"If you're coming from a Mac, you'll—-hahahahaha. But seriously, even the Mactards will have to tone down their nasal David Spadian snide, at least a little bit."<p>For a second there I thought it was going to be a serious article.
<i>"Microsoft, just fix the unwieldy Control Panel interface, please."</i><p>That screenshot is not accurate. You have to work to get it that ugly. (That is, he change the "View by" to large icons). The control panel is incredibly usable with its default layout.<p>I didn't read the rest of it, no point. I'm using Windows 7 right now and it's great. It puts XP and Vista to shame.
As someone who officially became a desktop OS interface nerd while playing with Dynapad (<a href="http://hci.ucsd.edu/lab/dynapad.htm" rel="nofollow">http://hci.ucsd.edu/lab/dynapad.htm</a>), it frustrates me how risk averse the big OS vendors are. They have all the market share, infrastructure, marketing, and engineering talent to pull of something really incredible, but they opt not to do so.<p>I understand that they don't want to disrupt their user base with something too radical. That makes sense to me. However, with the next version of Windows, <i>Microsoft had nothing to lose</i>. Everyone hated Vista and most people avoided upgrading to it. Why not treat this failure as a huge opportunity to do something new and interesting?<p>They could have pushed the state of the art of desktop operating systems way forward, and possibly taken away that smug feeling of superiority us Mac users have enjoyed for years. Instead they just polished up a subset of Vista's warts. Oh well.
If I remember correctly, there was much hype before Vista was released two, but it in real world usage, it soon slowed down a perfectly good computer within 1-2 months. I hope this is not the case with Windows 7 too.
I wonder if there's any speed improvement compared to XP/Vista after you've installed a dozen applications. It's almost ridiculous that it takes my PC up to five minutes from pushing the power button before I can start working.
If you upgrade from (32-bit) XP to Win7, do you need to reinstall all your apps?<p>Isn't that an important issue for a lot of folks? Yet no comment either way in the review...