I remem­ber back when Windows 3.1 just came out. I was in high school and work­ing on Windows 3.0–simply a GUI on top of DOS. Windows 3.0 was sim­ply ter­ri­ble and slowed every­thing down, kind of like Vista. I had to get Windows 3.1 so I together with a cou­ple of my geeky friends, split the cost three ways and pur­chased Windows 3.1 from Egghead. I was happy with Windows 3.1: it was much faster, the graph­ics was cooler and all was good in Saratoga. Fast for­ward about 20 years.

Windows 7 is Microsoft’s fix to Vista. Vista is like Windows 3.0: it slows machines and makes the whole expe­ri­ence of using a com­puter less excit­ing. You feel like you’re get­ting less work done and more work try­ing to fix the PC to make it work bet­ter with Vista. At least that’s what I did for about six months. After fail­ing I went back to Windows XP Pro SP3. Now Windows 7 is out and reviews are say­ing that it is much faster than Vista. That’s great. Engadget just posted up a review of Windows 7 RTM (Release To Manufacturing). The UI looks quite pretty (thanks to the inter­est­ing back­grounds they used) and there really are some great fea­tures: quick dis­play switch­ing, Aero snap and shake, etc. But what got me com­pletely dis­cour­aged was this:

Our worst expe­ri­ences, how­ever, were with a clean install to a quite mod­ern net­book. The OS became increas­ingly unsta­ble over time — Windows Explorer itself seemed to be the main cul­prit — and the machine even­tu­ally failed to boot entirely. Luckily, the Startup Repair util­ity man­aged to jump to the res­cue and found a System Restore point that booted fine, though we lost the few cus­tomiza­tions we’d made up to that point and were face with basi­cally a fresh install again. It was nice of Windows 7 to recover itself so well, but we would obvi­ously have pre­ferred to not run into that issue in the first place.

That means Windows 7 is still Windows where after a long time of using it the sys­tem slowly gets worse and worse. Remember after I ditched Vista I went back to XP. And soon after going back to XP I went full blown over to OS X. I want to say that I’ve never looked back but I did. I tried to use Office 2008 on the Mac and I must say that the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft really don’t know what they are doing: Excel for Mac really sucks guys. So I installed XP on top of Parallels to run Excel. You would think it would be slower, but it is actu­ally faster, much faster, than run­ning the Mac ver­sion of Excel.

Back to Windows 7: it’s faster and pret­tier than Vista and has sev­eral snazzy fea­tures. But it’s the old Windows that even­tu­ally die on you. The Mac mini that we have has been run­ning with­out a cold reboot for months with­out show­ing any signs that it is slow­ing down and about to crawl to a halt. I’ve heard from a friend of mine that there is a guy who has a full-time job at Dell and his main respon­si­bil­ity is to go around all the Windows Servers and hard reboot them after a set num­ber of hours. Truth or fic­tion, I don’t know.