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Windows 7 released!

by Brandon on October 22nd, 2009

As of today, Windows 7 is officially the latest commercially available operating system from Microsoft.  That’s a pretty cool thing for me in several ways.  First of all, when discussing Windows 7 over the last few months I’ve had to add the caveat “and it’ll be available toward the end of October.”  On several occasions I’d come close to forgetting that Windows 7 wasn’t already released since my work on it has largely been done for a while and all the people I work with have been running it for months (if not longer).  At last I can tell people not only how excited I am about Windows 7, but also that they can go check it out or buy it right now.  That’s pretty cool.

Another thing that’s pretty cool is realizing how fast it all seemed to happen.  When I first joined the Windows Experience team at the beginning of Windows 7 I was a bit nervous about working on such a large project with a timeline that seemed near to an eternity .  I feared that I’d get bored or that the work would drag on and on, and that in the end I’d just be dying to be done.  Instead, the time flew by and it was fun.  What’s more, our team planned and executed the release so well that it never felt like we needed to scramble to meet a deadline.  We even somehow managed to avoid another common pitfall of always wanting to add “just one more thing.”  Instead of feeling like it took too long or that we ran out of time to do everything I wanted, this release feels pretty darn close to “just right.”  And the experience has given me unending optimism for the work our team will do going forward.

Anyway, what does this all mean for you?  Well, for starters you can…

Visit your local computer store like Best Buy or Fry’s and check out dozens of awesome new Windows 7 PCs.

Buy Windows 7 or Windows 7 PCs from the new Microsoft Store.

Check out amazing new machines like the Dell Adamo XPS

Read LifeHacker’s complete guide to all things Windows 7

Have you tried Windows 7 yet?  Will you be buying an upgrade or a new Windows 7 PC this holiday season?

From → Technology

5 Comments
  1. I have been using Windows 7 RC on my laptop and on my home PC for months now and absolutely love it. I’ll buy the final version in the next days. So, thank you for the wonderful job. 🙂

  2. I tried out Win7’s RC1 couple of months ago and noticed and leaner and faster it was. There’s no annoying UAC popups to bug you, no new versions of software to install just for Win7 and it even detected and downloaded a driver for my age-old hp deskjet printer. Awesome! I’m loving it!

  3. anonymous permalink

    Is Microsoft genuinely concerned about:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_Vista
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_7

    80% are not legacy features, 80% are not design changes, just oversights. Please please fix them by Windows 7 SP1, especially Windows Explorer. I can’t imagine how a single application can get so worse from XP. I went back to XP just for the single status bar issue which is small but hugely important.

  4. @Anonymous –

    Most of the items in that list are not “features” – and most are not oversights. Could you be more specific about any changes that you feel negatively impact your experience?

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