It's gonna be a big week for Windows...

The long wait is almost over, and Windows 7 is only 2 days away.

I am sure that many users will breathe a sigh of relief as Vista's replacement hits the shelves.
Early in its life, Vista quickly developed an infamous reputation for the acceleration of grey hairs, in technicians and end-users alike.
Personally I found Vista to be acceptable when used for day-to-day office tasks (Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, surfing the net, using Skype, playing the occasional game etc...)

It all went rather banana-shaped though, if you tried to throw too much at Vista at once.
Softline's Pastel is a great example here, with Vista requiring some serious tweaking, poking, prodding and patching in order for Pastel to run in a near-stable fashion.

Now Microsoft promises a stable and ground-breaking new operating system in Windows 7.
Beta releases among testers and end-users have produced promising results, so we can only hope that this bodes well for the newest addition to the Microsoft stable.

Looking back, Windows 7 marks 24 years since the first iteration of Windows was launched.
Let's take a quick journey back in time to see where it all began...:

- November 1985 Windows 1.01
- November 1987 Windows 2.03
- May 1988 Windows 2.10
- March 1989 Windows 2.11
- May 1990 Windows 3.0
- March 1992 Windows 3.1x
- October 1992 Windows For Workgroups 3.1
- July 1993 Windows NT 3.1
- December 1993 Windows For Workgroups 3.11
- January 1994 Windows 3.2 (released in Simplified Chinese only)
- September 1994 Windows NT 3.5
- May 1995 Windows NT 3.51
- August 1995 Windows 95 4.0.950
- July 1996 Windows NT 4.0
- June 1998 Windows 98 4.10.1998
- May 1999 Windows 98 SE 4.10.2222
- February 2000 Windows 2000 NT 5.0.2195
- September 2000 Windows Me 4.90.3000
- October 2001 Windows XP NT 5.1.2600
- March 2003 Windows XP 64-bit Edition (IA-64) NT 5.2.3790
- April 2003 Windows Server 2003 NT 5.2.3790
- April 2005 Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
- July 2006 Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs
- January 2007 (retail) Windows Vista NT 6.0.6002
- July 2007 Windows Home Server
- February 2008 Windows Server 2008 NT 6.0.6002
- October 2009 Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2

What do you think they will call the next version of Windows...?