(Image credit: Future) Fastest-selling OS ever 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.īut 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. 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.

Stability was also impressive out of the gate, and again that didn’t harm the initial reception of the operating system. The performance of the OS was considerably better all-round, and that was obviously a big draw from the get-go with Windows 7. Windows Vista was known to be a relative resource hog, and Windows 7 ran far quicker, not to mention with much less disk churning. It was clearly an immediate improvement in this respect, and even more importantly, under the bonnet too. So it’s quite easy to see that part of Windows 7’s popularity 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).Ĭertainly, 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).

Windows 7 sp2