CTO Tech Blog

Last Thursday we saw the release of Windows 7 and along with it a new Mac commercial on television.  Apple is attacking Microsoft’s promises of a more stable feature rich operating system as expected, but this time I think they’ve missed the mark.  I have to admit that I love Apple’s commercials even though I believe PC’s are still the better choice for business even with XP or Vista.  Everyone knows about programming flaws and vulnerabilities in the Microsoft family so what makes it a better platform?  The entrenchment that XP has in business makes it the defacto standard.  Because of this most applications are written for Windows even though many are reworked to support Macs as well.  While some aspects of configuring and securing Windows are beyond many users abilities, they are more flexible and granular so that IT departments can employ more business aligned configurations.  In addition, a large part of the lack of known flaws in the Mac operating system is simple obscurity.  Hackers don’t spend as much time trying to break the code of systems that are not used as widely in business.  There have been viruses and security flaws in many versions of Mac OS but they are not as widely discussed as those in Windows.

I have been running Windows 7 at home and in my office for a number of months and my experience has been that it is living up to Microsoft’s claims of better speed and reliability.  At home I transitioned from Windows XP where I would experience unexplained slowdowns and a very slow boot process.  At work, speed was an issue as well as having a very cluttered start menu and desktop from all f the third party applications I needed to support all of the features I require.  In both cases Windows 7 has made a noticeable difference.  Boot time on both systems is short enough that I don’t have to go find something else to do while waiting and the systems are very responsive when opening new applications.  The user interface at first appears very different with an unlabeled circle instead of a start button and the way that windows fade in and out of view as I run my mouse over them on the taskbar.  The reality is that there was virtually no learning curve and I find the new nested task bar makes it much easier for me to find a certain window in the rash of applications that I tend to run concurrently.  There are a couple of security features that I’ve had to get used to.  The two main ones are; being prompted to do some things as an administrator even though my account has full privileges and not being able to download files to certain locations on my hard disk.  In both cases these new features force me to be aware of the security of my system, one by prompting me to accept that administrative privileges will be used and the other by only allowing files to be saved in certain folders, but the reality is that I used to do those things myself… most of the time.

Would I recommend running out and upgrading your computers all to Windows 7?  No.  The reality is that XP is still viable in most situations and it isn’t worth the expense of upgrading unless you have a specific need for some of the new features.  I would, however, say not to shy away from Windows 7 when purchasing a new system or when considering a major upgrade or reinstallation.