Jonathan Prentice

In the process of covering the Windows Vista launch in January 2007, I made a point of looking up a guy in New Zealand named Jonathan Prentice. That might seem random, but Prentice has a unique history with Windows. As a college student in the mid-1990s, his enthusiasm and time zone made him a worldwide symbol of the excitement over Windows 95 as the first person in the world to buy the highly anticipated operating system.

In other words, in terms of gauging consumer reaction to a product, Prentice is to Windows what Mikey was to Life cereal.

Three years ago, it turned out that Prentice was significantly less than excited about Windows Vista -- foreshadowing the lackluster response the product would ultimately receive in the marketplace.

When it comes to Windows 7, however, he's back on the Microsoft bandwagon. As noted in our story this morning about the importance of the new operating system for the company, Prentice has been running test versions of Windows 7 for several months, and he likes it. He really likes it. Mostly.

Prentice, now 33, runs a technology consulting business with offices in Auckland and Wellington. Via email this week, he described his experience with Windows 7 in response to my questions. Read on for excerpts from his message, which should be informative for anyone considering the upgrade.

I’ve been using Windows 7 personally for months. I downloaded the betas and have run 2 different versions of the beta and am now running the RTM version on my laptop. As soon as it was available I got rid of Vista in the hope that 7 was better and I was certainly not disappointed. I love the advances in the interface, they have delivered on their promise of a much more intuitive and simple to use interface and have removed some of the pains from Vista.

I actually found it faster than Vista from the first time I installed it and have been enjoying it ever since. A couple of small issues with driver compatibility but those are now resolved and they were for things that weren’t essential.

This is a huge improvement from the heavy slug that Vista is, even though [Vista] was still better than XP (as long as you had the resources to run it).

I still don’t like the control panel wizard thing and I turn it back to classic mode immediately and the user intervention and warning stuff drives me nuts but I’m an IT geek and this stuff is meant to protect end users so I understand the value it has but I still hate it.

Microsoft will always be Microsoft and not much really changes from that perspective. People in general are always skeptical of their new releases and what can you expect from some of the past performances but to be perfectly honest they have done what no Windows OS has done before and actually produced a pretty damned good OS without needing a service pack to make it usable from an end user perspective. Although I’m sure one will be out soon enough.

What would I say to someone running Vista when 7 is released? Upgrade, upgrade as fast as you can. What would I say to a corporate looking to replace their desktop equipment? Probably stick with XP for the moment but “watch this space” closely as it’s a vast improvement on XP overall.