I just found this: "State of Decay" and it made me think of giving Windows 7 a review.

Verity Stob writes insightful but techy articles for the register. She? I assume its a she. Uses a Beaufort Scale of cruft to define, just how bad your PC has got. Now I accumulate cruft at a slower rate than most people. I know enough NOT to allow any installer to run without using the "custom" option. But I also use the PC alot.

 
Tom Desktop PC The Back box with the
side panel open and the missing buttons
 and unmatched cd drives as it was 4 years ago

For instance my home PC is at cruft for 7 (known as a yachtsman's gale in the real scale). It has a boot menu of many options, left to its own devices it boots to a kernel panic of a missing presumed dead version of Dapper Drake Ubuntu Linux^[1]. It crashes regularly, partly cos windows is very unhappy at being installed on a AMD Athlon (64bit), and being run on a Second hand P4(32bit) mainboard thrown out by work. It is held together by physical willpower. Since that is a contradiction in terms I'll explain, bits of it are 13 year old second hand such as its 3.5' drive bought third hand off Matt in 97. I've found its best to only connect the bits I need at any given time, rather than running it with its full compliment of hardware. This physical care (and the odd thump) are not sufficient to make it work. You've heard the phrase "A watched kettle never boils", well this PC doesn't boot with out you sat at it. Your brain has to will it on. Before it got that second hand mainboard off work it was cruft mark 8-9. It is a marvellous machine, with partition tables by M.C.Esher, and a pile of odds and ends (half height firewire card bent straight, second network card additional hard disks and chepo video capture card^{[2]) piled on top to be inserted as needed.}

My old Laptop

The reason my desk top is in that state is its become largely a test bed and backup of the laptop^[3]. By this time into my last trip my laptop, running XP on excellent but old IBM X series hardware. Was at cruft mark 4-5 symptoms different, but no longer visible due to the smashed screen. Errr I'm going to start the next paragraph with a shock out burst I'm going to say something nice about M$.

Cruft Force 2

Gusting 3 maybe. Shit that's good. Boot times are lower than the loss in battery performance. The only nasty I could find in the event log. was:

Faulting application name: Dreamweaver.exe, version: 10.0.0.4117, time stamp: 0x48c874b4

But no particular significance can be associated to that cos I just tried to open a webpage downloaded with flash get on Tongan internet and, more importantly, dreamweaver is made by Adobe. Its not like dreamweaver was ever a beacon of stability before adobe got their half arsed hands on it.

Its power management - never great, is worse. But windows laptop has ever worked properly, this one didn't when new. Crashing aps (usually due to removing the hard drive it was reading video from), irresponsible undocks etc cause the brightness controls to die till you re- boot. Which is annoying, but other than that its fine.

Better than fine, the reboot is fast, by this stage a re-boot on XP on my old laptop was heading for 15 minutes. If you could get the bloody thing to actually shut down at all. its had the same uses as the old one its been used in multiple internet connection sharing configurations, dinghied, dampened and pickup trucked. It still boots fast and smooth. Windows has developed no nasty habits. Bar the cashing the brightness controls.

I've really only just thought about it but its behaving bloody well indeed. Windows 7 good.

Verity being a normal person has only gone as far as cruft force 10. Normally that's as high as you go. Hopefully that's as far as you go. Extreme weather is catered for with 11 and 12, though yachts people aren't supposed to survive it. Force 12 = Hurricane strength. If you want to know what cruft 11 looks like try these pictures. Cruft 12 I hope I never encounter, some re-search as been done into the phenomenon however, by the brave, but foolish el reg ventblockers.  

1 - OK I'm being optimistic its probably Breezy Badger
2 - Etc. Etc. Etc.