Win7 V XP - My opinion

[verytalldave]

Just had my first "hands-on" experience of Windows 7 on a friends brand new PC. Spent about 3 hours downloading "stuff" for him and optimising it.
I am still running XP and to be honest, I cant see any major (or minor for that matter) advantage over XP.
OK, his new PC is allot faster than my old clockwork machine, but as far as operating systems are concerned, I cannot see why anyone should want to upgrade unless they feel they need more than 4G of RAM.
I dont feel quite so bad now about not bothering..............

Vista must really have been a crock of **** for MS to release W7 so quickly.

 

[flango]

I agree with you I am running one laptop on XP SP3 and one on 7 both perform well,7 has some niffty features over XP if you use them otherwise they are similar. Windows 7 has been perfectly stable which is a major improvement over that pile of ****e they call Vista. Will keep them both on separate OS and see how we go but is it worth the extra to upgrade? Depends on what you use your machine for IMHO.

 

[Stratman]

I recently bought a new laptop with Vista 64bit and a free upgrade to Windows 7, so luckily I only spent two or three weeks with Vista.

Windows 7 has been super stable, but has loads of nagware. By that I mean virtually every time I want to install something, move something or change something a "do you really want to do this?" window pops up, meaning I have to stop doing what I want to do and deal with Uncle Bill's patronising guff instead. I am the only 'user' on my lappy, and naturally have all the priveleges, but if I want to copy or move a file the message pops up "You need administrator priveleges to perform this action". What's that all about?

 

[Gollom]

I recently bought a new laptop with Vista 64bit and a free upgrade to Windows 7, so luckily I only spent two or three weeks with Vista.

Windows 7 has been super stable, but has loads of nagware. By that I mean virtually every time I want to install something, move something or change something a "do you really want to do this?" window pops up, meaning I have to stop doing what I want to do and deal with Uncle Bill's patronising guff instead. I am the only 'user' on my lappy, and naturally have all the priveleges, but if I want to copy or move a file the message pops up "You need administrator priveleges to perform this action". What's that all about?

You can turn that off in Control Panel/Action Centre/Security/User Access Control

 

[splang]

Windows 7 is MUCH quicker to boot.
Plus I get to upgrade from VISTA to 7 for £30 (includes VAT etc) which ain't the costliest thing ever....
(good being a teacher - holidays too!)

 

[para alpha]

Running windows 7 on my HP NC6120. The reason for that is I kept getting the BSOD waffling about a PCI Problem. Tried for days to source a solution to the problem but I had no luck. So I installed Windows 7... Still working! No problems with it really.

 

[Merc Owner 2B]

Vista must really have been a crock of **** for MS to release W7 so quickly.

Interesting view but did you know that Win7 should have actually been Win 2007 but they couldn't get all the features to work so they released the bit that did (most of the time!) work and called it Vista!

So, to an extent, it's true to say that Win7 is what Vista "should have been".

The upgrade is worthwhile as it's a more stable platform with a lot less hardware driver conflicts and bear in mind that XP won't be receiving updates from MS after next year.

I've been beta testing Win7 since Nov 2008 and can say it's the best Windows yet. It's the first time that a new operating system actually speeds up an existing pc due to it's superior memory and resource management.

 

[flango]

bear in mind that XP won't be receiving updates from MS after next year.

Thought MS had guaranteed XP updates until end of 2012 minimum? or at least thats what was in the IT press.

 

[Merc Owner 2B]

Thought MS had guaranteed XP updates until end of 2012 minimum? or at least thats what was in the IT press.

Yes, true. I was thinking of the corporate/commercial stuff that I use. However, once this stops I sometimes wonder how much effort and skill they put into the home/personal pc market.

 

[flango]

Yes, true. I was thinking of the corporate/commercial stuff that I use. However, once this stops I sometimes wonder how much effort and skill they put into the home/personal pc market.

Yep totally agree with you, you cant imagine them putting much effort at all into a legacy OS. From what I've seen so far I'm quite happy to make the change to 7 as and when.

 

[Merc Owner 2B]

From what I've seen so far I'm quite happy to make the change to 7 as and when.

Yes that's how I feel regarding our home PCs. I use MY MOVIES to rip and store dvds and distribute them around the house via network drives. The new version of this software is much slicker with faster access times. However, it will only run on WIN 7 so my "as and when" is coming up fast!

I also want to record HD TV (via windows media center) which I haven't managed with XP. And it's always best to use new hardware before embarking upon a new operating system (well that's what I'm telling SWMBO!) So finances will hold me back for a while!

 

[Dryce]

Interesting view but did you know that Win7 should have actually been Win 2007 but they couldn't get all the features to work so they released the bit that did (most of the time!) work and called it Vista!

Current revisionist history of Vista version 25a.1 - author: you

Basically Microsoft have two problems with Windows. First is that they have had quite an ambitious internal roadmap of features over the last decade and a half which they have not managed to fulfil. Second is they get spooked every so often by Apple.

Win7 falls short of some of of the ambitions they had for Vista. So your revision of history doesn't ring true.

And rather than Win7 being released because Apple spooked them - they spooked themselves with Vista this time round and had to remedy the situation.

 

[Dryce]

Windows 7 is MUCH quicker to boot.

Was given a four year old Centrino based laptop with XP Pro to look at by a friend yesterday. It booted so fast I wondered if I had blacked out for a while during the sequence.

 

[Bobby Dazzler]

I know of at least two very large global companies who have made a strategic decision to stick with XP until at least 2013.

Windows 7 seems pretty good from what I hear - I'll know over Christmas when I have time to have a play on a new laptop.

 

[crockers]

Have upgraded both our laptops to windows 7. Boot up is so much faster than the old vista. But neither are as fast as the iMac running Snow Leopard.

 

[Alfie]

Just had my first "hands-on" experience of Windows 7 on a friends brand new PC. Spent about 3 hours downloading "stuff" for him and optimising it.
I am still running XP and to be honest, I cant see any major (or minor for that matter) advantage over XP.
OK, his new PC is allot faster than my old clockwork machine, but as far as operating systems are concerned, I cannot see why anyone should want to upgrade unless they feel they need more than 4G of RAM.
I dont feel quite so bad now about not bothering..............

Vista must really have been a crock of **** for MS to release W7 so quickly.

I am very interested in this thread as I too went to vista on a new home PC. It was so awful and slow that I went back to XP and wondered why I had ever bothered to go to vista. It really did put me off. So much so that my view of win7 is now clouded by the vista (pardon the pun) experience. I really will wait a long time before going to win7 now as XP is stable and does what I want.

 

[Stratman]

Despite my earlier gripes, I find W7 a good OS. It does indeed boot and shut down noticeably more quickly than XP, and its programme compatibility mode goes as far back as Win95.

IF you check the version number of Windows 7, you'll find it's actually Windows 6

 

[st13phil]

Thought MS had guaranteed XP updates until end of 2012 minimum? or at least thats what was in the IT press.

For the definitive support situation regarding Microsoft products see here.

 

[Soltan]

The general consensus is that if you’re with XP SP3 and it works then stick with it. If you are on Vista then get rid and switch to Windows 7 as it’s faster, slicker and more stable.

There is no compelling argument to upgrade from XP unless you want to take advantage of more than 4GB of RAM. MS have spent a long time getting XP stable and it’s well supported by most software.

Even from a gaming front I personally don’t find DirectX 10 anything to shout about (in terms of visual impact) and ditto for DirectX 11, although better support for multi-core is always good.

 

[spinaltap]

I upgraded my copy of XP Pro SP3 (32bit) to Windows 7 Pro (64bit) on my Macintosh (in VirtualBox) and all has gone well so far.

I run Office 2007 Enterprise (my wife uses Publisher) with ease.

It's still not as good as OSX Snow Leopard, though.