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Oct. 26th, 2009
Windows 7 shipped last week
Oct. 26th, 2009 07:27 amWindows 7 released last week. A lot of people, myself included, are calling it Vista 2.0, but Microsoft would like to distance itself from the Vista name. If you have newer hardware, i.e. less than 2 years old and lots of memory and good video card, you probably shouldn't have any issues with upgrading as long as you're careful. I downloaded the beta of 7 and was running it in a virtual environment on my Mac and was satisfied, but I have no plans to buy it for my 5ish year old AMD Athlon system: it's just too old and underpowered comparatively (I use it as a Tivo repository). My virtual machine is going to be deactivated by MS in a month or so, at which point I'll go back to using my virtual XP image. Still, it worked well.
Here's some thoughts/recommendations:
I cannot emphasize this too strongly: BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER BEFORE UPGRADING!
You can get an external hard drive at Best Buy or Staples et al for $50-75ish. Microsoft says that you have to reformat your hard drive if you're upgrading from XP (you don't have to if you're upgrading from Vista, but it's always a good idea to do it). There are reports of people not having to reformat when upgrading from XP and earlier, but don't take the chance: BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER! MS includes a utility to restore your data from an external HD after installation, but I have no experience with that as the install that I did was to a new virtual image and had no data migration with it.
Conveniently, Wired has put their Wiki page on backing up a Windows PC on their front page this morning: http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Back_Up_Your_Data_on_a_Windows_PC
There are reports that some people are having problems downloading updates if they bought/downloaded the discounted price student edition. I'm sure MS will get that sorted out very soon.
I haven't heard of any horrible major third-party software problems with it, but I'm sure there will be some. Like I said, this is basically Vista 2.0: most of the major bugs have been ironed out of Vista, so 7 should be a fairly painless experience.
Here's some thoughts/recommendations:
I cannot emphasize this too strongly: BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER BEFORE UPGRADING!
You can get an external hard drive at Best Buy or Staples et al for $50-75ish. Microsoft says that you have to reformat your hard drive if you're upgrading from XP (you don't have to if you're upgrading from Vista, but it's always a good idea to do it). There are reports of people not having to reformat when upgrading from XP and earlier, but don't take the chance: BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER! MS includes a utility to restore your data from an external HD after installation, but I have no experience with that as the install that I did was to a new virtual image and had no data migration with it.
Conveniently, Wired has put their Wiki page on backing up a Windows PC on their front page this morning: http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Back_Up_Your_Data_on_a_Windows_PC
There are reports that some people are having problems downloading updates if they bought/downloaded the discounted price student edition. I'm sure MS will get that sorted out very soon.
I haven't heard of any horrible major third-party software problems with it, but I'm sure there will be some. Like I said, this is basically Vista 2.0: most of the major bugs have been ironed out of Vista, so 7 should be a fairly painless experience.