If you're interested in trying out Windows 7, the official beta is out now (well, yesterday, but it went down almost immediately due to huge demand). You can download it here for a limited time (first 2.5m keys): http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx

I dunno if I'd run it on a primary machine, but if you have a secondary or a laptop it's really great. Like Vista, with more features, but much faster. I haven't used XP in forever to compare, but people upgrading from XP say it's even faster than XP (though, that's probably coming from a crufty XP install to a fresh Win7).

When is the expected or estimated release of Win7?

I'm kind of disappointed that MS has seemingly "given up" on Vista so soon, at least in comparison to the original release and subsequent life of XP. New products are cool and this one looks promising, but still I would like to see further refinement to Vista. They probably have no choice however, as it seems that the PC public has doomed (unjustifiably imo) Vista into a Windows Millenium-like fate, not without the help of Apple and its fanboys, of course =).

7 should be out Q4 2009.

And I agree, there's nothing wrong with Vista. It runs great on my desktop and ran great on my laptop until I put Win7 on it. Most of the people dogging it have never used it once.

Service Pack 1 helped Vista considerably. Other than having to learn the new setup, it's a decent OS. Most of it looks to be borrowed from the Mac OS however.

awesome thanks so much i was trying to find it and could only find the "sorry we're down" site.

I get free 64 bit upgrade :P

Coming from a Mac user, this release is a huge improvement over Vista. I'm still too used to Apple's intuitive human engineering, and after a day of trying it out, I'm just still more productive on a Mac.

I'm glad to see Microsoft getting some stuff right with Win7. I heard some rumors a few months back that it was looking like they just rebranded Vista with a couple tweaks. Its sounding more and more like they actually fixed what was broken. I hear the install is considerably smaller than the Vista install as well.

I think, inevitably, Win 7 will have to be adopted by the masses. We are at the point where it is relatively inexpensive to put 4+ GB of ram in a system, but you have to run a 64 bit OS. XP 64, from what I hear, isn't adequate from a driver availability standpoint and people avoid Vista like the plague. If Win 7 proves to be what Microsoft promises, it may indeed be the new XP.

Personally, though, I think Microsoft should allow free upgrades to Win7 for anyone who purchased Vista. A token of good will and a quick jump in numbers of Win7 users.

There's nothing wrong with Vista.

When I fire up my XP virtual machine to test in XP/IE6, I'm always surprised at how archaic and clunky XP feels after using Vista for so long.

I never bought vista. It ran like crap when it first came out, and still doesn't seem to be any faster than xp. I do not care for all the anti piracy crap in Vista. I will probably skip and go right to windows 7.

If you look back, that's generally what people have said about every new OS Microsoft has released. Most people fear change and come up with excuses to justify that.

Usually, the same people dogging Vista say they love 2008, even though they're almost identical. It's just a mob mentality of haters.

Actually , from the big ass write up on windows 7 in my magazine, it tells how Vista has fucking loading bars for shit like my computer and what not. Thats ridiculous. But it seems Windows 7 will be better so its all good. I think its pretty self evident by the sales figures for Vista, how good the OS is.

That's not true at all.

That's exactly the kind of bad information that seeded this mob mentality of Vista being bad. That's all sales figures are evident of. It's just a huge echo chamber at this point. Silly, really.

This is a video I just uploaded of me hitting the Windows key, typing "computer', and hitting enter. This is on an old E6600 Core 2 Duo, from back when they first came out too...

4279dPnC24M

Hitting Win+E would've been even faster, but I figured I'd show the performance of the start menu and its search (that's searching shortcuts, email, filesystem, etc as I type) too.

According to some of the programmers working on our LabVIEW cluster, Windows Server 2008 BSODs whenever it's rebooting. It's been a common annoyance and we've since then switched to Red Hat for some of the Windows machines and we're even considering the purchase of some Mac Pros since LabVIEW has become available for OS X.

We've since then stayed far away from adopting Windows 2008 on our Windows machines running LabVIEW since National Instruments support people are even puzzled why this is happening. We aren't the only ones to whom this is happening. They recommend staying on Windows 2003 until the issue is resolved with Microsoft. Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn't been helping much with the DAQ drivers. And we have been patently avoiding the use of Microsoft products, much to the chagrin of salesmen who continue to pry on my purchasers to buy into Microsoft...

This might not be Microsoft's issues, or NI's, but this problem with the Vista/2008 kernel has been a nuisance.

Most of our machines except for our accounting servers are running Red Hat or OS X. Citrix is used for Microsoft Dynamics GP... and even that, we are considering migrating to SAP Netweaver, which would be supported by our Red Hat contract. In most cases, we wouldn't even need to Citrix in with GUI tools, web clients, and terminal consoles.

By contrast, I've got a few 2008 servers that've been humming along for months with 0 interaction (2 of them public facing). Not that they were trouble with 2003, but 2008 is a bit easier to admin and I wanted IIS7.

I can see how weaving that web of interconnections would be good for job security though!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_new_to_Windows_Vista

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/13303

There seems to be a striking difference between what the tech press and techies in general say about Vista, and how Vista users actually feel about Vista. As someone who's been using Vista on his primary PC for ten to twelve hours a day since February 17, I can attest to this first-hand: it just isn't anywhere near as bad as everyone says. It's not even a little bad—I can honestly say I haven't once in the past seven months felt like moving back to Windows XP. In fact, I feel like I'm missing out when I have to use XP on another machine.

...

Personally, I think the bad press Vista receives is simply a feedback loop. Geeks don't like change, and they're often very vocal about the fact. Throw in some fear, uncertainty, and doubt from misinformed bloggers and tech journalists, and you have geeks telling each other to hold on to Windows XP like it's the best OS ever made—even though in reality, it's very much outdated and flawed in many ways. Of course, this is hardly the first time a new Microsoft operating system has been shunned by the techie elite. Many geeks similarly recoiled in horror from XP following its release in 2001, and I personally know some who stuck with Windows 98 SE for a couple of years after XP's introduction.

While I realize the complications and complexity, one issue that would help MS and several other companies would be better tech support. We're becoming dependent on Internet patches to fix things, and a crap product at release drives off users.

I started with Vista when it first came out, since it was installed on my laptop whether I liked it or not. It was a nightmare - slow, crashed frequently, and some bizaare handling of various utilities. SP1 and subsequent fixes seem to have addressed most of that, and I now feel like the quote above - I use it all the time on my primary machine, even willingly bought it, and XP does seem a little backwards now. It is extremely stable, and with the exception of hunting down 64 bit drivers I haven't had any real difficulties.

My only issue with Vista were old programs that were never intended to run on it. Thankfully there's a compat option and that solved 99% of my problems, the other 1% were solved when I disabled the UAC.

I love Vista especially when it comes to installing new hardware or installing it for the first time. I had to format and rebuild an old XP this weekend and it was a chore to find all the goshdamn drivers.

However, word on the street from our windows folks is that Windows 7 is repackaged Vista. Giving it a new name hoping to remove stigma from the dirty word Vista. I don't really care as long as it still plays my games, you know...the important stuff.

However, word on the street from our windows folks is that Windows 7 is repackaged Vista. Giving it a new name hoping to remove stigma from the dirty word Vista. I don't really care as long as it still plays my games, you know...the important stuff.

They're probably getting confused due to the v6.1 kernel thing, which is to maximize application compatibility.

How old is Vista? I can't help like this is a lot faster than their average release

About two years now and nearly three by Win7 release, which isn't abnormal. The time between XP and Vista (which is probably what you're comparing to) was longer than usual because they basically scraped the first try at Vista and started over.

i am digging tghe new version, the aesthetics are nice, i noticed a SIGNIFICANT increase in performance. I typically run WoW one one screen and a movie on another screen. I without changing any settings gain 30fps in WoW in general, about 15fps in BG's

Don't get me wrong Sanchek, I am all about Windows. I use Vista 64 at home and am pleased with it. I have experienced several of the things that people have complained about with Vista personally, so I don't act like they aren't there. I have never been so frustrated with Vista that I wished I was on XP though.

One thing that I dislike about Vista: Wireless networking. It either works without a hitch or its a nightmare, and with no reason.

Vista is decent. I am not running it anymore though. I have XP again, be it the 64 bit version. I kept having video card stability issues with Vista where the driver would "Stop and recover". It got really annoying, considering that the same card on a dual booted system would run fine under XP. There was alot of talk about both ATI and Nvidia writing crap drivers for Vista, but people typically still pegged the fault on the OS, which probably isn't fair but it was still an aggregate annoyance to the point that Vista is now off my hard disc.

Lumm I experienced the same things until SP1 and better drivers from nVidia. I update my video drivers every time nVidia releases them and I have zero glitches now.

My performance is fandamtastic these days :D of course 4GB of RAM and an nVidia 9800 helps. I get 45-60+fps in WARHAMMER except when there's 300 people on the screen then it's like 10-15 :( I'm getting 60-80fps in LOTRO with spikes to 100 at times. Last time I ran WoW I pushed over 100 consistently except in the cities where it dropped to 70s. My performance issues were never Vista they were inadequate hardware and shitty drivers.

Windows Explore 8 is a little buggy, but they say it like 10 times before you start using it that its going to be that way.

It uses less resources than vista did, even though people didnt realize how vista did things.

It could be me just seeing the shiny new toy, but video playback seems smoother, and there is a hands down noticable difference in gaming quality.

I haven't played any games in it, but heard that it doesn't have that annoying lagginess when alt-tabbing out of full screen games. True?

Are drivers for all the major hardware reliable?

I haven't played any games in it, but heard that it doesn't have that annoying lagginess when alt-tabbing out of full screen games. True?

No lag at all, infact if you mouse over the minimized game, it will show a mini-live version moving and all. Vista did that but it was laggy, this is smooth.

As a test i ran WoW most settings on high or on, Media Center playing a movie, Zune Marketplace playing a song and downloading 3 songs, while syncing to my zune, Ventrilo, IE8 with 6 tabs open, and had Blackberry Desktop manager converting an .avi to an optomized version for my Bold, and had no lag switching between applications or within an application. My temps started getting in the yellow, but WoW and the avi converstion alone would tax most machines.

Are drivers for all the major hardware reliable?

I have it on two machines. One with an ATI 2600 Pro, Core 2 Duo processor, the other has 2 Nvidia 8800 GTX's running AMD 64 of some sort that i cant recall. G15 keyboard on one, MERC keyboard on the other, wacom tablet, 2 HP Printers, Dell printer/fax/scanner, Kodak photo negative scanner, Linksys Wireless card on one, Sound Blaster Audigy on one......thats all the hardware i can think of that i had no problems with.

My onboard netword adapter i had to download and reinstall the drivers, but i chalked that up to me having old version that hadn't been updated in a long time.

wanted to add, start up time is wicked fast.

Yeah, drivers should be no trouble.

Vista was rough at first because it was the first to implement (require) the new driver model, which is technically much better for stability/security/etc, but also required the mfgs to get their act together. Sort of like the step from 95/98 to 2000 (remember what a pain that was at first too?).

Now that everything has a Vista driver, that stuff will all work in Win7 (like 2k drivers in XP).

Hmm, I've had mucho trouble with this laptop locking up with vista. Maybe I should try windows 7.

is it Acer?

No, it's a Gateway. Just something I bought for cheap when my last one died suddenly.

A few handy tips: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx

A few handy tips: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx


nice find

Games running good? I never tried Vista ans I'm scared of it, but I am interested in 7.

I've been happy with Vista on my gaming machine and ecstatic with it on my wife's "home pc" where we do all our our picture and video work.

The only knock I have is the network file copy problem with Vista. Copying files over a network is extremely painful and god-awful slow.

Games running good? I never tried Vista ans I'm scared of it, but I am interested in 7.All but the oldest. If I understand it right, it's the 16-bit installers that won't run.

Everything else is pretty and smooth.

had my first crash :)

middle of playing wow it started getting laggy, and then droped to like 10 fps. I WTF'd then boom...WoW cut out and a debugging script that gets sent to MS popped up.

I've been happy with Vista on my gaming machine and ecstatic with it on my wife's "home pc" where we do all our our picture and video work.

The only knock I have is the network file copy problem with Vista. Copying files over a network is extremely painful and god-awful slow.


eh? I haven't experienced this and I use one of my vista ultimate machines a media center enabled PC so I can stream stuff to my 360. I also have my TiVo hooked up to an XP machine and copy files to another Vista node that has the fast DVD burner on it. I have never had issues with copying files or configuring the network. What is the copy problem?

Speaking of drivers, I had a pretty good experience with an obscure piece of hardware on my laptop.

The biometric scanner didn't work at first, but the alert center thinggy directed me to where a working driver was. Installed that and it worked, including allowing bypassing the Windows login. Before I decided to install Win7, I had already written that off as something that probably wouldn't work.

Quick question: Does the Win7 beta include Media Center?

I also wonder if they will tier the Win7 product release a la Home, Pro or Basic/Home/Business/Ultimate?

the beta is ultimate and yes has media center

Have yet to test out the media center portion of it, but so far I love the beta. I put it on my laptop a few days ago and it works loads better than vista did.

My laptop is a HP Pavillion tx1210US
AMD x2 Turion 2.2ghz
4GB DDR 2 (533 I think) RAM
Geforce Go 6150 (think it's 256 might only be 128mb ram on that)

And it fucking flies through stuff. Previously I had reinstalled vista on it because the install was 9 months old and getting slow on me. Copying things over the wireless network would always slow down, and often just stop completely. Even with updated drivers, etc etc. I tried with encryption, without, everything you could think of with my router didnt make a difference. However; with win 7 it copied the files right accross the network no issues.

The few things I can't get it to do are mainly just drivers issues, i.e. my laptop is a tablet. Under XP when i rotate the screen and pop it into tablet mode it would auto rotate the screen for me. No such luck in Win 7. BUT the screen is more accurate in win 7, and the handwriting recognition seems to work better. Though that may just be the shiny new feelign talking.

I have been playing WoW on it as well, I get probably 25% better performance out of it. However, alt tabbing out is a fucking nightmare. It typically hangs up and takes 9-10 seconds to finally tab out, then usually switches right back to wow unless i click on the desktop at the right moment. Though I chalk most of that up to the laptop's hardware and the load the applications are putting on it.

But definitely a little more Win in windows with this version.

thats odd about the alt+tabbing i found it to be much more seamless.

Yeah I suspect it has a lot more to do with the limitations of hardware rather than software. I think I may load it on my main box to test out the media center/TV recording part. to see how well it handles that, and that machien is much more robust (Quadcore Phenom Geforce 8800 etc etc)

It's this kind of garbage "reporting" that dogged Vista: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=11505

Luckily, the Win7 beta built far too much positive momentum for these negative nancies to counter at this point.

I would counter that Jeremy Allison has forgotten more about the operation of Windows than most of us will ever know. There's absolutely nothing in that article that is "garbage reporting," he's calling the Windows upgrade cycle as he sees it -- and fairly in tune with a lot of other people.

I don't have Vista fits, but it does nothing of significance XP didn't other than finally support 64-bit addressing, 15 years after the rest of the world figured it out.

His involvement with building Samba doesn't make him an expert on operating systems he's never touched. The people who built VisiCalc are legends, but that doesn't qualify them to review Office 2007 after doing nothing more than reading the back of the box either.

He's going on about how we should beware because Win7 might just be hype, like he thinks Vista was. Meanwhile, people who have actually installed and used Win7 think it's great.

He's talking out of his ass, pure and simple.

The same garbage that was coming from the anti-Vista echo chamber a year or two ago.

Complaining about the forced upgrade cycles Microsoft uses is not "talking out of your ass." He never said "Windows 7 sux d00d," he said Windows 7 was another repetition of the hollow "all new, all better, all awesome!" tripe that gets trotted out for every Windows release yet has been only remotely accurate for about two of them.

People didn't hate Vista because it kicked their dog, they didn't think the pain in the ass of getting used to it and needing another two GB of ram to run it was compensated by non-features they didn't give a shit about.

According to Microsoft, Windows 7 is the version of Windows everyone has been waiting for. According to the “What’s New” section of the Windows 7 website it will be “Faster and Easier”, it will “Work your way”, and give you “New Possibilities”. I must confess it sounds less than thrilling to me, but these are the things the Windows marketers thought it was worth pointing out about the new “center of people’s technological solar system” — to quote Steve Ballmer.

But wait a minute. Let’s get in the time machine, go back a few years and take our foot off the crushed butterfly of Windows Vista and look at what was promised for the previous version of Windows. Windows Vista is “safer and more reliable” and there were “dozens of wonderful new features”. Dozens! After five and a half years in development, there are dozens of new features.

Garbage like that is a waste of our time. He's trying to suggest an implied equivalence based on the bullet points on the back of the boxes, after already admitting that he knows nothing about Win7.

Way to miss the rest of the article. You could at least call him out for doing a bait-and-switch talking about Linux instead of Windows, since that's remotely germane to what you're quoting.

also, Win7 sux. LOELZ.

The whole thing is packed full of him celebrating his ignorance of the topic:

But Windows 7 does seem to be different. The main difference is that it is being massively rushed out the door of Redmond, in rather an unseemly haste. The reason of course is the disaster that was Windows Vista. The marketing hype for Vista is barely dry on the page and yet we’re being told Windows 7 is the version everyone has really been waiting for. It does seem that Windows Vista was a failure of epic proportions for Microsoft and the job of the marketing people is now to convince their customers to skip Vista and move directly to Windows 7. A more honest assessment of the Windows 7 hype might be “forget Vista, this is the Windows you really want to upgrade to!”

It's like he's just not been paying attention at all for the past year.

The article is so bad that even Reddit, which is an anti-MS stronghold, tore the guy up: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7r231/windows_7_look_past_the_hype/

I was turned off by the slow file copying in Vista--when copying a large collection of small files from my mom's old laptop to her new one (over the local wired network), the estimated completion time was somewhere around 30-60 days. And if I remember right, even cancelling the file copy operation didn't work. In the end I had to zip the files, copy those zip files over, and then unzip them on the new laptop, which took a couple hours.

Sure, this problem was supposedly fixed by SP1, but it left me with absolutely no desire to give Vista a second look, and made me a bit more wary of future Windows releases, since I could no longer take for granted that something so basic as file copying would work correctly.

As for Windows 7, unless it somehow makes my Everquest or Firefox experience better--as that's about all I use Windows for these days, at least at home--I simply have no reason to move from XP, much less pay to do so.

I would imagine that a relatively tiny minority of people upgrade PC operating systems outside of the normal PC upgrade cycle. I wouldn't expect you to go out of your way to upgrade to Win7 (though you'll probably want to if you use it).

The thing that irks me is when people like this guy use perceived authority to trash something they haven't even used and admittedly know nothing about. I'm glad enough people got their hands on the beta that this has knocked his credibility down a notch for many, instead of him getting away with that echo chamber nonsense.

Don't be such a hater.

As for Windows 7, unless it somehow makes my Everquest or Firefox experience better--as that's about all I use Windows for these days, at least at home--I simply have no reason to move from XP, much less pay to do so.

If the Mozilla guys get their act together, there is one pretty handy new relevant feature. You can navigate/close tabs directly from the taskbar now, if the app supports it.

I'd imagine Firefox will implement it ASAP. You can see it working with IE (ick) in the attachment.

Having an MRU list of relevant files for programs on the start menu is pretty handy too.

I've really been enjoying these little things a lot, since it's installed on my laptop and every tiny bit of efficiency helps when you're using a trackpad.

Interesting, but I don't think I'd use it. I use the Quick Launch feature of the taskbar, but that's about it; normally I switch tasks using Alt+Tab, and keep the taskbar hidden, so I have more room on the screen to work with.

You can launch the quick launch apps with Win+1-n in Vista and Win7. Pretty handy if you use quick launch a lot (I do too).

There are many small improvements like that in Vista and Win7. It's hard to remember them all until you drop back to XP and it feels like you're in the stone age. Conversely, when you move from XP to Vista or Win7, you're going to need time to discover all those nifty features.

I moved up to vista with SP1 when I got my technet subscription; it's nice especially now that they have drivers for everything.

However, having used Win7 since It came out on open beta I think Vista may go the way of ME. Not for the same reasons, but because it got Sony'd with it's release. They tossed it out there long before it was ready and had poor compatibility. Now it works great, but it's hard to get consumers away from the perception. Which is why so many people still won't touch it.

And really, unless you *need* the "New Features" of XP why the hell would you upgrade. I Just like it because WinXP64 still sucks for driver support, but Vista 64 has good support.

And that article was nothing but more linux fanboi-ism. Not that Linux isn't deserving of a little bit. But FFS at least learn about what you're trashing.

Sinofsky's not playin around: http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/windows_7/next_windows_7_milestone_release_candidate.html

No beta 2 of this.

As a relatively quickly improved version surely based off of a Vista "template," Win7's rightful name should probably be "Windows Vista Second Edition" a la 98.

It's as similar to Vista as Vista is to XP. They reworked it from the kernel up.

Windows 7 RC is going public on Tuesday. You can go ahead and get a key here if you don't have one (says beta on the page, but works with RC too), though they say there will be no limits on them this time:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx

I've been running RC on my laptop for a few days, and it's solid. That rare explorer hang/crash appears to be gone.

I've had beta since this thread was started will i have to do anything?

If you want RC, you'll need to download and install it. Beta doesn't windows update to it or anything.

If you want to "upgrade" from beta to RC, you'll need to use this trick also: http://www.blogsdna.com/3083/how-to-upgrade-windows-7-beta-build-7000-to-windows-7-rc-build-7100.htm

awesome thanks!

FYI, I reinstalled from scratch. So, I can't comment on the stability of the "upgrade" method. I'd imagine it's fine though.

Where is the ISO or download file for me to use the newer RC version? Says downloads not available at the moment, but I went ahead and got a key.

Also when does this license/key expire and force me to uninstall or buy the full version when its available?

It'll be available on Tuesday.

It's my understanding that the beta/RC keys will be valid until 6/1/2010.

i thought they said 9/2009??

There will be overlap between the beta/RC keys and the release.

Just so I know beforehand, will the installation file be an ISO or some sort of other deal?

It's a bootable DVD ISO.

More better info: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx

Am I going to want to go Vista 64 ---> Win7?

Yeah, Win7 x64.

Repaved my build 7100 with the retail version of Win7 over the weekend. Could not ask for a better install experience. Watching it go get the latest nvidia drivers and install them without a reboot made me happy in a sad sort of way.

I have my legit copy just still running off the RC until I decide to take the time to rebuild.

You can apparently edit the install's cversion.ini's MinClient setting down to 7000 and upgrade from any of the betas, RCs, etc. I had crufted mine up with some other stuff and needed a repave anyway, so I didn't get a chance to try that, but I've heard it works fine.

So rumor has it you can't upgrade from Vista but need to do a complete erase and install, is that true?

Not true. There's no direct upgrade for XP stragglers, but Vista is fine.

In either, you can use the "Windows Easy Transfer" utility to make a fresh Win7 install almost like an upgrade. For most apps, it'll transfer settings all the way down to where on the screen its windows were last open.

Note: XP is still eligible for the upgrade version of the media. The installer just won't give you an upgrade install. It'll move XP off to windows.old and perform a fresh install anyway.

Windows 7 Install has failed 3x for me now. It freezes during the last step at about 62% complete

Are you doing an upgrade from Vista?

If you are upgrading from Vista, run the upgrade adviser from Vista first: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/get/upgrade-advisor.aspx

That 62% hang usually means it's hanging while trying to start some services or drivers it brought forward from Vista. You can probably identify that trouble spot from the adviser and then uninstall/disable it before upgrading, then deal with it later.

Ya I ran the advisor and disbaled or uninstalled everytthing it asked for and yet it still hangs...It's pissing me off.

What services do you have set to start automatically under Vista?

On my mom's computer, i went to msconfig, unclicked EVERYTHING in startup tab, restarted and it worked.

Ok, now my next question - is it really worth it?
I obviously have my vista gaming pc which you all helped me pick out, and my girlfriend has its twin, and I have a Win XP dell laptop from 2000 my girlfriend's mom has jammed with spyware which desperately needs a reformat.

Would I see improved performance in any and all of these? Would I need to buy 3 copies to upgrade em all?

UI response was a lot snappier than Vista but there really isn't a whole lot of "must have" stuff in there, if any. I wouldn't bother unless you're reinstalling anyway or if there were specific Vista-isms you really hated.

cute google-fight style article: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/iandouglas/100004063/windows-7-by-the-number/

Ok, now my next question - is it really worth it?
I obviously have my vista gaming pc which you all helped me pick out, and my girlfriend has its twin, and I have a Win XP dell laptop from 2000 my girlfriend's mom has jammed with spyware which desperately needs a reformat.

Would I see improved performance in any and all of these? Would I need to buy 3 copies to upgrade em all?

Upgrading Vista to Win7 is a no-brainer. It's faster and better in every aspect.

XP is a bit more iffy. Run the upgrade adviser and see about your hardware before you decide anything. If it's that old, it's probably not a great bet. That low end, you can buy a new laptop with Win7 pre-installed for only a few hundred dollars more than Win7 itself.

What am I actually getting for my $120.00 to upgrade from Vista 64 to Win 7?

Is it worth it?

Beyond being faster than Vista (and smaller), there are a lot of new features: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/what-is-windows-7.aspx

Is it worth it? Yes. For Vista users, it's an easy choice. You can upgrade in place, Vista hardware is good for Win7, and it's always going to be faster than Vista.

Still, run the upgrade adviser first, just to make sure you don't have some weird service or startup program that Win7 chokes on (like Korlis is having trouble with).

This epic ARS review on Win7 is pretty fair, if you have some time to waste: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/reviews/2009/10/windows-7-the-review.ars

Just saw Best Buy's ad from Sunday, and there is an (I think it is ASUS) model offering: Windows 7 Home Premium, 8GB memory, 1 TB hard drive, and Intel GMA X4500 graphics, Intel Core 2 Quad Processor, and 20" HD LCD 16:9 Widescreen monitor....for $729.

I have not had any real problems with Vista, so I am going to wait until I decide to buy a new pute and it comes standard on-board. Especially considering how cheap they are getting with the goodies.

Hey Sanchek, maybe you can answer this. I've been eyeballing the Windows 7 Family Pack for a few days now, but cant tell if it includes both 32 bit and 64 bit editions in it. Specifically, I have 3 computers, 2 of which have 64 bit CPUs, and one having a 32 bit.

Would I be able to purchase this and upgrade all of them such that the 2 64 bit CPUs will get the 64 bit OS installed, and the 32 will have the 32 bit OS?

I've seen side-references that this is so, but nothing concrete, so since you seem to be up on the distro scheme, I figured I'd ping you to see if you knew.

Thanks in advance.

Assuming you're talking about the Home Premium Family Pack (not sure if there are other versions), yes it does include both x86 and x64 media. Vista/7 product keys are good for either version, bitwise, so you can mix and match the three licenses how you want.

The only pitfall I can think of there is that you cannot "upgrade" 32 bit to 64 bit, in place. If you're running those two x64 installs x86 right now, I'm not positive how that "upgrade" would work. It would probably be fine though.

I think I will have to go the Windows Easy Transfer route disabling services uninstalling crap did not help. Although my machine could use a clean install.

I have 2 solid installs of XP 64 bit. Is 7 really going to trump this? There have been plenty of articles about how 7 blows Vista away but it seems that comparisons to XP have politely been left out of the contest. Is it a safe bet that I won't be arsed out and forced to buy 7 until I need a new driver and no one makes an XP one anymore? I ran Vista for a while on my two desktops and eventually came to...well...prefer not using it. This laptop I am on right now while on the road has me locked out of downgrading it to XP Media Center Edition (got the disc and everything) because most of the devices have no XP drivers to speak of and the machine just plain won't be able to do anything so for now my only road to something better is put in a SSD and go 7. How soon will it be before critical items such as new video cards, audio devices etc will not ship with anything less Vista drivers?

Once I got 7 installed I will not go back. Ya for some reason it was difficult with my PC but 7 blows XP/Vista out of the water.

7 supposedly isn't much better than XP unless running multiple programs at the same time. I read somewhere that when using multiple processors 7 can be up to 250% faster or more.

How was the Easy Transfer for you?

It was ok. Sucks reinstalling programs but it went really well the programs I reinstalled instantly had all the info they needed or already had it was like they were never closed.

It does seem I lost a file(My old flash sig) but I guess that's ok just be nice to have.

I had to do the same on my wife's PC since her's was only running Vista 32bit and now is running 7 64bit. But it too went really smoothly.

I wish I knew what happened to the 7 upgrade on my PC. I think it was having permission issues due to installs/re-installs over the years but I am not sure. I disabled about every process driver that I could and yet keep Vista going but no go.

awesome thanks so much i was trying to find it and could only find the "sorry we're down" site.

I get free 64 bit upgrade :P


OK, I have not demonstrated my computer ignorance lately, so let me take this opportunity to ask what may seem a silly question:

Can I go from a basic Vista 32 to W7 64 on an upgrade?

Have still not really decided that I have any need to upgrade, but that might be something that would tilt the floor a bit, and have me leaning.

Switching between 32 and 64 bit always requires a fresh install, regardless of anything else.

The Easy Transfer deal does make a fresh install half like an upgrade though. You have to reinstall programs, but your files and settings (even for those yet-to-be-installed programs) will transfer over.

Thanks! :)

Just curious - does anyone know if there is a meaningful difference between the hard drive space taken by Win7 Pro versus Ultimate? I only wonder if having all those other languages on board Ultimate makes it much larger.

You don't have to install them. They're just available as updates.

I've got a Win7 Ultimate VM with Visual Studio 2010 installed that comes in right at 10gb for both.