Got a new machine, my old one was starting to burn out – as usual.
Hands down, Windows 7 Professional is light years a head of Vista Professional. Wow. The UI’s better, without needing more RAM. The security implementation has been tweaked slightly – I’m not fighting with soft link over regular shortcuts… Also, the environment emulation helps a ton. They’ve taken the theme to a new level – background changing every few moments… nice.
I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that my new machine is also a step-up. The Dell Studio XPS 16 is pretty remarkable. Aside from the i7, with 6MB cache, being pretty powerful on its own. Dell, with this line, has gotten a complete makeover. Small things like the soft lighting under the keyboard and touch-surfaces. That’s right, I said touch-surfaces – no more eject button for your optical drive. An optical drive that reads Blue-Ray, and writes DVDs. Certain lights that used to be on the far rear, right, are now to the front of the machine, and on the left.
I don’t have time to go over each little thing, but I can say that someone clearly put money into some real HCI research. I wont say this is a Mac, or anything crazy like that. I will say that if Dell stays on this path, I cant see why I wouldn’t keep coming back to them for my computing needs.