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Windows 7's first 100 days: So how were yours?

Windows 7 has been out in the wild for 100 days. My experience has been nothing but positive, but what about yours?
Written by Zack Whittaker, Contributor

It has been 100 days since the release-to-manufacturing copy of Windows 7 was available for download on MSDN and TechNet. I'll put this very simply: I have never used an operating system which works so well, is as stable as it is, is aesthetically pleasing, and is a pleasure to use still even after three and a bit months.

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There is nothing within Windows 7 which is particularly aimed at students or me specifically. The whole kit and kaboodle focuses on making it an all-inclusive "experience", but after using it for so long now the experience fades into the background, like a sickly cough in a lecture theatre.

At the end of the day, all you want to do is check your emails or whop out a quick essay. You don't particularly care about the experience and most of the time you don't notice the surroundings. Even with Windows 7, this hasn't changed.

Besides my computer going well and truly kaput, the way I noticed my positive experience so far is through the lack of negative experiences. I'm lucky in that I took advantage of pre-release builds and have seen Windows 7 grow from a small, insignificant Vista rip-off, into a mature, upstanding member of the technology community.

There is only one nit-picky thing that I still struggle to shrug off. The memory usage is far better than Vista but has a long way to go until it reaches levels that XP coped with. Even with a base level of applications open: Outlook 2007, Messenger, Skype and DisplayFusion to maximise my taskbar space, but it still looks like it uses more than it should. On a 4GB RAM system (in 32-bit mode, so only 3.5GB is really recognised), I'm still using 1.10GB on a dual screen system.

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I understand why, as I have two screens and the Aero theme takes up quite a lot of memory usage, and doubled it naturally doubles (ish) the memory usage. But I like to keep my memory usage down as much as possible; at least that way I don't hear my tower whirring away and going nuts.

The feedback I have had from other people, friends and colleagues, may seem somewhat cliched. But all have had a positive attitude towards it when mentioning it in passing. "Oh, Zack, by the way, Windows 7; I like", for example. Seeing it running on my friend's computer in a 24-inch crystal clear LCD screen combined with his justified semi-smugness about being one of the few, even still, to have the operating system on his computer, being another.

All in all, I'm extremely happy with everything as it is and how it works, what it does and when it does it. But what I say isn't too important. How were your first 100 days?

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