Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate > Reviews (20)

Ok, let me start by saying - unlike a lot of people, I thought Vista was absolutely fantastic, a massive leap forward from XP and (obviously no software is perfect) but it never really put a foot wrong with me. So a day after Apple overtake Microsoft as the biggest Tech company, what do I make of Microsofts new operating system?
Let's start with buying it - I think the price is appauling and an absolute joke to be frank, fortunately being a student there are ways of picking up cheaper versions, my personal opinion is I wouldn't want to pay more than £80 or so for an operating system, and even then it's pushing it. You can tell Microsoft have lost hundreds of billion of dollars of profit recently, their licencing stratagies are crazy too - I couldn't pick up a 3 licence deal for our other PC's anywhere as they force you to buy one at a time - how frustrating.
The installation is remarkably quick and easy, I thought - it requires very little input from you and will generally just get on with it by itself which is handy if you have other things to be getting on with.
It gets you up and running quickly and takes to the new desktop and you could be forgiven for instantly thinking "isn't this just a vamped up Vista?" but you'll notice if you have come across from Vista that the speed it boots up and shuts down in is remarkable - my PC is nothing special but it booted up in about 15 seconds this morning - wow!
Here for me is where the problems began, at the end of the day everyone will have different experiences with operating systems, so here is my story. After installing the first batch of updates the whole system ground to a halt and what used to be a 15 second shut down time became 15 minutes - literally. Everything I ran would take 5 - 10 minutes to run, I spotted it had another update to do, so I told it to install, and 3 hours (this is not an exaggeration!) later it was done and running properly again - but what a waste of time, especially as it was only a 1.4MB update. I make that 7KB a minute... once up and running a 20MB update took barely 3 or 4 minutes.
So I starting installing my usual stuff, and soon things began to go wrong again, and still today several weeks on still regularly stop responding for minutes and then run fine again, slowing everything down.
While I'm on the subject on ranting - no matter where I look I cannot change the brightness setting, my laptops shortcut buttons don't work and there is no setting anywhere else. Several of the other shortcuts don't work too, although some (for example, sound) do. The microphone jack has stopped working, some of my old software is no longer compatable, mainly microsofts own - but they do provide alternatives thank god. My personal opinion is the new layout of the toolbar is tedious and slow to use, it now requires 2 clicks to open a web page if you are using several at once - so I scrapped it and went back to the old toolbar layout which they do fortunatly provide as an option.
So are there any good sides to this new operating system?

Of course there are, the speed (when it does work) is fantastic, and lives up to claims. Some new little features like being able to move tabs in the toolbar around are nice. But on the whole I'm really gutted because there isn't much new since Vista, and for me it doesn't work any better. This particularly hacks me off considering how much they charge for what is basically a very big service pack to Vista. If you hated Vista, you'll probably hate this, I can't see any progress being made by what is now sadly a company going rapidly downhill.
A year ago I would have outright refused to even contemplate buying a Mac, a year on I still wouldn't look at one, but it is now at the back of my mind... what a shame... who knows what I'll think in a years time - I hope I never have to go near a Mac. Sorry Microsoft...
Would I recommend it? It depends who you are - I'm going to tick Yes, because I think it's a damn sight better than the Apple alternative - and probably usually better than XP or Vista, sadly it just hasn't worked for me... yet...