Windows 7 Japan

POSTED BY DANNY CHOO On Fri 2009/09/25 22:40 JST in Japanese Culture
Taken this afternoon at the Bic Camera store in Shibuya. A shop assistant tells folks how they will get some exclusive pre-order goodies if they order their copy of Windows 7 now - the goodies being some Windows and 7UP YoYo's...
Have any of you been playing about with the beta versions? Planning on upgrading or sticking with Vista or XP?
Me was a Windows user since Windows 95 and switched to Mac in 2005. Before being a Mac user, I used to wonder what on earth could one do on a Mac apart from browse the Internets and check mail. Most of my staff at Amazon used a Mac and I remember saying to them "wheres the floppy drive?" ^^;
I also used to think that Macs didn't have any software. While Windows users have the choice of zillions of FTP apps, Macs have only a handful. But coming to think of it - its the quality over quantity that counts and a handful is all thats needed. In this case I use Transmit which is an excellent FTP app that supports Amazon S3 and what have you.
Without Windows however, I don't think I would be in the line of work I'm currently in. It was thanks to the self studying of Windows, partitioning FDisk, MBR and wot not that got me the qualifications I needed to Join Japan Airlines as a computer Engineer.
Without JAL, I would not have got into Nature doing Web Marketing in Tokyo and without that no Amazon etc.
Things I don't miss about Windows is having to wipe my current working copy of Windows and recover a clone that I took of a clean installation with my regular apps. I used Drive Image for a while before using Norton Ghost.
Things I do miss about Windows is Explorer - no not IE! I found the file management properties of Windows far superior (and still is) over Macs Finder.
For example, in Windows I get a thumbnailed preview of whats inside a folder - such a simple thing that would increase my productivity on a Mac.
Also, with Finder, when browsing for folders in the Save or Open dialog, I cant sort by date or type which is annoying as hell!
What gets on your nut and what do you enjoy about the current operating system you use?
After using Macs for few years, I find that I generally get things done quicker and as the system is Unix based, the environment is closer to the environment of our servers which run dannychoo.com, figure.fm and soon japannow.fm and manga.fm. Having a similar environment is important for development purposes for example - I had a load of encoding issues when using Apache with PHP on Windows.
At the end of the day however, its not a case of which operating is better than the other but giving various systems a whirl to see which fits or work style needs is recommended.