Windows 7

Unless you've been living in space for the last 6 months, you'll be well aware that Windows 7 was released yesterday. I've been running Windows 7 RC for several months now and have been very pleased with it. There are a myriad of reviews on the web so I won't go into the dull details, but there are several points that really make Windows 7 an excellent operating system for me.

Note that I totally skipped out using Vista. Ten minuted on a new laptop installed killed it for me, so I'm mainly talking about the differences between XP and 7.

* Stability - even the release candidate has been more stable than Windows XP for me. I use my laptop heavily for development work and have been impressed with how solid it has been.

* Speed - I haven't performed any detailed profiling, but Windows 7 feels faster, responsive and snappier that XP. This makes all the difference when you're using it for 10 hours a day. I've read some reviews that state that Win 7 runs slightly slower than XP, but at the end of the day what's important is that it feels fast and you're not sitting there frustrated. Shutting down Windows 7 does feel like it takes an age though.

* All the minor tweaks - it's often the small things that make a difference. For example, using WIN-P to turn the external monitor on/off, or when you press F2 to rename a file, Explorer selects the filename and NOT the extension so you don't need to type the extension again.

* UI - as a developer, eye candy is not really that important to me. However, if it's there and doesn't detract from functionality it can be a great thing. Windows 7 gets this right.

* Drivers - when you plug in any new piece of hardware, Win 7 goes and grabs the drivers from the internet without any hassle. The range of drivers so far seems excellent. It found all drivers for my laptop (even the bluetooth card), webcam, printers etc with no problems at all. Installation is automatic.

As always, there are a few things that bug me. Hopefully these will be fixed/addressed in due course. They may even be fixed in the full release, but I haven't had a chance to download and run it yet.

* Compatibility - whilst every application I have used works, you have to switch Fireworks into Windows XP compatibility mode to fix some display and functionality issues.

* Shutdown times - for some reason it takes 2 or 3 minutes to shutdown my laptop. It's not a huge issue but can be a little frustrating.

Developing Flex with IE8 can also be a bit painful. IE8 uses the same process model as Chrome - that is every tab is a new process. In theory this is great, however it just doesn't work when you're debugging Flex apps. If you kill the app from Flex, the process stays in memory eating up valuable resources. I find myself having to head into task manager and kill all those rogue processes regularly. Chrome does the same. Firefox works better, but as it's much slower to start up I'm hesitant to switch.