Windows 7 Bigger than Harry Potter

Posted on 21/10/2009 by Matthew O`Neill
Harry Potter, Microsoft, Windows 7

You read correctly, Amazon UK have announced a few startling facts:

1. Windows 7 has sold more copies in its first 8 hours of pre-release then Vista did in its entire pre-order period

2. Windows 7 has stormed ahead of Harry Potter as the biggest grossing pre-order product of all-time at Amazon.co.uk

Source: TG Daily.

Whether or not Windows 7 can defeat the dark wizard that is Lord Voldemort I don't know, but it's sure to be a highly successful operating system.

The imminent release of Windows 7

Posted on 21/10/2009 by Matthew O`Neill
Microsoft, Windows 7

With Microsoft’s latest and greatest operating system hitting the shelves this week, astride a noticeable wave of publicity and positive reviews, you might be wondering what all the fuss is about.

Well, it’s finally time for Vista to disappear into the night. Being rather flawed, and having a troublesome release, Vista led to a mass of businesses not even bothering to move on from Windows XP – now 8 years old. Many others struggled with the day-to-day problems of Vista as an operating system – ‘Application Compatibility’ anyone?

What’s great is that Microsoft have admitted that Vista was “less good” and have now pulled a veritable rabbit out of the hat in the form of Windows 7. It’s quite simply brilliant. 

There’s no question about it, Windows 7 is fantastic. It’s better in every way. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the key improvements:

It’s faster – Vista was resource intensive and didn’t run well on low-spec machines, which resulted in a very sluggish experience. The opposite is true of Windows 7. It actually runs faster on older/low-spec machines that would have struggled to run Vista. Overall, it’s very fast and a delight to use.

It’s compatible – Application Compatibility was a nightmare on Vista. However, Microsoft have seriously looked into this issue. Most legacy applications will now just work straight out of the box, and those that don’t can be seamlessly run in a virtual Windows XP instance.

It’s better – Everything about Windows 7 is better. Microsoft have put a lot of effort into the user experience: it looks better, its graphical, the searching and organising is easier. It also goes a long way to remove the traditional complexity of using a PC.

This is just the beginning. Check out our factsheet here, and our 7 reasons to get Windows 7 here for more information.

I think it’s safe to say that everyone is looking forward to Windows 7. There’s no reason not to upgrade. More importantly, as a business, you don’t want to be running an 8 year old operating system with the inherent security risks. Nor do you want to continue struggling with Vista, not when there's a free upgrade path from Vista to 7 if you purchased Vista after 26th June 2009 and before 31st Jan 2010.

Windows 7 vs Windows XP on a Netbook.

Posted on 30/07/2009 by Matthew O`Neill
Lab Tech, Microsoft, Netbooks, Windows 7

Netbooks have become all the rage over the past few years due to their wallet friendly price, and their ability to provide both an ultra portable laptop PC whilst still maintaining a fairly solid home/work performance. However, this ultra portability comes at the expense of reduced hardware specifications such as smaller processors, disk drives and memory. This means that their performance can often be limited.

The guys over at Legit Reviews have just completed a full performance comparison between Windows 7 and Windows XP on a Asus Eee PC Netbook, with Windows 7 matching XP or coming out on top in most of the results. This is good news for manufactures, who will be able to comfortably ship Windows 7 on low-end netbooks without fear of large-scale performance issues. It also means people get to enjoy a newer operating system without the hassle, and with most manufacturers offering a free Windows 7 upgrade voucher, why not?

Read the full review here.