I was wrong. Windows 7 is horrible.

Well, I never actually said I liked it, I just said that Windows 7 actually seemed to work, which is more than could be said for its bastard sibling, Vista.

But having installed Windows 7 on my brand spanking new high-spec PC, I’ve wiped it off and am going back to XP Professional (well, as soon as the 64 bit version I bought off eBay arrives, that is). I thought I had better have a go rather than be accused of being a grumpy old man, but there are just too many bugs (IIS hangs, installed programs get dropped, network printers vanish, you can’t grant yourself Administrator permissions), too many incompatibilities (Office 2000 won’t work and Open Office is good but not quite as good) and my nice super fast PC doesn’t seem to run any faster than my 4 year old PC as Windows’ showy interface seems to have gobbled up all the extra power.

Now I’m back to a nice clean PC, with sharp minimalist screens that fire up instantly. What a relief.

While I’m waiting for my 64-bit version of XP Pro to arrive, I’ve loaded Ubuntu Desktop on the box. Its nice! Loaded up fast, detected all my network cards (more than Windows did), boots up instantly. When XP dies, I’m going Linux.

Windows 7 – actually works, shock, horror!

Having slagged Windows 7 off in a previous post, I spent (far too much) of last weekend installing it on various PCs to see how it ran. In particular I wanted to see if i) it ran acceptably on old, basic, hardware ii) recognised all the devices on install iii) ran applications that Vista couldn’t and iv) allowed an experienced developer (well, me, anyway) to create ASP pages and run them locally.

And the good news is that it passed all those tests without too much difficulty.

So, will I be upgrading from XP? No, why should I? Although the good news is that Windows 7 actually works, I’ve yet to see any feature that makes it better than XP. XP for all it faults is pretty stable now, and moving to Windows 7 would take a least a day of my time.

The media keep reviewing Windows 7 as though it was an application. It isn’t, it’s an operating system. Operating systems are there to run applications, communicate with devices such as printers and drives, and not slow things down or get in the way. We don’t want features in an operating system, just stability, low memory usage and speed. Perhaps I’m biased because I’m an application author, but operating systems are not exciting!

Windows 7 – who cares?

I keep seeing reviews of Windows 7 telling me that it isn’t as bad as Vista and showing me how cutely I can shake a window and minimise all the others. Who cares? These are all completely trivial features.

What people in the real world want is an OS that won’t crash, is fast, runs all their existing applications perfectly and has drivers for all their existing peripherals.

While XP sometimes fails on the first two counts, I see nothing that makes me believe that Windows 7 will be any better. Why spend ages trying to configure “XP Compatibility Mode” – that’s what I have right now with XP.

The only persuasive reason that I’ve seen to get people to move is because support for XP will cease in April 2014. Luckily that’s some time away.

Why fork out money and pull out hair to get a product that is worse than what you’ve already got? Who is the IT industry and media trying to fool?