I’m really not one of those vocal Operating System lover/haters. My dad worked at IBM for 30 years and so I grew up with computers and even took a PC Jr. with a whopping 128k of RAM and a color (what we called color) monitor with me to college in the 80’s. My first work computer was a Macintosh and learned about all that AppleTalk stuff and the cool publishing Quark could do. I’ve used and administrated Win3.1, NT 4.0 (on laptops), Win95, WinME, Win2000/Server, and of course a user of XP and Vista along with a few variants of Linux. I use Windows for home and work and personally I think each OS has it’s plus’/minus’. Very non-committal, I know. Now I’m looking to buy a new computer and with that, a new Operating System.

If you’ve been avoiding the news, TV or print ads over the last year, Windows 7 is the long awaited new OS from Microsoft.  Much has been written about Vista and the delicate balance between usability and security.  People want to be protected and secure but also want to do their daily computing tasks without much interruption.  Enterprises need to secure their access points but users want to single click to everything.  There has to be a balance.  With the endless amount of threats, I want a box that has the basic protections but also want to make some security decisions myself.  I also want to make sure that the computer I choose abides by the company access policies in place, in case I need to connect to my corporate network since I probably will be doing some work from my home computer.  This has become a requirement in recent years as tele-working continues to grow.  With Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Direct Access, folks will be able to do that with ease.  F5 recently announced solutions to optimize Win7/Server 2008 R2 deployments and our FirePass SSL VPN already supports Windows 7 clients.

Sifting through some of the recent articles about Windows 7, there is this one that indicates Windows 7 is gaining but at the expense of XP – this one that announces Windows 7 passed Mac OS X in market share – and this one that says ‘Of all new Windows 7 users, 70% said that they were “extremely satisfied” and another 24% said they were “somewhat satisfied” with the operating system.’  And it seems like they’ve answered the most recent BSOD, saying it probably was malware but will still wait to see the final outcome.  Then, of course, there’s the Windows 7 Whopper to contend with while I figure out which hardware platform I want.

ps