Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 75
 DO NOT UPGRADE November 19, 2009
John - Fresh Air (Las Vegas)
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
I bought both Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional pre-release. Disregard all of the hype of the last 6 months - Windows 7 is NOT worth the cost, the time, the risks, or the hassles of upgrading. My most reliable computer is still my Windows XP.
In addition - if you have the Vista Home Premium - you can NOT use the Windows 7 Professional upgrade.
With Windows 7 you get slight improvements on the task bar and interface - however - you risk losing your data, having to do a complete reinstall of ALL of your programs, and then - when you finally have it installed - many of your programs will crash with Windows 7.
DO NOT UPGRADE - if you have a working system. The improvements are very marginal.
Disastrous! November 18, 2009
the unamusicologist
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I bought the computer for which this was destined three years ago. I'd intended to upgrade that machine to Vista, so I added a nice video card. Then Vista was released, and it proved to be disastrous. I passed. In the mean time, I doubled the RAM in my computer, and I watched when MS released the beta of Windows 7 as tech writers hailed the new OS as a huge improvement. With this in mind, I decided to take advantage of an offer to purchase the Windows 7 Pro upgrade for $100.
After a few days, I finally got around to installing the 32-bit version of Windows 7 on my computer. What a mistake! First, I had difficulties locating drivers for components made by well-known manufacturers: ever heard of Linksys? Belkin? Some of these I never found. Then, in the first week, I was getting the blue screen of death (BSOD) more than a half-dozen times per day, often in the middle of the night when no one was working on the computer. So much for stability!
The BSOD issue prompted me to install the 64-bit version. In this case as well, I have been unable to find drivers (including for network cards).
Now, contrast my Windows 7 experience with my Ubuntu 9.10 experience. I installed 64-bit Ubuntu. All the drivers were available, and the operating system is fast and stable. It's also free and easy to use, looks great, and includes tons of terrific free applications (including OpenOffice, the first office suite to give MS Office a run for its money).
I only have a few reasons to run Windows: I'm a software developer, and some of the applications I develop use technologies targeted at Windows. I also have other software (e.g., Quicken and the music notation program Sibelius) for which Linux versions aren't available. My solution will be to run Windows in a virtual machine. Otherwise, I'm going to stick with Ubuntu for the rest of my computing needs.
My recommendation: download Ubuntu and, if you're still a bit nervous about a new operating system, pick up a book like this: Beginning Ubuntu Linux, Fourth Edition. As for Windows? Don't even go there.
 To the People who don't understand the upgrade path from Microsoft November 18, 2009
M. Thompson (The Sunny Southwest, USA)
The upgrade works fine if you follow the upgrade path that Microsoft has taken the time to outline and document.
[...]
If you are trying to upgrade a "home" version of Vista to Win 7 Professional it's not going to work the way you expect, you have to get the "ultimate" upgrade and then it will work, without having to re-install your applications.
I'm very pleased with Windows 7 and it appears to be a good, logical next step in Microsoft's evolution of operating systems. I have experience over the past 25 years with Windows, Mac OS, Linux, DOS, so on so forth and think this is a solid entry into the market.
Anyways, I hope this post helps clear some of the confusion I'm seeing in these reviews.
Hardly if at all an improvement on Vista November 17, 2009
Daniel J. Knight (Albuquerque, NM)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
1) Can't make the taskbar show behind windows
2) Quicklaunch wasn't an option, but found a trick from a non-microsoft website to make it appear, and it looks ugly as there is no dividing line
3) The taskbar is an ugly glassy powder blue, gives me a headache
4) MSPaint has been mangled. Instead of simply putting zoom out on one toolbar, instead, some idiot put a zoom in and out toolbar or tab whatever separate from the main toolbar, and the main toolbar only has zoom in, so then you have to switch back and forth between tabs, what a moron designer. On top of that the color picker is off-center, so that when you pick a color it's picking the one above the pixel you have it over, really annoying if you don't have the time or aren't in the mood to learn to use something like adobe photoshop. But hopefully I can get the vista version of mspaint online (ahem: thank God for btjunkie and pbay).
5) If you use Windows 7 on a net book prepare to be extremely annoyed since the built in dialog boxes and menus (ones that have a lot of options) don't resize to fit the screen, so that you either have to set the taskbar to auto popup mode or move it to the left or right, if you don't you can't click the bottom buttons like yes, no, ok, enter, skip etc. The same is true for firefox dialog boxes beyond the basic "yes" or "no" type.
6) The network manager is WORSE then in Vista and XP, unlike those two the network manager is stuck in the right corner of the screen, and you can't switch on the fly when you're in the process of trying to connect, instead you're forced to wait till it's done or press cancel, and it's sluggish, at least on my netbook.
PROS:
1) Very fast SDHC scanning speed in comparison to vista and xp; big headache relief.
2) Seems to be much more stable than xp and vista, seems that way. I haven't experienced any crashes yet.
3) Seems to be more resistant to browser-hijacking trojans. I got the same one on vista as I did on windows 7, but it seems the trojans are more aggressive on firefox in vista then in windows 7, and the software from msoft was able to find a few and delete them, that might be why they aren't messing up firefox as bad on Windows 7.
Conclusion:
I get the impression that there are programmers at microsoft that deliberately do stupid things thinking that they will be asked to stay on the job longer by getting their managers to keep them in order to make improvements in the next version of Windows. Ff that's the case, and they are not fired, then they and their managers sbould be kicked in the balls extremely hard, in fact all of microsoft should be kicked in the balls extremely hard for incompetence and tried for treason against humanity, for being complicit in trying to drive world insane.
I can't even say this is an improvement on Windows XP or Vista since XP and Vista scale the dialog boxes correctly on netbooks, why is Windows 7 dumber? But then again on XP certain dialog boxes didn't show in the taskbar and you had to minimize and maximize folders to make them show, but that's not as annoying as having to move the task bar to the side to be able to click the buttons on dialog boxes. If you take a lot of photos using SDHC cards and don't mind keeping the taskbar to the side or on autohide when using a netbook, then I'd say get Windows 7. Hopefully, WindowBlinds can get rid of the ugly taskbar coloration. The end.
College Dropout November 15, 2009
Steven Krause (RSM)
1 out of 7 found this review helpful
Bill Gates obviously never took Unix 101, doesn't care to be bothered to spend a Billion or so to make a software product that actually works for years and years with no problems, and definitely got really poor scores on "plays well with others". Anyone that buys Windows 7 should also play the Lottery. I'll buy a windows product when I can make a folder named "prn" on it.
Showing reviews 6-10 of 75
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