I started out building my current computer with pretty up-to-date hardware, and originally ran Vista Business SP1 on it. By the time Windows 7 RC1 came out, I had upgraded to Vista SP2 and was still sick of Vista’s aggravating idiosyncrasies, so I decided to move to the Windows 7 RC, which ended up being a good idea. The upgrade was seamless, and although I was still on a 32-bit OS and therefore couldn’t make full use of my RAM, I was still able to run Vent, a media player, over 30 webpage tabs in Google Chrome, and WoW all at the same time with no performance loss in-game (always 60+ FPS, even in places like Dalaran). I was really happy with my OS, and was looking forward to the October 22nd official release. Everything was going great.
October 22nd rolled around, and I had already preordered my copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. Downloaded it, everything went great – until when I tried to upgrade, I was told “Windows 7 does not support an upgrade from your current OS”. That’s right – I could not upgrade the RELEASE CANDIDATE of their operating system to the official release version. I ended up having to blow another $300 on a full copy of Windows 7, and am not particularly enamoured with the handling of this upgrade process. One would think Microsoft would want to make things easier for RC1 users as they helped with pre-release bug testing and so forth, but no – instead, I was stuck buying the entire full version because I was never told to keep a partition with Vista around so I could upgrade to the release Win 7.
Oh well, I guess – I shouldn’t have expected any more from Microsoft. Getting screwed to the tune of $300 isn’t my idea of fun. That aside, Win 7 is indeed a great OS, even better on release. Very impressed with how well it runs everything – even better than RC1 did, which is saying something.
[...] more here: Windows 7 upgrade rant. « Fireball Spam This entry was posted by MikeWink and posted on October 24, 2009 at 7:09 pm and filed under [...]
I am running Vista, and love it. At first, before I learned how to turn off the Admin Account Control feature, I hated it. Once I removed it, and then added some good protection on my system, it was great. However it didnt start out that way. When I first got this computer, there was only Norton AV, which we all know is a resource hog and not really that great. There was no other firewall, and the only anti-spyware, was counter-spy. Now that everything is out and has a stable version, I have no problems. In fact, my system crashed a few times because of software bugs, from 3rd-party ware, and Vista recovered itself. I know a lot of people complained about it, but for me – I love Vista. When XP and all the other versions crashed, we had to manually debug it, so you had to know a bit about computers.
I don’t know if there is a version of these softwares for Win 7, but I have had great success with Outpost Firewall, Avast! AV, Spybot S&D with TeaTimer running, and my latest addition KeyScrambler – which is a passive way to protect from keylogging, by scrambling all that I type, including the clipboard and passwords.
Spybot runs on Win 7 fine, and I actually use Symantec Endpoint for my antivirus – pretty nice stuff, and small memory footprint too
XP/2K crashed/froze/hung/locked much less for me than did Vista; with Vista, video drivers crashed repeatedly, Explorer would routinely hang 4-5 times a day forcing me to end process and restart. There were some good points – DirectX 10 support, for one – and certainly once Service Pack 2 finally came out the OS was worth using – but Win 7 is so much better that it’s not even a contest, tbh. 7 is perfectly stable – haven’t had it hang yet – keeps the best parts of Vista, and adds more to the OS while reducing the memory-hogging ridiculousness that was Vista. Simply put, Win 7 is the single best OS that Microsoft has ever released – if a bit expensive, at least when they fail to explain that helping them develop it will actually make it MORE expensive for you. -_-
Have had Vista 64-bit running on my system for half a year with no problems at all.
That makes sense, why would MS let you use an upgrade license to go from a free version of their OS to the retail version? You didnt have Vista installed at the time. In hindsight, there is a hack to get around that issue of upgrading the RC to the retail. My upgrade went great and I was able to upgrade from RC to Retail doing a fresh install, dont ask me how, but it worked. I’ve read there have been a few occurances of such happening.
Dont know if I can post links, but check this out, guess it might be moot now.
http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/clean_install_upgrade_media.asp
Yeah, but I still owned a Vista license from before I installed RC1.