After years of working on my old single core HP laptop running Windows XP, I finally reached a point where I needed more power for multi-tasking.  Every fiber in my being said, "Shawn, go spend twice the money and get yourself a Macbook Pro.  You'll be happier with the performance."  I toiled over this decision for days and days, weeks and months.  Finally, this past weekend, like Popeye, "I had all I could stands and I couldn't stands no more."  My beautiful bride and I loaded into the car headed for the Apple store.  On the way, I decided to make one final stop at Sams Club just to browse their selection of pc's.

So standing at Sams Club I find  this machine, an HP dv7-2277cl running an Intel P7550 2.26 dual core 64-bit processor, 17.3" led screen with 4GB DDR3 Ram, 640GB (Dual 320GB) 7200 rpm hard drives, the ATI Radeon 4650 1GB Video Card... quite impressive.  The price tag $999.  Wow!  My beautiful bride and I could EACH get a laptop for less than the price of ONE Macbook Pro.  Standing in the store, I noticed the laptop was even running Windows 7.  Ok, I'm getting a little scared.  Windows releases tend to be wrought with dread and apprehension and the Microsoft track record indicates that with ANY of their operating systems, a user doesn't get to be productive until AT LEAST service pack 2 or later.  I've heard from several of my co-workers that Windows 7 is supposed to be "MUCH better than Vista."  And of course it is running the 64-bit version, so maybe everything would be sweet and I would be happy with this version.

Nope.  Windows 7 is flashier than previous versions of windows, but that's about the extent of it.  I still have to wait for programs to start, still have to wait for even the "all Programs" window to open, still have to wait for drive access, still noticing TONS of useless shit running in the background.  And what REALLY qualified as COMIC RELIEF on the "new" Microsoft OS is the moment I turned on the laptop there were already OVER 20 "critical security updates" for Windows 7.  Already?!?!  REALLY MICROSOFT?!?!?!  Do your engineers understand the concept of QA PRIOR to selling???  Unbelievable.  Windows 7 is just Vista with more lipstick.  Yes there are a couple nifty new features like being able to reorganize your taskbar... woot.  What I'm looking at is another bloated bundle of useless hogware by Microsoft That Mac/PC commerical was right... "trust me."