Windows 7 Home Premium
I recently bought myself a top spec PC, it came installed with Windows Vista, however, I had bought within the free upgrade to Windows 7 period so I sent off for the free copy. It took some time for it to arrive, and then some time for me to get round to doing the upgrade as I wanted to do a clean install rather than an upgrade.
The install went well, it did take some time to install, comparable with windows XP and Vista I would guess, and a neat feature of it downloading updates during the install process is good, however, if you come to use your install disk in a year or two I am guessing that those downloads would take some time.
Having got it installed I must say I am very impressed, being a Mac user and OSX fan the interface is very familiar to me! Not that I am saying it is copied but some of the functionality is out of the same chapter in the ‘How to design a Operating System GUI’ book.
Am am using Home Premium edition so it comes with the Media Centre, of which I was already a fan from XP and vista days, but the Homegroup facility and the ability to easily share media between users is a great advantage, more of which later.
The ability to pin items to your task bar, and the fact that the icons take up much less room now is a great advantage, I now have a Mac’esk single click to open an application rather than the 2 or even three click method of using the start menu.
At first I thought that the new snipping tool was a bit gimmicky, however, I have had cause to use it on several occasions, especially while blogging, the ability to take a quick grab of a screen and save it as an image is perfect.
My wife’s laptop has been playing up for some time so I have invested in a newer (secondhand) one for her and again installed Windows 7 onto it, upgraded our Media Centre PC from Vista to windows 7 and upgraded my laptop from XP pro to Windows 7.
All those installs went without a hitch, apart from a minor problem with the media centre PC which I need to look at where it will only use one of the Digital TV Receivers.
I have been buying the install disks and licences from Amazon where Home Premium full costs £94.99 and the upgrade costs £64.75, although from memory I only paid £80 ish for the full version so these prices must vary.
We are now able to record TV on the media centre and each watch it on any one of the other computers. My Wife can be watching Dancing on Ice while I watch top gear on my laptop with headphones on.
My view is that this is where Windows should have been several years ago, it is Windows as it should be. I am not sure that it has achieved the heights of the latest Mac OS but it is certainly slicker than Windows has ever been.
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