Windows 7 – Microsoft’s best operating system ever?

[Mark-x]

 

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, for it rings out for Windows 7. Microsoft’s venerable OS has officially run out of time, and with support now ended, there will doubtless be a good number of folks feeling sad about being forced to abandon Windows 7 – presumably to make tracks for Windows 10. Or possibly another operating system entirely, for the real diehard anti-Windows 10 types.

Windows 7 is certainly one of the incarnations of the desktop OS which Microsoft got right, but what really led to its success, and what clicked with its user base, making it so difficult to give up for many?

 

We thought we’d mull over the reasons, and rewind through a potted history of Windows 7 to highlight exactly why the OS was so well-loved – and indeed may remain so in the near future. Because if Windows XP is anything to go by, Windows 7 will retain a good chunk of users long after Microsoft has officially closed the curtains by ceasing support on January 14.

 

 

Windows 7 was born in 2009, and it followed the infamously unpo[CENSORED]r Windows Vista. And at the other end of the OS timescale, it was superseded by the equally disliked Windows 8.

So it’s quite easy to see that part of Windows 7’s po[CENSORED]rity is derived from the simple fact that it was sandwiched between two incarnations of Microsoft’s desktop operating system which are universally regarded as awful (arguably they’re the worst versions ever produced, alongside Windows Me of course).

 

Certainly, Windows 7 felt like a big step on from Vista in terms of the overall interface, which looked far more modern, and was more user-friendly and streamlined (with less nagging and interrupting your workflow in general – Vista had a nasty habit of bombarding you with User Account Control security prompts). It was clearly an immediate improvement in this respect, and even more importantly, under the bonnet too.

 

Windows Vista was known to be a relative resource hog, and Windows 7 ran far quicker, not to mention with much less disk churning. The performance of the OS was considerably better all-round, and that was obviously a big draw from the get-go with Windows 7. Stability was also impressive out of the gate, and again that didn’t harm the initial reception of the operating system.

 

Not everything ran totally smooth with Windows 7’s launch, of course – there will always be issues with any piece of software, particularly something as complex and intricate as an operating system. As we observed in our review back at the time, there were some rough edges and legacy dialog boxes lurking here and there, plus a few gremlins pertaining to battery life and performance hitches.

But the Windows 7 reviews, like ours, were all pretty impressed, and the OS got off to a good start generally speaking, with a positive critical reception.

 

 

So clearly we can salute Windows 7, as it rumbles into end-of-life, as a winner by all sorts of yardsticks – even if some of its fame, fortune and favor was due to being sandwiched between preceding and succeeding Windows operating systems that were distinctly below-par for many different reasons.

 

By no means, however, is this predominantly a story about the fortuitous timing of being a tasty filling in the middle of two bits of stale OS bread. Even now, in 2020, and nearly five years after the release of Windows 10, Windows 7 remains very po[CENSORED]r.

Going by the most recent OS market share figures for December 2019, Windows 7 is still on 27% of PCs across the world (although a good chunk of those will doubtless be corporate users). So, still over a quarter of users are running the OS, and there’s certainly a temptation to draw comparisons with Windows XP, which hung around like a bad odor for way too long after its expiry date. But does that mean Windows 7 will become another Windows XP in this respect?

 

Microsoft certainly seems to be anticipating some heels being dug in: the software giant has indicated that some business users can avail themselves of an extra year of support with certain versions of Windows 7 (and a scheme whereby companies can pay for additional support on top of that was revealed a year ago). Microsoft’s also planning to wield a cattle prod in the form of full-screen nag pop-ups informing users they must upgrade (although we know how well that’s gone down in the past).