First of all, I've been playing with computers since the mid-80s, and I've used just about every OS there is. I am retired for now, and all I use my computers for these days is writing, surfing, playing and downloading movies.

I downloaded the beta of Vista back in late '05 for my first 64 bit machine. It was horrible. After a week of just trying to find my way around, I gave up and went back to XP Pro, which I stuck with until the advent of W7.

I downloaded the first beta of W7 last January. The first thing I noticed about it was that device drivers were no problem at all. All of the Vista drivers worked perfectly. The second thing was that the OS was very easy to learn. For the most part, if you want to do something or change something, you simply right-click. Want to change your task bar appearance? Just right click on it.

The point here being that Windows 7 was as easy to learn as Vista was difficult.

Furthermore, I've had no trouble finding anything I needed to run in it. Most of my XP Pro stuff runs on it just fine and even some of my old 98SE stuff. It's been stable and pretty much glitch free since the beginning. It's lighter, faster and a heck of a lot easier to find your way around in than any version of Vista I've tried yet. And, the Aero desktop environment is just beautiful.

Last week I was able to find a pair of full retail Windows 7 Home Premium discs on eBay for a mere $20. I was able to get the keys also for about $10 each. In the last few days I have loaded it onto my recently acquired T61 (64 bit) and my nearly 4 year old Inspiron e1505 (32bit) with zero hassle or drama, even though W7 is not supported by Dell on the e1505. Over the next few days I will be installing it on three more machines and expect no more trouble than that.

So yes, I suppose that you could say that 7 is just an upgrade of Vista. But I suppose we could also say that XP was just an upgrade of ME. It is in fact everything that Vista should have been in the first place, and quite possibly the best Windows ever.

Now there is one very important thing to consider, and that is that the computing world is going through a major change as we switch from 32bit to 64bit hardware, just as we did in the late 80s going from 16bit to 32 bit and as we will one day switch from 64bit to 128bit. Windows 7 was designed from the ground up to be a 64bit OS, where XP Pro was conceived from it's beginnings as a 32bit OS. Over the next few years, XP will become less and less useful until finally it will fade away. Windows 7, like it or not, is the future. At least in the Windows world.

It's all good to talk about how great the old stuff was, and I love old things. But, to stay competitive, indeed to stay alive, we must embrace the new. Lest we become dinosaurs ourselves.