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Windows 7 shipped last week
Windows 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.
no subject
How well does it run WoW?
:)
BTW, We're heading to Las Cruces Thanksgiving for an Agility Trial over the weekend (well that's the plan, stuff is coming up, so it's keep your fingers crossed time).
Are you and the SO going to be in town?
no subject
Never installed WoW on it, so can't tell you off-hand. A guy I knew had a 17" Compaq laptop and installed Hackintosh on it, so he ran WoW on the same hardware both under Vista and under OS-X: WoW ran better under OS-X.
no subject
Besides, I can't afford to put new hardware into my computer right now....