Time for an all-too-familiar song-and-dance routine as Microsoft Corp tries to convince you that you should upgrade to its new operating system, Windows 7. Tech pundits are spinning tales of its supposed greatness – that wouldn’t have anything to do with Microsoft pulling its ads if one said otherwise, of course.

Now that Windows 7 is out and about, we’re suddenly being told how old and outdated Windows Vista was. The talking heads in tech circles are talking about what a huge embarrassment Vista was for Microsoft (remember, these are the same guys who told us, when Vista was first introduced a few years ago, how great it was). Their message is that if you don’t upgrade to Window 7, you’re simply making do with a piece of crap OS. Extremely strange.

Then again, the same people say the same things each and every time a new version of Windows is rolled out. The old version was crap, the new version is faster, better, smarter, requires less hardware support, is easier to use, razzle dazzle, boom, boom, boom. And it always – always – winds up being slower than your previous version, and more demanding of your hardware so that you have to go out and buy more memory, and so on. And always, one of your favourite little applications or features will be missing because Microsoft decided to get rid of it. And, on top of that, some of your old applications won’t work anymore because the innards of the OS got changed around, so you’ll either have to upgrade those other applications or stop using them.

I can remember the days when Windows 3.1 came on six floppy disks and required less than 10MB of your hard drive. Then Windows 95 came along, but it was much more hardware intensive and if you wanted to use it, you had to basically buy a new computer. It wasn’t until Windows 98 (in 1998) that Windows 95 finally got all its bugs worked out. Then we turned and there was Windows ME. After years of work, Windows XP was released, and people actually liked it for a change. Microsoft stuck with that for a while, but finding itself in need of more cash from upgrades, it introduced Windows Vista.

Now, here we are – and Windows 7 is sitting on the shelves, promising to be better, faster, easier on your hardware, easier to use – the whole song and dance, again.

Should you go rush out to adopt Win 7? You have to ask? My opinion is that if you’re satisfied with the way your machine runs, stick with what works. I still have XP and see no reason to upgrade it. I’ve never had a bit of trouble with it and it’s very nicely matched with the hardware. Why would I want to potentially mess everything up with an upgrade? I also have a laptop with Vista, and to be honest, I can’t tell the difference between XP and Vista. I’m sure there are some changes under the hood, but they may or may not have made any difference to my computing experience.

If you absolutely have to have the latest and greatest and you’ve got plenty of money to throw around, by all means, go out and buy yourself an upgrade to Win 7. If it makes you happy, so much the better.

Some of us, though, would rather take a wait and see approach. Myself, I’d like to wait and see whether Win 7 really does offer a better user experience, better features, a better interface. I’d like to hear what real people have to say about it, not the talking heads in the magazines. I’d like to hear readers say that Win 7 takes up less space on your hard drive (I was scanning my XP machine the other day and there were more than a million files on it, most of them the operating system!). I’d like to hear users of Win 7 say that it runs faster and boots up quicker. That they have an easier time setting up a home network. That they don’t have problems with application compatibility.

So, I’ll wait and see. Keep in mind that an upgrade – not the full version, just an upgrade – will run you from $120 to $220 (4,000-7,300 baht). Who knows how much that will be by the time it gets to this part of the world.

Future Window, Latest Window, Window 7