“Careers: Windows 7 Skills Shortage Looming?
IT pros with Windows 7 skills are — or soon will be — a hot commodity.” – http://esj.com/articles/2010/09/21/windows-7-skills-shortage.aspx
If you’re in this business, whether you’re a Mac or Linux or Unix or Windows person, you always should be looking forward to the next area of demand. Whether you like Windows or not, it’s time to get skilled with Windows 7.
I’ve been using it side-by-side with my Mac, on a laptop I got for my mother, and it is in many ways a very nice OS. It sucks processor and ram like wild, and User Access Control (UAC) is still intrusive as heck compared to the defaults of my Mac. When I list processes for all users I see 70+ running, versus 54 for my Mac with no development tools running. What’s all that extra stuff running in Windows? HP updates, Synaptic drivers, mobile device support, and a whole bunch of those scary svchost.exes that can’t easily be identified at all. What I’d expect.
How well will 7 stand up to my usual development load? I’m talking about running JBoss, Coldfusion server, MySQL, Dreamweaver, Apache, and a handful of browsers for testing. My old Compaq laptop would overheat, choke and crash, not just frequently but every time. My Mac, on the other hand, swallows all this without a burp. My Linux boxes don’t even hiccup on this load.
But for consumers and business users (read “people who only use Excel, Word and Outlook”), Windows 7 is looking viable and in fact not bad. You do in fact get all that nice Windows AD manageability. Just remember that imaging (Ghosting) these systems requires some extra steps, and particularly that no amount of ram will ever seem like enough. Otherwise, it’s everything you expect from Windows. Get familiar with it.