Last week Microsoft made the Release Candidate of its new operating system Windows 7 available for free download.  Before you go ahead and click the download button there are a few things that you need to know.
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1. The file is almost 2.5GB – this means on a dial-up connection (56k/sec) it will take about 5 days to download.
2. The licence that MS provide is only a temporay one, and not only will it expire in May 2010, reports indicate that a couple of months before expiry it will start to automatically shut down every couple of hours.
3. This is not the final product, so it must be remembered that despite all the testing that has already gone on, it is likely that there will still be bugs in it.

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Is it any good?

CoConut Solutions have been testing and early indications are that it’s faster than Vista, however in all honesty that’s not saying much.  Vista was renowned for being very heavy on computer resources.  In all tests XP outperformed Vista, and this was the reason why Vista was never adopted by the emerging NetBook market.
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The second issue is that there are possibly too many editions:
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• Starter
• Home Basic (only available in developing nations NOT T&T)
• Home Premium
• Professional
• Ultimate

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In addition there will be the Enterprise edition, however in all fairness this will only be seen by volume licensing customers.  Our opinion is that this such a wide choice only leads to consumer confusion as to the package to suit their needs.  Life was a lot easier when XP offered Home or Professional Editions.
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However it appears that Starter edition is a low-cost stripped down version, designed for NetBooks and low cost machines.  It most notable limitation is that it will only run 3 applications at one.  This means that by the time you’ve opened your e-mail, opened your web-browser, there is only one more application that Starter Edition can support before you have to start shutting things down.
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As I write this, I have 6 applications open – E-mail, web browser, 2 file browsers, calculator & notepad.  Bare in mind this is being written on a Sunday, and I don’t consider writing a blog entry to be actual work.  Tomorrow morning I will be also using CoConut Solutions’ company database, The GIMP (image manipulation software) as well as various spreadsheets.  All of these import word-processing documents.  Starter Edition will be of little use to anyone who wants to use their computer to do some work as well!
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Windows 7 is not what you would call backward compatible.  If you are considering upgrading from XP, there will be some applications that will not run with Windows 7.  MS provides an XP emulator to run these applications.  Although it is a way of catering for users of the earlier OS, it’s not the pretiest of solutions for what many hoped would be a more inclusive OS.
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Criticisms, and one or two gripes with the user interface aside, Windows 7 does look good.  However in our opinion Microsoft seem to lack direction as to how and where they want to take their business.  CoConut Solutions are sure that if they had there way, Microsoft would have developed an OS that looked incredible – far better than Windows 7 actually does.  However they have had to listen to the critics regarding their Vista ‘mistakes’, and then came along NetBooks, for which a bloated and overly resource-thirsty just was not an option, which caused MS to strip down Windows 7 further!
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CoConut Solutions will continue testing.  If you are interested in it yourself, get hold of a copy and run it in a virtual machine.  However if you want to spend money on a computer with an Operating System that works, buy a Mac.  If you just want an Operating System that works, contact CoConut Solutions for the best Linux solution.
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Tags: Operating System, Windows

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 10th, 2009 at 7:59 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.