Tom Austin

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Tom Austin
VP & Gartner Fellow
17 years at Gartner
41 years IT industry

Tom Austin, vice president, has been a Gartner fellow for a decade. He is chief of research for social software, collaboration, communications, information management, business intelligence and high-performance workplace (HPW) research. Read Full Bio

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Windows 7 User Experience — Personal Notes

by Tom Austin  |  December 29, 2009  |  3 Comments

A big plaudit and a caution (both personal experiences and opinions, not Gartner positions).

I finally got around to upgrading my Vista-based Lenovo X61 Tablet to Windows7 (W7) and I was really impressed. I watched my wife fire up a new notebook and cringe…I’m still not impressed with what it takes a "mere mortal" to do in "managing" their PC.

On W7 upgrades:

I used the upgrade method instead of the clean slate approach. In the past, upgrades tended to be very tedious and painful — and, more often than not, something (sometimes many things) broke.

Surprise! It worked wonderfully. Only gotchas that I recall were

  1. Start menu items didn’t propagate to the new system (so *I* had to go in and "pin to Start menu"
  2. It drove me to manually deinstall iTunes and then reinstall it. Why? Why can’t it handle this automatically?
  3. It pushed me to upgrade Norton Ghost [NG] from V.14 to V.15. (I love Ghost as a personal image backup that I run monthly in addition to using Karen’s Replicator [KR] daily — at night.) Windows update said NG did not support W7 — and I wasn’t about to take chances but what breaks? Why not tell me? And help me automatically upgrade (and pay for the upgrade).

I am really, really impressed with how much better W7 is than Vista, in terms of my initial impressions (vs. Vista). Since I have taken Microsoft to task on related issues, I thought it incumbent on me to also praise them on something very well done.

That said, I also watched my wife set up a new notebook she bought herself at Christmas this year. And it’s still too darned hard to set these systems up if you’re not a bit twiddler. There are alerts no mere mortal should need to respond to (all the ones they don’t understand) and there’s no reason why Microsoft can’t simplify virus protection and system update so that, on first connection to the Internet, all the darned patches get downloaded and installed, automagically.

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3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 mrfator   December 30, 2009 at 7:30 pm

    If you’re a geek and want to fill time maintaining your PC macs are, as they say, twice as much as a PC. If you value your time and and find constant maintance frustrating then get a mac they’re half the price of a PC. It’s really hard to make this point to the those who have only used wndows machines especially in the cost obsessed US, but there is real reason why Apple’s marketshare is accelerating as it is.

  • 2 Windows 7 Upgrades — Best Yet, Better Still Needed   January 5, 2010 at 11:49 am

    [...] ← Windows 7 User Experience — Personal Notes [...]

  • 3 noneed.info » Blog Archive » Windows 7 User Experience — Personal Notes   January 6, 2010 at 6:04 pm

    [...] here: Windows 7 User Experience — Personal Notes December 29th, 2009 in Windows 7 | tags: mere-mortal, new-notebook, really-impressed, tablet, [...]