Officially being released tomorrow (October 22, 2009), Windows 7 provides users with many reasons to rejoice. However, upgrading charges isn't one of them.

Personally, I still use Windows XP and thought Vista was pretty much what you’d call a failure. And being honest, I’m really looking forward to this next major release from Microsoft. After taking a spin around defeat, things like search, navigation, and stability have been repaired and hopefully are now up to par. Coming out soon (if not out by the time you’ve read this), plenty of big-name companies have gotten the opportunity to try out a pre-release version of Windows 7 and so far, its been smooth sailing…

Upgrading looks like a breeze (if you use Vista already… if not, your going to have a little harder time getting all your precious data straight over to Windows 7), and system performance looks incredible! “Noticeably faster” is a comment many reviewers have used and I think its well deserved. Now I won’t rant about features because I personally haven’t gotten to use this new OS. Putting it simply, there is only a few things I really look for in an operating system: performance, stability, and simplicity. Unfortunately I can’t fill out Microsoft’s grade card quite yet as I haven’t even used it yet!

In preliminary judging however, performance looks better than average, and the simplicity of the machine is improved but not perfect.  And stability in my books, is judged based on how well the machine will run overtime. For example, if 3 months into use, the machine still runs as fast as the day I installed, I’ll be impressed.

In conclusion, its a nice “clean-up” to Vista and should hold out until Windows 8 (which is already being developed). I personally believe the pices for all three versions are outragous compared to what they should be. Seriously… Vista failed and Microsoft still expects us to pay full price? Not cool. On another note, iIt still doesn’t stack up to Leopard in my opinion, but it nears the Mac OS X Tiger region… still leaving it behind in terms of innovation, but thats okay. I’ve been using XP since I can remember and any Windows OS better than XP is going to make it feel like a huge improvement.