Summary: Windows 7 is coming soon, and all reports are that it's a better, more reasonable Windows than Vista. Should you switch?
My computer is an Acer PC Model Aspire M3201; Processor AMD Phenom(tm) 9100e Quad-Core (x4) 1.80 GHz; 3.00 GB RAM; 32-bit Operating System. At the present time I run Windows Vista Home Premium with Internet Explorer 8, but it crashes quite a lot. I have been thinking of trying out Windows 7. Would you recommend this and how would i go about it?
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Early reports on Windows 7 are very promising. Some have even gone so far as to call Windows 7 the best "service pack" for Windows Vista ever.
After having played with it some myself, I have to agree: Windows 7 looks very promising.
But as I write this, it has not yet been released. That means that there are serious issues using anything you might have downloaded.
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Patience is required for Windows 7. I would not switch to it just yet.
The only copies of Windows 7 that are available for download as of this writing fall into three categories:
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Beta versions
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Release Candidate (RC) versions
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Pirated versions
Beta versions are technically not supposed to be available, though I expect they're out there. Install one and I believe one of the first things Windows Update will recommend you do us update to the RC build.
It's not that difficult to get a Windows 7 release candidate build, at least until some time next month. Check the Microsoft site and only download from there, so as to avoid any potential malware added by others.
A pirated version is, of course, quite illegal and I won't address it here further.
The most obvious problem with the test versions (Beta or RC) is that they will expire - quite literally sometime next year they will stop working (or at least severely cripple themselves) and require that you install the actual released version of Windows 7. In addition, once the final version is available officially the test versions won't be supported - not by Microsoft, and not by any software or hardware vendor you might need help from.
Finally, when the time comes that you must upgrade your test version, the recommend approach is, as I understand it, reformat and reinstall. (That's my recommendation for all paths to Windows 7, but that's a discussion for another day.)
Do not install the test versions as a way switch to Windows 7.
Wait for Windows 7 to be released and obtain it through official, legal, channels. Yes, that might be a couple of months from the time you read this.
What you can do is test.
For example, I've used Parallels Workstation to install a copy of the Windows 7 as a virtual machine on my Windows XP desktop. That's given me a great opportunity to test and play with it to see what it's all about without impacting anything else on my machine. If you have a spare machine, that's another great way to test it out.
If you truly want to try it on your machine - pretending it's your final upgrade to Windows 7 - then the process is actually pretty simple, if a little time consuming:
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Take a full image backup of your machine. Make sure that you have whatever tools are required to be able to restore this image to an empty hard disk later.
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Install Windows 7 (probably the RC version at this point) as either a clean install or an upgrade.
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Play with Windows 7 RC as much as you like.
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When you are done, restore your machine to that image you took in the first step.
This approach, and the only proper way to use Windows 7 before it's released, is to consider it, and everything you do with it, disposable.
If that's not a viable approach for you, then I strongly suggest you wait at least until the release version is available through official channels. (And even then I typically caution to wait for "a while" as others flush out any issues that might remain.)
The good news is that, particularly if you're running Vista, Windows 7 may be an appropriate upgrade when it is available.
Kind of like a service pack.
Related:
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What will happen when Microsoft stops supporting Windows XP? As official support for Windows XP is phased out, what you can expect from Microsoft will change. Fortunately, it will phase out over a fairly long time.
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Should I get Windows Vista or XP? When purchasing a new machine if offered a choice, Windows Vista may or may not be a clear choice over Windows XP. We'll look at the issues involved.
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Can I switch from Windows Vista back to XP? Windows Vista comes preinstalled on most new computers these days. You can typically revert to Windows XP if you like, but not without a little pain.
Article C3823 - July 30, 2009
There is no point NOT getting software until a couple of months after it comes out simply to let the patches and fixes come out. The more people that use the software, the quicker things are fixed. Also, W7 is the first OS from Microsoft to have both public Beta and RC which means that it is alot more stable than previous Windows OS's.
Posted by: Pookey at August 4, 2009 11:57 PMI'm impressed that a lot of the comments I've seen on this forum are rather more balanced than I've seen on some others.
Yes, Vista IS a good operating system (if you can just overlook its thirst for resources). It has annoying features, but it IS faster than XP in most of the things that you and I want to do every day, like web browsing and file handling.
I've tried Win7 a couple of times and for me, the magic hasn't worked yet... Win7 is being hyped in some quarters as the next Windows 95, but I can't see it.
For me the turnoff is the Start Menu, which works exactly like DOSShell. Every sub-menu occupies the entire window, and you have to click on the sub-menu title to open it (you can no longer hover, and menus don't scroll across the screen, so you no longer have a graphical representation of your menu tree). You can't customise it by dragging and dropping; you have to manually edit a system file.
Clearly MS have decided that Windows 95 represented a wrong turn, so they are going back to their DOS roots...
Posted by: Alan Masterman at August 5, 2009 5:10 AMI have to disagree with Alan's comment that Vista is "faster than XP in most of the things that you and I want to do every day". It's not. And has never been. Vista is criticised for good reason. It has it's moments, but overall it's not enough of an improvement over XP. The community at large has spoken, which is why we have Windows 7 (Vista 2.0).
Posted by: snickers at August 5, 2009 6:04 AMCome on, Snickers, you can't be ENTIRELY serious.
We don't have Windows 7 because "the community has spoken". We have it because of "technology pull" - also known as "innovate or die". In other words, in a competitive industry, MS and the rest HAVE to keep coming up with something (which appears to be) new. That's what modern capitalism is about.
As to Vista being faster: I accept that this can be platform-dependent, to a degree. For example, if you only have 1GB of RAM, XP will leave Vista for dead. On my Acer Extensa 5620, Vista is faster than XP, and that is evident even on an intuitive assessment, without benchmarking. This is probably due to Vista's superior dual-core management.
For me - and I agree that this IS subjective - Vista wins mainly because it supports Windows Classic format.
Do you remember how we queued in the streets to buy Win95 and Win98? Do you remember what a stunning revolution it was to edit the Start menu with drag-and-drop? To be able to scroll the entire Start menu across the screen? To open a menu just by hovering the cursor over it? All of these features have been jettisoned in Win7.
Posted by: Alan Masterman at August 5, 2009 8:19 AMIf you are into sport, you will be familiar with the adage: always change a losing game, never change a winning game. Windows Classic was a winning game. Problem is, it's no longer novel, it's no longer EXCITING. So you have to come up with something different. Different is BETTER! Different is EXCITING!
I've been using Win7 for a total of about 40 hours of real work so far. I found that until I REALLY started using it, I didn't find any of the problems. There are some fairly big annoyances. For me one of the biggest is that the internet connectivity drops every so often (for me it's about once in 5 hours). This is a very well-documented problem; just look in any of the good Win7 Support forums. Another annoyance is that the "folders losing their settings" problem from XP is back, and the well-known XP registry fix (BagMRU size) doesn't work in Win7. These are the kind of problems that you don't find until you've spent some serious time with Win7. If you're willing to be a geek and find workarounds for the problems, then go for it. But I wouldn't really recommend it yet for non-geek users. Wait for the retail release. I'm hoping that some of these big annoyances are fixed in the final version -- although judging by the commentary on MS TechNet, it doesn't look good for that to happen...
Posted by: Geoff Walker at August 6, 2009 10:55 PMI wonder if W7 is just a remarketed version of XP(with some Vista appearance options added)...
Posted by: snail at August 10, 2009 12:04 PMI'm sticking with XP and Linux for nonprofessional software.
Yeah..!!! u should try to windows 7 for the free RC Test version from microsoft as the case that it would be expire near by future is not a loss for u if u just install it in a virtual machine which is also a free software from microsoft.com..so try it until March 2010.
Posted by: SURAJ at August 12, 2009 5:13 AM@Alan
The main reason for innovation at Microsoft is to keep businesses happy NOT consumers. We consumers are little bugs, generating coins for Microsoft, not notes, where notes are $100 bills and coins are a couple of cents. Big business is what give MS their money, not consumers. Big business has said, "we don't like Vista's resource hogging and lack of integration for updates and service packs," so MS has gone and dealt with their problems.
Posted by: Pookey at September 3, 2009 1:12 AMthat's a lot to pay for a service pack. I might have one my kids in University a copy for me of Win 7 for $30.
Posted by: Mark at October 18, 2009 2:50 PMnow it has been released so u should tell about it in detail.......as many want...
Posted by: vikash at November 4, 2009 6:37 AM