Considering Windows 7 Professional for three recently acquired semi bussiness systems. They currently have licenced XP professional loaded on them, and if I "upgrade" to Win 7 I would want to do a clean load rather than preserve anything on them as I don't know what may be lurking. But there again is it worth the significant cost and hassle to load Win 7 ?? My original idea was to have Win 7 to future proof having been stuck on Win2K which now even gives issues on ebay!!
So: is anyone running Win7 professional and is it all it is cracked up to be, or is it a P.O.S. ?
It's difficult to say unless we know what your concerns are. I replaced my XP PC and installed W7 Professional on the new PC. Still not great, but *much* better than XP.
A clean install is definitely the way to go. And hassle-wise you'll probably find W7 easier than XP, assuming reasonably modern hardware.
My Windows 7 Pro retail cost me 84 quid on Amazon which isn't bad IMO.
I had clung to XP from my old machine to the new one (even though it arrived with Vista) about 3 months ago several customers began to show an interest in Win7, so I thought I'd better upgrade, expecting to put up with many features I'd dislike ...
Well turns out there's not much to dislike after all, and quite a lot that it does well. It installed like a breeze (had almost all drivers our of the box the same way that Linux has done for years).
I did upgrade the machine to an SSD at the same time which gave it a bit of a boost, and have since upgraded from 4GB to 8GB, but that's mainly due to the VMs I also run on the machine, 3 or 4GB would be fine for normal business use, 2GB would start to be a pinch.
Run the Win7 Upgrade Advisor first to check for show stoppers such as incompatible video hardware
IIRC, clean install is the *only* way from XP, it's not possible to do an in-place upgrade.
You don't give a system spec for the machines, but I've put win7 on several older XP-era machines, and not had a problem.
It does keep you 'recent' in regard to software compatability and support.
If the machines are 64-bit compatable, and you wish to have more than 3 GB or so of RAM, the jump to win7 is the time to consider going 64-bit too. However, the older XP-era machines may not justify this.
Personally I think W7 Pro is fine. We have maybe 20 machines with this in the office.
IMO though if you want to use your machines in an office and you NEED to connect to a domain and/or NEED remote desktop server I would buy new machines with W7 Pro because for £300 - £350 you will get what you want and probably very superior hardware.
If the machines are actually for home use then you can get W7 Home Premium "Family Pack" from Amazon and this gives you 3 (upgrade) W7 installs for ~£100
Main diff from win 7 home premium is the XP emulator as far as I know. PCs at work have this, my Home Premium does not. However, I made an effort to get rid of all XP stuff, so thats no problem for me. Is win 7 in general any good ? Its just like Vista was (after the first service pack), with slightly more fancy graphics and a better Media Center. Its strange how according to the media, Vista was a hopeless disaster but Win 7 is amazing. The guts of the OS are virtually the same ! Simon.
I think it all depends on the programs you want to run and what you want to do. In a small office that I "support" , the owner has been running Win 7 on her laptop for many months now and has finally decided it's time to look at replacing all her 7 desktop machines to move her staff to Win 7.
I work with audio and have been battling problems. One machine has an ATI chipset and I eventually had to manually install ATI "usb filter drivers" to get some usb audio to work. I still have unresolved problems with ATI Catalyst installers and at least one other driver installer crashes.
There are problems with the low quality sample rate conversion (XP has high quality options) that can affect audio quality very badly - YouTube can be affected. Sample rate conversion is a feature of the Win7 audio mixer.
There are badly labelled settings in the Win7 audio control panel, and it is possible to think you have switched features off when they are still active but not visible.
These are the sort of things I've seen. Presumably in other specialist areas others have found similar glitches.
I have been running these trials on a pair of laptops here - one 32-bit and one 64-bit. There seems no doubt that 64-bit will be the main one in future.
XP Mode is useful. One person I know installed their old Quickbooks (or maybe Quicken) on to it and it ran fine, but she discovered that there was no way to activate the licence on the new machine in the UK since the company had retreated back to the USA.
I'd probably move to Win7 Pro 64 if I were reduced to one machine, but I am typing this on XP because Turnpike won't run on the 64-bit version.
whatever they did to W7 over vista, it made a much better job of it, going by the vista laptop we have here and a couple of machines (one pretty old, one fairly new with W7 on it) Seems , smoother, faster and still after about a year this desktop boots much faster into w7 than it does into it's win XP install.
I've found the same, comparing my daughters' Vista HP machines with my Win7 desktop; all are 32bit with 3GB RAM. GUI and speed of operation aren't that different.
Well, you could switch off a lot of the silly stuff. The other problem was drivers, which were becoming available. And they needed to be rewritten due to the guts ! I had some free stuff that packed up because the encryption DLLs had changed. One I had eventually paid for failed, and it started working when I downloaded the new demo version, since the vital DLL had been installed. Only reasonable, I had paid for it after all ! Simon.
I have XP on the desktops and get on OK with that. Bought a laptop with Vista and positively hated it. To the point where I just about installed XP - but it came with a free upgrade to Win 7 (when it came out) so waited. And I'm very happy with it.
It must have been Quickbooks, then. I don't remember the exact details, but I do know that different versions are not compatible. I think the situation was that her old version would not run on Win 7, after installing on Win7 XPMode, she found she had to ring a number for registration that didn't exist. She then made contact with the parent company in the US, who said that there was no longer an option to register the software outside the US for legal reasons. I understand that she worked with her accountant to either change the version or the program.
The statements elsewhere that Win 7 is just like Vista SP1 do not hold true for the audio elements. They look the same, but the way the audio is dealt with internally is different. The developers have made videos about this that can be found on the Microsoft site if you persevere.
I moved one machine through XP, Vista 32, Win 7 32 then finally Win7 64, working on audio problems throughout. The are changes between Vista and Win7 and usb audio was bad in Win7, not in Vista (the ATI issue referred to above). Of course some of the problems may be that Win 7 drivers are still catching up.
I know that banging on about the audio is pretty irrelevant. It's just that if other departments at Microsoft have performed similar re-writes, there could well be subtle problems elsewhere as well.
Having said all that, Win 7 has a much better feel to it than Vista. My Vista laptops all seem very slow and seem to spend ages sitting churning away with the HD light flashing.
It's not a consequence of it being 64 bit, as I said, it worked well enough under Win7 64 RC, however they changed something in the OS which is incompatible with turnpike - If you actually read posts in demon.ip.support.turnpike following win7 SP1, you will see the general unhappiness that the problem wasn't addressed
If you want to know what the actual problem is, you can always JFGI its been discussed on numerous occasions
Not sure of Geoffs point - possibly something about it not being a problem of working under 64 bits per se as it did work ok in the RC? , but you are correct Bill, Turnpike still doesn't work under 64 bit window 7 - due to a bug in windows introduced with the release version, which they still haven't bothered to fix, so probably never will (something to do with the spawning of the 32 bit explorer process that turnpike requires IIRC)
I never had any problems with Vista and found it more stable than XP. It seemed to me that some people had problems with Vista because they put it on under-specified machines.
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