Just upgraded
the home tower to Win7. It had been sluggish lately so it was due; I tend to keep the OS on SATA 0 and data on SATA1, and I had a fresh clean Win XP pro on a spare drive but I thought, why not see if 7 is any improvement in speed, and so far, it’s ok.
Winrot is a pain but it’s the price you have to pay to get a computer that will do the shit I need it to do.
Been using 7 in work environs for a couple of years now. Starting to see some windows 8 boxes.
I guess MS thought 7 was making people too productive because 8 flat out sucks.
If I could find a cheap copy of win 7 ultimate Pro I might be tempted to bring my home box up into more current settings.
You don’t need Ultimate. Ultimate has stuff you’d never use at home (I know, I’m running a copy right now, and it was a waste of money — but since I “go to work” via this computer, I thought at the time it might be handy to have the extra features). The regular Pro version is all you need for a home box.
In fact there’s darn little business case for using Ultimate anywhere, so far as I can see, unless you have unusual security or internationalization requirements.
Here ya go: 7 Pro, $124 at Amazon.
Thanks Nathan, though my home box is 32 bit in nature…might have to bite the bullet and get one.
I would love to bump my system’s memory to its maximum (8 GB I think) and install Win 7. I think the performance gain would be worth it.
Of course I could get most of the same benefit, more or less, from just wiping the drive and reinstalling from scratch. This computer was new in 2007, after all….
Live to serve: The 32-bitness.
Ed, in essence an upgrade to Windows 7 is a fresh install. You can’t directly upgrade XP to 7. It will offer to save your Windows directory in a renamed space on your C: drive, but that’s the best you can do. My approach has been to run a full system backup to an external drive, then either format the existing C: drive and install 7, or install it on a new disk entirely.
Be aware with Windows 7 that any old standard XP backups you’ve made will be completely useless under Windows 7. You have to buy something like Acronis True Image (which I highly recommend, BTW) in order to open the old .BKF format files under Windows 7.
Frankly I not only strongly recommend buying True Image for that purpose, but for general backup purposes. The stock Windows 7 backup application simply sucks and is nowhere near as useful as the old XP backup. You can buy True Image for $29.99 right now (it’s on sale, 40% off regular price) and you will not regret it.
Newegg has it for just under a c-note. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116983
And if you can afford to wait awhile, they often-times run sales where you can get 10-20% off that price.
Vista, not XP. Thanks for the advice, though.