I’m dead serious with the title. I’ve installed W7 a couple days ago, and I have been testing it in ever way a person like me would use Windows 7 for. Look, I am a very non-lenient consumer when it comes to OS, Imaging Programs, and anything to do with web-development. I have my reasons for rejecting Vista, I have my reasons for rejecting a new computer, I have good reasons why I use Linux only for school work. Everything I use on my computer, I criticize and I KNOW exactly what the product needs to perfect. Well, I’m on Windows 7 right now, and before I give you my review of the system, let me tell you about my computer: I have a Dell Inspiron 1501, here are the specs:

• Processor: AMD Turion 64 MK-36 2 GHz (single core AMD)
• Ram: 1920 mb (DDR2 SDRAM)
• Graphics Card: ATI Radeon Xpress Series 1150M (128mb)
• HDD: 160 gb SATA

Everest Computer Specs

I bought my computer about three years ago. It’s a nice neat laptop with lots of wear and tear. The only two components I upgraded hardware-wise was my RAM (from 1gb) and my HDD (from 80gb). So far, I’ve run XP Media Center on it, XP Professional SP2, Sp3, Vista Ultimate, Ubuntu 7.10 – 9.04, Fedora 8 and up, Mandriva 2008, Slackware, and yeah, the list goes on. And except for minor driver problems under the Linux distros, the computer runs perfectly. I’m a very heavy user as well, my computer runs about 15 or 16 hours every day, and I run multiple programs at once. Here’s what I have opened usually: Dreamweaver CS3, Photoshop CS3, Firefox, Word, Win Explorer, and Winamp. This might come as a surprise but my system does not freeze up while running all those programs. Not even under Vista. My Windows 7 rating is 2.9 Here’s why Windows 7 is so amazing:

Windows 7, so amazing

I’m currently running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 ultimate. YES, 64-BIT ON A SINGLE CORE PROCESSOR. My computer is comparatively weak to anything else on the market, but I can still run W7 64-bit. Before I get into my own personal tests, let me tell you about some lesser known features W7 has: The Little Things in W7

• snipping tool, sticky notes and other accessories. The snipping tool lets you take a screenshot of your computer screen with your own parameters ie, you can choose what part of the screen will be “screenshotted”. This is eternally amazing. The Sticky Notes are the same as the sticky notes in Ubuntu, for all you Linux fans. Among the other accessories is the new Wordpad that makes you want to reconsider buying MS Office
  

  Snipping Tool

  

  Sticky Notes

• Order Changing. In the new taskbar, you can finally change the order of the opened apps. That means, you can open all your applications separately and then move them around so that the order is pleasing to you. And it is! I’ve been waiting for this feature for a long time
  

  Order Change

• Show Desktop. The new show desktop button all the way on the right does something that I’ve awaited for a long time as well. When you press the button again, all your windows will un-minimize in the order they were before. So now, you have a “show/hide” desktop button. VERY USEFUL!
• New Status Bar. Okay, the new status bar on the bottom right, next to the time, finally does not infinitely expand. Rather when there is too many status icons, you get a little arrow that if you click, you get a small menu of your status icons. No longer will our Taskbars be plagued by endless status icons!
  

  Windows TaskBar

• Gadgets. I was a fan of the sidebar in the Vista, but one thing bothered me. It was a “bar”! another one that restricted the screen. I could not move around the widgets (or whatever they were called) as it suited me and I was always brought down by the sheer impact it had on my screen. Now, I have two or three gadgets up there that do not restrict me in any way
  

  Gadgets

• TaskBar Icons. The taskbar icons are great. They don’t take up a lot of space, and you still know what’s going on. When I was running Windows XP, I had a single great problem, too many tasks in my taskbar. The text combined with the icon in previous Windows OSes took up too much space. Now I have a single icon that tells me about the program.
  

  Taskbar

• New Windows Media Player. I’ve never truly used the Windows Media Player until now on W7. I always used Winamp but the WMP made me change my mind. I’ve already gotten rid of my old Winamp. Not only is the interface super-friendly with its playlist on the right, the library in the middle. Well, let me show you:
  

  Windows Media Player

  As you can see, I’ve got a playlist on the right where I can drag any songs from the left. Trust me, there is nothing easier than this new WMP. Oh and also, you know how sometimes you rip a CD on your computer and all you get is “track 1, track 2″ with no metadata? WMP solves that, you can right click the album and “find album info” through which you can add ALL of that metadata. You’ll manually find the right album and the computer will add the metadata to those songs (such as title, album name, artist etc).

• Codecs, I was impatient so I installed the codecs right away, but apparently, I did not need to. W7 contains codecs to almost anything imaginable. It plays mp3, avi, wma (haha joke!), rmvb, basically anything out there.
• Windows Media Center, I’m not a media center person, and if I was, I’d probably get XBMC that probably tops everything out there but I have to give credit to Microsoft for WMC, it’s good. I mean, it’s really good. You can set up your library, it launches fast, and it’s not as annoying as the media center for XP
  

  Windows Media Center

Performance The performance is my main issue with Windowses, especially with Vista. When I had the original Vista install, my computer would freeze up, put my processor into overdrive, near-damn burn my ram. I solved that with a few quickfixes, such as getting rid of the sidebar, uninstalling a lot of crap, and optimizing it. I ended up with a beautiful, fast system. With Windows 7, I did not have to do anything like that. Somehow, whenever I launch a program, my processor goes to 100% for about ten seconds and then goes back to about 40%. Mind you, I use a single core 2ghz AMD processor. So to me, that’s amazing. After this initial spike, nothing ever changes no matter what I do in the application. Sometimes, the processor is used even less, at about 20% its capacity. My RAM is dead-set to 50% (ie 1gb) and usually starts out on 30% use when I boot up my computer. To me, just that is amazing. But let’s see what happens when I actually start using the system. I installed Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, and Flash CS3 on my computer. I had no problem installing them, and they haven’t crashed…yet. The programs launch beautifully and faster than they have on my XP system setup, or my Vista set up. Once I launch Dreamweaver, I get about a 3% addition to my RAM use, and my processor keeps its current usage. And basically, no matter what I do on Dreamweaver, neither the processor usage nor the RAM usage changes significantly. The RAM usage stays the same, topping out on 54% (I have WMP turned on, and Firefox with five different tabs). When I launched Photoshop, it took less than 10 seconds to boot up. A record for me, because sometimes I had to wait almost a whole minute. My RAM usage jumped five percent to 56% and whatever I did, the RAM meter would move one or two percent, that’s it. The processor keeps jumping between 20% to 50%. The response of the program is immediate, which is something I’ve never achieved under XP or Vista.

So what now?

W7 basically knocked the wind out of me. The features, the easy of use, the interface, well everything about it basically won me over. I’m not even sure I’ll install Ubuntu 9.10 now, it seems a bit stupid because Windows 7 provides me with everything and at a significantly less power drain and better responsiveness.

All in all, I’m in love