MSFT names Windows "7", Windows 7

[Impulsivity]

Xen said:

Impulsivity said:

Maybe they can actually make 7.0 an improvement over 6.0 and 5.1 this time...Using Vista is strange because it shows Windows is actually in regression from 2002 when XP started. From the way they are hyping Windows 7 though, listing all these new features, I'm starting to think it's going to be another long ride on the bloatware express.

They should make only 2 versions of Windows. The first should be the Vista+even more crap bloatware extravaganza, and the second one should be a OS pared down from even XP that uses no more then a few hundred MBs of RAM, runs everything cleanly and has NONE of those features like confirming I want to open a program, superfetch with the endless hard drive thrashing, page files that reduce 4GBs of RAM into 2GBs available and all the rest. Is it too much to ask a version of Windows to run small and clean like OSX and many builds of Linux have been able to do for nearly a decade now?

...it probably is too much to ask until they lose some more market share for another crap OS and finally realize that the UNIX lightweight OS express is the way to go.

Yes! This!

How easy is the move from Windows to Linux though, guys? I wouldn't mind moving.

 

 

    Your best bet is to make a dual boot system IMO.  What you do is make a second partition for Linux and give it 40 GBs or so (whatever you can spare, might be less if you have a notebook, might as well just use a separate hard drive if you have a desktop).  There are several versions of Linux to choose, I would recommend doing a search and looking at the GUIs and deciding which one you like best.  I like Ubuntu personally.  The video below shows a demo of it

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It looks a lot like OSX so I'm a little biased towards that appearance, but it is also VERY easy to use and far more advanced then Vista in terms of multiple desktops and the like (OSX has something similar called spaces which lets you use 4 separate desktops).  

 

  You said you don't game much, which is good, Linux sucks far worse then even OSX for gaming (at least OSX can play major releases like COD4 and Spore, Linux gets almost nothing).  It DOES work very well for web browsing, using open office for word processing and all the things you would do for the Vista Office (except Open office is way faster and doesn't crash nearly as often as Office 2007, going back to the bloatware thing).  Outside gaming Ubuntu blows Vista away in just about every possible way.  Things like loading programs, saving documents and all the rest are noticably faster with the far more lightweight Linux distributions.

 

   I would recommend partitioning still though, just in case you want to use a game that requires Windows.  I have a hard drive with Windows on it in my Mac Pro for that purpose though I REALLY try to get games I want to play on OSX; I hate using Windows Vista with a passion.