Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 21-25 of 76
 Yup, I'm a criminal, haul me away November 10, 2009
Engineer (Minneapolis, MN)
2 out of 7 found this review helpful
You got me Microsoft. Trying to upgrade both windows and my hard drive at the same time without going through the 4 hour process of loading my old copy of windows onto the new drive. What was I thinking. That would be pirating, or something? Thank you for not allowing me to do such a rational thing Microsoft, and saving me from falling into a life of crime. I don't know what would have been next for me on my descent into chaos - meth lab, pulling the tags off my mattress. No wonder Apple is such a flash in the pan.
Isn't this supposed to be free for VIsta users? November 10, 2009
Krowl
0 out of 6 found this review helpful
I heard that Microsoft was giving Vista users a break on the price... what happened?
 Window 7 Upgrade, A flawless upgrade November 9, 2009
W. Neumiller (Kenosha, WI)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
What a nice change, at first Windows 7 struck me that it might not be what I'm looking for, but today I think it's great.
I made sure I had the latest drivers on my Vista machine before I started the upgrade. It completed an hour later without a single hitch and very little interaction from me.
Windows 7 is a great upgrade and includes all of the fixes that everybody wanted. I have nothing bad to say. Everything works and I will be putting the the windows XP virtual machine from Microsoft on it today.
One thing that struck me about Windows 7 is the fast boot, and how fast windows runs compared to Vista.
Get used to windows 7 and enjoy. two thumbs up from me!
 Windows 7 Pro 64bit - not ready for prime time as of early Nov 09 November 9, 2009
Bobby Bro (Houston, TX)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I feel the urge to review Windows 7 Professional 64bit so that I can warn potential buyers and let them know what they should plan on experiencing. I have lost lots of work hours in my experience with Win 7 Professional 64 bit so far, and have actually went to the Apple store in the mall 2 times and the Apple store online to price out a Mac Book pro after getting Win7 because I've been so frustrated. Keep in mind that no service packs have come out yet for Win 7 Pro 64 bit.
When Windows XP pro came out with SP1, I had to install it on about 20 systems, as we were involved in an IT startup operation for a company. I couldn't believe how stable XP Pro, SP1 was. But as XP has gone through the years, I guess all the updates have caused its stability to decline. I'm even suspicious that there might have been a few downgrades thrown in the updates to get consumers to want to move on. My experience with XP pro from about 2002 - 2007 was very positive.
But as XP started declining in performance, which seemed to coincide with the Windows Vista release, I started looking beyond, mostly beyond Microsoft. Finally Windows 7 came out and everyone was raving over it. Being the computer geek I am, I had to have it. I did do my research before purchasing the upgrade, which was only about $200.
What I like about it - the interface is nice. I deal with a lot of graphics and being able to see the large thumbnails in the folders is really nice. It seems like it's easier to navigate around to get to files. But it's a little bit like buying Blackberry's version of the I-phone. Apple came up with this. The OS really seems like it's got a better handle on security with the white listing feature, and the file permissions levels are more detailed, which would come in handy if I had many employees, AND IF THE OS WOULD WORK CORRECTLY. Microsoft does have a good positioning on the security features. Apple doesn't have to worry about security because they rarely get hacked into. Have you ever wondered why? And have you ever felt like you're playing a security game that you probably don't even need to be involved in if you switch to Mac?
What I Don't Like - It's really interesting that all of the sudden my Firefox installation simply disappeared. If that weren't suspicious, then I'd have to point to the fact that my taskbar icon for I-tunes keeps on disappearing. If those two things taken together didn't point to some unfair treatment of vendors whom Microsoft might deem competitors, then it's very interesting that my Adobe Flash (the program, not the viewer) doesn't seem to start or recognize files. In all of this, it seems to only be a problem with programs outside of Microsoft's realm. All of these programs mentioned are in direct competition with Microsoft products.
More about what I don't like - This 64bit OS (Win7 Professional) is making my laptop run so hot that I've had to rig up a way to prop it up and then kick on the room ceiling fan on the highest setting in order to cool my laptop so that the parts on the motherboard don't fry. I'm not over-exaggerating. I called my IT company about this and the guy I usually work with told me that he props his laptop up so that the fans can cool it better. That was his advice for mine. This is really interesting advice, and one of the reasons that I started looking into Mac Books. I'm getting tired of playing silly games. I feel like we're stepping back about 10 years.
Finally, the OS isn't loading any faster than XP. In XP's heyday, it blew away Win7 in startup time. Win7 64 bit is also showing programs as not responding quite often. I just had to shut it down because programs were acting like they were sleeping and I couldn't get them to get going. Not what you'd expect from Microsoft at this point in the game, right? Definitely not what I expected.
If I had a company with several employees, and I was starting from ground zero, I would go with all Macs. I have been looking at Macs since 2005, but the cost of migrating and the cost of Mac systems has kept me away so far. I currently have 4 work laptops for 3 of us. After this experience, I will definitely take the financial hit and move over to Macs because I can't trust Microsoft to play fairly, nor do I trust them to produce an OS that performs well enough for everyday workloads. It seems that they are really struggling with these new OS's for whatever reason.
Worthwhile upgrade November 9, 2009
S. Berg (Florida)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Awesome upgrade, October 29, 2009
I knew from the day that I installed the Windows pre-beta copy of Windows 7 that I received at a Microsoft event almost a year ago that Windows 7 was going tos bea huge improvement over Vista and XP. The first machine that I installed it on was a Lenovo T43 laptop. This machine could not reasonably run Vista (from a clean install)...I could not even surf the web on it. I installed a clean version of 32-bit Win7 on this machine and it turned it into a new machine. I did not have to download a single driver to get it to work and the whole install took less than a half an hour. Now this machine is perfectly functioning and I can use it to surf the web and stream youtube videos, etc. If you want to take full advantage of all the graphical elements in Windows 7 you will need more hardware power, but the point is that Windows 7 tends to upgrade your machine because of all the incremental performance enhancements that were made to the operating system.
I have installed Windows 7 on probably about 20 machines in the last year and I have not had any issues with it not installing drivers. That is good because I suggest you do a clean install. When I decided to upgrade my office machine back in August I used the File and Setting Transfer Wizard to back up all my programs and settings to a external drive and then did a clean install, then restore my programs and settings. This worked better than I expected it would. Almost everything I needed was where it should have been. The few things that were missing still could be found on my hard drive. I ran into one problem where I tried to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7. There was a problem late into the install process that force the Windows 7 install to be rolled back. It is due do some driver/service/hardware not acting the way it should that causes this, but it is happening to a few people out there I know. The good thing is that if there is a problem like this your original OS is restored perfectly.
There is not a lot of new features in the operating system. Some of my favorites are the new mobile broadband (cellular) integration into the wireless network user interface. You don't have to install a cumbersome application from the cellular card maker anymore (if you have a card that supports the new driver model) and you cellular driver doesn't install all the extra COM ports. Also, I really like how they handle the taskbar when you have more than one of the same application running. When you click on it you get a small screenshot of the application (if you have the aero theme support, otherwise it is more textual). This also works great with IE, because all the tabs are show no matter how many instances of IE are running at the same time. I hated trying find tabs if you have multiple instances of IE running that multiple tabs open in each of them...this problem is fixed now. Finally, XP mode is a nice feature that you can have with a little setup work. It allow you to run a virtual XP machine inside Windows 7. It takes a little work to setup and doesn't run you application as fast as they would natively. You need a faster CPU and extra memory if you plan on using this a lot. But, hopefully the average user doesn't need to use this.
So far, I have not found any application that ran on Vista that don't run on Windows 7.
Also, if you plan on using more than 3 GB of RAM you need to buy a 64-bit version of Windows 7.
Hope this helps.
Showing reviews 21-25 of 76
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