Over five hundred thousand feedback reports and counting.
Most Atomicans use Windows, in either XP or Vista, but even some Linux fans are getting excited about Windows 7 - it looks to be everything that Vista should have been, even if it is split into too many editions.
In the past, Microsoft have been rather tight-lipped about any errors in their operating systems (and even in other products such as their Xbox 360 failure rates), but all that seems to be changing rapidly with the imminent arrival of Windows 7.
The beta opened for the OS a few weeks back, and thousands of people flooded to the MS site to grab their copy and run through 7 with a fine-toothed comb for as many errors and issues as they could find, pumping out 500,000 feedback reports as of the last total.
There was so much feedback that it even got up to one feedback report every fifteen seconds like clockwork for one whole week, and each MS developer working on 7 quickly became swamped with work.
Good news is here though - of all those errors have come some 2000-odd fixes that have made their way into the OS so far, and most likely a goodly amount still to come meaning that by the time we actually get it, it should be pretty stable.
Hardware compatibility was one of the biggest issues for Vista's launch, but there's been a mammoth amount of testing done through all the people just using the OS, and it's looking incredibly good for such an early stage - most probably attributed to the OS' similarity to Vista's driver model.
If you've managed to grab a copy of Windows 7 (or are still hanging onto a key and haven't used it yet), check out the beta walkthrough to learn the basics, and delve deep into the OS to see just how much you can break - every error you find might help them improve the end result for everyone else.
DailyTech has much more info on the feedback, as well as some developer complaints, and is well worth a read.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012