Windows 7

I realise I've been raving recently about Macs, so I decided to take a look at what at what the latest version of Windows has to offer.

My first challenge was getting videos on the Microsoft website to play. To be fair both Apple and Microsoft seem to be under the illusion that someone shopping for a new computer and operating system will be browsing their website on a fast computer with a huge monitor, which doesn't make sense. At least, however, the content on the Mac website all worked for me, whereas some of the Microsoft videos didn't.

In any case the selection of features that Windows 7 was being sold with having were also fairly amusing to me. It is true to say that Microsoft is boasting features that Apple isn't; the reason being most of them are features that Macs have been doing for years!

"Windows Search" is possibly the best example of this. It's an incredibly fast search system that finds files on the computer very quickly. You might see it and say "Wow! That's impressive!" until you realise that Apple users have had Spotlight, which is at least as good, for four years.

There's also the new fancy "clipping tool" which is an application that allows the user to capture only a portion of the screen as a screenshot. Nice... but, again, for years Apple users have only needed press Apple key + Shift + 4 to do that.

Overall I've found that whilst Windows 7 has a couple of nice features, there is nothing at all about it that particularly impresses me.