Upgrading to Windows 7

[porteous]

Just upgraded my PC from Vista (which I never liked) to Windows 7. First impressions ae good, but am I alone in being a little p****d off that Microsoft insist on selling me a hugely expensive operating system which consistently breaks down in various ways, is obsolete in six months and works more and more slowly as time goes on, for no obvious reason. Shouldn't upgrades be free when all they seem yo do is address flaws in the original product? Apple/Mac ???????

 

[Bromptonaut]

Seems to be a concensus that Vista is a pile of poo and migrating to 7 makes sense. But never having Vista and staying with XP is just fine.

 

[accountantpete]

In my own little world I can't see the reason for Windows 7 apart from keeping the $$ flowing in. XP does everything I want.

The next step is that they will stop supporting XP - but that should be a couple of years away.

 

[threebikesmcginty]

Vista was the installed OS on my work laptop - seems ok to me. For Windows.

 

[numbnuts]

I had to move to windows 7 as my XP laptop was getting old, the first think I noticed that 7 "home" does not support infra-red but pro does, so both PDAs are US, the next was GPS I had to buy a new lead why I don't know, but after that it has been fine, but I'm really annoyed that I can't use my PDAs and later will have to buy a new one

 

[subaqua]

I had to move to windows 7 as my XP laptop was getting old, the first think I noticed that 7 "home" does not support infra-red but pro does, so both PDAs are US, the next was GPS I had to buy a new lead why I don't know, but after that it has been fine, but I'm really annoyed that I can't use my PDAs and later will have to buy a new one

if the laptop was getting old and needed to be replaced due to hardware issues , then the old XP disk that came with your old laptop can be used to put XP on the new Laptop.

would a USB IR dongle not overcome the IR problem?

Windows 7 , according to the IT dept where i work, is what Vista was supposed to be. Vista was rushed out incomplete. Might be Bull**** though

 

[johnsie]

Just upgraded my PC from Vista (which I never liked) to Windows 7. First impressions ae good, but am I alone in being a little p****d off that Microsoft insist on selling me a hugely expensive operating system which consistently breaks down in various ways, is obsolete in six months and works more and more slowly as time goes on, for no obvious reason. Shouldn't upgrades be free when all they seem yo do is address flaws in the original product? Apple/Mac ???????

No problems here - except I can no longer use the "record what you hear" feature on my sound card. I can still record live radio and vinyl and cassette, but not content played through iPlayer for example.

 

[ian turner]

Vista was the installed OS on my work laptop - seems ok to me. For Windows.

I had Windows ME installed on one of my PCs at one point and never noticed any excessive
problems with crashes contrary to popular (read as "forum") based opinion.
Microsoft sell operating systems, Apple sell mp3 players er phones hmm computers where the OS
is not actually meant to used on non Apple equipment so it's not their bread and butter.
Apples latest variant aka Snow Leopard seems to have caused fun and games for a whole
load of users used to "it just works" thinking Not forgetting the latest iPhones problems
with preset Alarms, Daylight saving and Year changes
Note that Windows 7 comes with a Windows XP emulator but only in the more expensive versions
as their line of thinking is that legacy support is a minority requirement that you should be prepared to
pay for e.g IR support. Hency full XP emulation is only available in the Pro versions.
If the laptop came with an XP cd then odds on it's OEM and won't like a different platform plus will lack sata drivers and won't see the harddrive after installation so will require playing around with nlite just to create a cd with the relevant drivers. Then there is the possibility that there are no xp drivers for some of the hardware.
A USB IR dongle is still IR and home premium would still not support it.
Vista was an attempt to maintain market share by releasing a new product. It was meant to include a new filing system (WinFS) which was dropped and didn't make it to Windows 7 either. Mind you theres all those folk trying to format terrabyte drives to FAT32 because the PS3 doesn't recognise NTFS

 

[Inertia]

I definately think Windows 7 is worth it, and considering how many different configurations and combinations of hardware and software there are nowadays I think Microsoft do a pretty good job keeping bugs to a minimum (and Im no microsoft fanboy)

Look at Apple, they have a consistant base (iphone) and they still get bugs on it.

Its a lot better than vista, vista is sluggish wheras windows 7 is lightning on identical hardware. I wouldnt recopmmend upgrading every time microsft bring in a new version though. Xp did what I wanted for a long time but when 7 ceme out I tried the beta and as it ran very well and had a lot of improvements I decided to give it a try.

 

[tyred]

<cough> Linux <cough>

 

[Riverman]

Ubuntu is normally perfectly fine for browsing, email, flash video etc and there's quite a lot of interesting useful apps you can get on linux like Amarok. + It's free, free as in beer, free as in freedom.

 

[Riverman]

If we could run Microsoft Office on Linux we'd be off like a shot.

To be honest for basic documents, I find google docs suffices. Open Office, although powerful, I've always found not very userfriendly.

 

[ian turner]

Ubuntu is normally perfectly fine for browsing, email, flash video etc and there's quite a lot of interesting useful apps you can get on linux like Amarok. + It's free, free as in beer, free as in freedom.

And the command line is very powerful
Most folks only develop an interest in more than 6 basic applications when they have an iphone and think they need an application to help them choose their trainers.

 

[redjedi]

Ubuntu is normally perfectly fine for browsing, email, flash video etc and there's quite a lot of interesting useful apps you can get on linux like Amarok. + It's free, free as in beer, free as in freedom.

+1

Unless you run Windows specific software then you should definitely give a Linux OS a try.

I installed it when I built my new computer a couple of years ago, as I couldn't afford Windows 7. I can't play games, but I don't want to anyway, and it does everything else I could need.

Every now and again I get stuck because a piece of software won't work, but there are lot's of people writing work a rounds or there's a Linux friendly free version.

We've been using Windows 7 in the office for a few months now, and all the "new" features that people have found, I was using long before on Ubuntu

 

[Saddle bum]

Windows 7 is what Vista should have been.