run apart from needing a little tweak to Google’s Chrome browser.

So, in our limited example, it looks like Microsoft has a winner here – the next job will be to attempt to persuade those who have paid for Vista to upgrade again and to undo the negative press around the Vista story.

We’ll see how it goes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Development, Software, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.