It seems that the new operating system will certainly convince XP users to make the switch

Ever since various Windows 7 beta releases have hit the market, be it Bit Torrent or Microsoft’s website, analysts didn’t see in the soon-to-be-released operating system revolutionizing features, but rather a fine tuned version of Windows Vista.

Windows Vista is just two years old, but many reviewers and users have already put the dust on it. Vista has been criticized by virtually anyone who has been using it, as Microsoft was blamed for hurrying up to roll out an unfinished product on the market. Users pointed out that the operating system was filled with compatibility issues, which was a deal-breaker for many gamers, who couldn’t play their favorite games on the new platform.

And there was even more, as Vista soon proved to be a notorious resource hog. Just after a few days after it was installed, boot times considerably increased and moreover, the never-ending random access write operations were slowing down every task. In addition, unless the User Account Control feature was deactivated, users were shown a dialog box whatever application they wanted to open.

While the Redmond giant addressed the compatibility issues by releasing an impressive number of updates, the overall user experience remained virtually the same, with the Search Indexing and Superfetch features keeping the hard drive and the CPU busy all the time.

Summing up all the issues that Vista had during its lifespan, one can see Windows 7 as a version of Vista that just doesn’t have any of these inconveniences. The new operating system looks very similar to Vista, but it also has some new features that are intended to provide a much more pleasant user experience.

As an example, the new taskbar, called the Superbar, completely changes the way people are used to work in Windows. The Superbar works a bit like the Dock in Mac OS X, as it will only show icons of the current programs in use. Moreover, multiple windows of the same application are grouped by default. Still, by hovering the mouse over the icon of a program reveals thumbnail live previews of all of its windows. There are more functionality features, though, as the developers added specific context menus for each program. This way, right clicking the Word icon will reveal a list with the most recent documents, so there will be no need to navigate through other menus.

However, the most useful addition of Windows 7 is the HomeGroups features. HomeGroups is Microsoft’s answer to the traditional network management. The new feature means less hassle when trying to connect the computers at home to a network, as Microsoft claims that Windows will automatically detect the settings for each PC in order to make it visible to the other ones. HomeGroups also provides users with a different approach on file sharing, as it will particularly focus on media content.

Besides these two most important additions to the Windows environment, one must note that Windows 7 is also much faster than Vista, and even snappier than XP. While some may argue that the new operating system is very hard to learn, especially for XP users, it is expected that Windows 7 will be a commercial success.