The blue screen of death is no longer an issue after I caught up with all the system update patches. So far I really enjoyed my experience with Win 7, comparing to the Win XP it replaced and the Snow Leopard upgrade I still regretted. Maybe some of these new features are in Vista also, but I completely skipped the Vista experience like a bad TV show:
- The calculator is much improved. Whoever programmed it finally realized that you don’t have to imitate the real-world calculator just for the sake of it. The designer/engineer at Apple still think that way – and did good job at it I might add;
- The task bar is great, much better than XP, Vista, or even better than OS X Snow Leopard.
- Overall feels pretty fast and stable, even though I’m running it on a 2-year-old laptop (2.2Ghz Core 2, 800MHz FSB, 2GB RAM).
- Nice little touch like the fast switching themes, short-cut key to choose projector connection options.
- 900 other features I haven’t discovered yet.
Small issues:
- Outlook system fonts became smaller than in XP and there’s no way to completely change it. Changing font size globally is still a visually poor experience.
I got a free copy of Windows Server 2008 R2 via dreamspark.com. I think it is about the same with Windows 7. I agree the task bar is nice.
I am playing with the new Microsoft Hyper-V to run VMs. My machine only has 3GB memory, it seems to be adequate to run a Linux, a windows XP, along side with the the Windows Server 2008 R2.
Another thing. I think the Resource Monitor is close to Mac OS X’s Activity Monitor. The UAC is still more annoying than Mac OS X’s.