Windoze 7

[ljsanders]

Having been in the "I'm sticking with XP SP3" club for a long time after seeing lots of friends have grief with Vista.

I recently received a new work laptop and installed Windows 7 on it (after hearing a lot of positive feedback from it), and also installed my new home laptop with Windows 7.

I'm pleasantly surprised! Its been virtually bullet proof apart from the trying to find the odd 64bit driver problem, but I find these are resolved easily with a quick Google search and most OEM vendors are supplying 64bit drivers for Win7 now.

As for application backward compatibility. Don't bother with the Microsoft XP mode software, its slow and rubbish. The microsoft XP mode needs hardware assist in the processor anyway and you need the Professional version of Win7. A lot of the cheap T4x00 and T6x00 mobile processors don't have hardware assist anyway.

If your application needs to run in XP only (or its 32bit only) then install Sun VirtualBox and install XP on that.

Virtual Box will run on a non-hardware assist processor.

I've done it on my home laptop (with a T6500 processor) and installed Easymap 4 under XP mode (through Sun VirtualBox not MS) and got a USB serial converter working and talking to my MBE ECU.

So my experience has been very positive and I recommend it.

[DanB]

Unless you are a large corporate with a support department, I would move from XP to Win7.

For the vast majority of business and all home users, migrating to Win7 is a very good idea.  It has a lot of new features which are well worth having.

Such as what, for the average home user?

[davidgh]

Only really significant advantage for me in the upgrade (and, being an IT muppet, this may well be soluble in other ways) was that the 64 bit system comes in the 7 box (i.e. I had the choice). Life improved because (and I hadn't realised) 32 bit system had been addressing less than half of my RAM

[dombanks]

ive used xp on my laptop for years and its always been good.

i used vista home (basic?) on a work pc for 2 not too long after it came out and had no problems what so ever, granted some of the bit i bought i had to get the drivers from the manufacturor rather than on the cd in the box but often it just did it for me.

my mum and dad have been using vista home summat for years with no problems either.

i cant wait to get my new pcto have a bash at 7 as for all my experience everytime there was an new system ive never had a problem. if you want to use it give it a go esp if you need to do a fresh install

[steve_m]

Unless you are a large corporate with a support department, I would move from XP to Win7.

For the vast majority of business and all home users, migrating to Win7 is a very good idea.  It has a lot of new features which are well worth having.

like needing an extra 25 gigs of HDD space and 10gigs more RAM  

It does need a bit more disk space but not that much, I have it running on a netbook, a Compaq 110 or something, 160 GB hard disk which is hardly big these days and 2 GB of memory.  Really quite swift and works well.

[steve_m]

Unless you are a large corporate with a support department, I would move from XP to Win7.

For the vast majority of business and all home users, migrating to Win7 is a very good idea.  It has a lot of new features which are well worth having.

Such as what, for the average home user?

Much better device driver support, it'll download drivers automatically for example.  Not necessarily a benefit for me or you but for Mr and Mrs Average, will make life much easier.  This even works for legacy hardware like old printers with a parallel port.

Much easier to share a printer and files on a home network - you can set up a home network without even knowing you're  doing it . . . I'm not sure if this is good or bad but it will help a lot of people !

Depending on which version you get you also get Bitlocker which is very useful . . .

All new printers (and other hardware) are coming with Win 7 drivers and XP will be phased out from driver support by most companies by the end of this year.

Even though MS claim to be supporting it all they're really doing is releasing hot fixes for critical security issues, not compatibility or functional issues.

[Steve Kirk]

Another thumbs up for Win 7 , just upgraded my desktop , came with 7 and i have to say i like it over XP. It;s a bit Mac-ish , very user friendly.

Mee likee

SK

[Blatman]

The main difference between home and Pro versions of XP revolve around networking and file sharing across a network. XP home lacks some of the "tools" required for these sorts of functions, whereas XP Pro includes the required tools. XP Home on a netbook is cut down even further IME, and it's frustrating to use even for someone who knows how to get around XP Pro.

As home networking has become far more popular with the advent of wireless (not predictable when XP was launched in 2001) the home versions of Vista and Windows 7 include these networking and file sharing tools with easy to configure wizards. For the average home user, these may well be a benefit, but if you want the rest of the "tools" for networking, like Hyper-terminal or a proper DOS interface, I don't think they are included by default in Vista and Windows 7 home versions so you need to buy... er... Pro or Ultimate versions (or whatever they are called, and NOT Home Premium either...)

Vista is resource hungry, 7 less so, with reports that even slightly older equipment actually performs better with Windows 7, BUT that's because it is necessary to do a clean install from anything other than Vista, so I kind of expect the performance boost. Lets see how these devices perform when they're loaded up with applications and programmes.

For what it's worth, in a back to back test, my brothers Dell Vista laptop, new and out the box, takes longer to boot than my 5 year old HP NW8240 with a 75% full hard drive with a whole bunch of stuff in the startup menu. Then, on the Vista machine, as soon as you want to look at Device Manager or some other system configuration utility, it takes twice as many clicks to get to the right screen because of a thing called User Access Control (UAC). UAC can be turned off, but I rarely see a Vista machine with this annoying "utility" deactivated. UAC is the 21st century version of that b****y annoying animated paper clip in Microsoft Office.

Gonna stop now. I can feel a rant coming on

[hilux]

I recommend staying with XP pro but having said that I needed an upgrade so got a cheap Dell with W7

My major gripe is that I cant synchronise Outlook on my new PC with others such as laptops with Vista Home basic (unless someone knows a man that can help)

My other gripe is that Outlook has gone (why???) and it keeps trying to default to Windows mail so I use Outlook 2003 on it.

I didnt like it at first and it isnt so backwards compatible but its grown on me.

Vista was pants.

Still its good to hear that MS are supporting XP for some time as we have other PC`s that use it.

[Fat Albert]

I simply can't believe the miss-information and disinformation that is being peddled on this thread

1. Vista is not a 'bad' operating system, there were an enormous number of problems trying to upgrade from XP to Vista as well as a lot of users installing it on inadequate hardware. I have dozens of clients with thousands of Vista desktops who find the cost of management reduced as compared with XP

2. Windows 7 is not a new operating system, it is Vista without all the 'features' that made Vista such a challenge to install but with an improved user interface and more efficiently coded kernel, list management and virtual memory management making it faster on any hardware and much faster on low spec hardware compared to Vista

3. There is a path to upgrade from XP to Win 7 without losing any data or re-installing any software. Just because Microsoft tell you something is so doesn't make it true. PC Mover from Laplink is just one of a number of third party products that will do the job, I have personally upgraded a wide variety of laptops and desktops to Win 7 (all flavours) from XP (all flavours) with no issues other than those you'd get trying to use your old applications on a clean install.

Personally, I would choose to do a clean install, but I don't have the problem of not having application media! I promise you it can be done and there are no performance issues, meaning the computer will run as fast or faster under W7 as it did under XP, of course, it would run faster still if a clean install is performed!

There is nothing wrong with XP, it works. W7 works better.

, quietly attempts to slip away after stoking the fire>