I haven’t written about Windows 7 for a while, so time I caught up.
We went live with Windows 7 as soon as we could. As Microsoft Partners we had access to it with the first release for Volume Licence customers. The release for OEM licences (the ones you get preinstalled on PCs when you buy them) is the 22nd (Thursday).
To put it simply, it is an excellent OS. No doubt there will be applications out there that are not compatible, but we haven’t found any yet. Everything we run has ran perfectly. It has coped with all our hardware, from the newest to oldest, with no driver issues.
Of the new features the one I’ve used most is the XP Compatibility mode. This allows you to run a fully licenced (on Windows 7 Enterprise) Windows XP virtual machine. You can then load any older applications directly onto this virtual machine, and then drag them to your desktop, so you can use older applications transparantly on your Windows 7 PC. As I’ve said, I don’t have any old applications that haven’t worked – but I have used it to run a seperate IE7 browser, useful when you are trying to log on to a website as two different people at once.
I’ve also started using Bitlocker to Go to encrypt USB Thumb drives. I’ve lost more of these than I own, and never put anything sensitive on them, but now I needn’t worry, the contents are encrypted and no one can get on them.
As someone who never understood why people didn’t upgrade in their droves to the superiour Vista from XP, I’m hoping that people will get the bug on Windows 7. It behaves itself, looks pretty, and most importantly works. Of course it is a bit different from XP, so if you are still on that you will have a bit of a learning curve – but it isn’t that steep.
We will have a stand at the Bishop’s Stortford Means Business Show (http://www.bsmb.co.uk/) on the 21st and the Stansted Business Show (http://www.b2bessex.com/) on the 6th November, so if you want a look at Windows 7 come along and have a peak.
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