By: Shmuli Goldberg

I’ve been testing windows 7 tirelessly since exam freedom last week. Everything from stability tests and benchmarking to trying to make it blue-screen. It’s been fun, but in retrospect a social life may have been better. As some of you have asked for it, here is my own humble opinion: It’s good! Really good!

Several new features such as one-click networking, virtualized XP-mode, libraries and integrated virtual hard disks are so genius yet simple that you’ll wonder why we’ve never seen them before. Networking is a breeze, even with more complicated tasks such as user-restricted file sharing and LAN-based backups that would have taken many frustrating hours to configure on Vista.

It is surprisingly stable, even at this early stage, and has handled the transition to full 64 bit and multi-stream processing remarkably well. Surprisingly, it actually out-performs windows XP on identical mid-range hardware, and requires very little in terms of disk space, processing power or RAM. It’s arguably better than it’s previous reincarnations, probably making it the best Windows yet, and one that finally deserves to replace the near century old XP as the home and office user’s choice.

On a broader scale however, in the 8 years that Microsoft’s been resting on it’s laurels (read: scratching it’s balls) Apple and Linux have been raping their sales, and thus their market share. Windows 7 does not have the ease of use or media capabilities of Mac OS X, as much as it may want you to think it does, and is nowhere near as secure or customizable as Linux. So while it may stem the tide of deserters, it won’t be regaining lost ground any time soon.

Final Verdict? It’s definitely the best Windows to date, but all that means is that it’s the best buggy, registry-dependant, Windows NT based operating system yet. So how much is that really saying?

One more thing: don’t touch windows security essentials! I know where it’s been, and you don’t want to!

-Shmuli