Re: Installing a different OS on a laptop?
You will not gain anything from the upgrade except maybe more eye candy and enhancements to the user GUI. ...<snip> if you had to administrate the OS all the time but lets be realistic,,,thats not how 99% of the people out there use their computers.
...<snip> you would be wasting money for no performance increase.
Frankly, there is such a monumental difference between every MS OS upgrade prior to Win 7 and Win7 everyone should be upgrading.
The majority of your complaints about Win7 are exactly what make it far and above any prior version. One at a time:
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Drivers, the driver system is nearly identical and fully backward compatible with Vista. This is the 1st time EVER Windows has supported backward compatibility in this respect. The exact thing being complained about is what makes this a simple upgrade without all of the nightmares of old hardware caused by previous upgrades, most notably Vista.
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"..maybe more eye candy and enhancements to the user GUI" More 'eye candy and enhancements' are what allow that 99% of users you identify to actually use a computer with any ease. People don't automatically know how to use a computer, and Windows has had a horrid track record of making life easier to newbies. Win 7 was meant to change that, and does. There are redundant shortcuts for nearly every task, just to try to predict where a user is most likely to look for a certain setting or document or collection of files.
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Backups: Speaking of normals users (and IT pros alike). Win7 has taken great strides to ensure people never again lose files by nearly any means. Virus hit your PC and overwrites 100 files? No problem, Win7 now saves file histories, so you can revert to any previous file. This works really well if you overwrite a document you've spent weeks on. Recycle bin was great for deleted files, but didn't cover you for that "oh crap!" mistaken save. Oh yeah, and actual useful backup and restores are now built-in.
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"...money for no performance increase" That same 99% of pc users don't care how blazingly fast Doom III plays or if their boot speed is 9% faster than previous versions. The performance comes into play when you click on an icon and the caching learns you run that program all the time and precaches it for next launch. By doing this the system cache is reduced, because Windows no longer has to cram as much crap into cache as possible, but can intelligently cache what is
most likely to be used, saving RAM for actual running of programs.
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Ease of install, not just use. To do a clean install of Windows 7, you insert the DVD and boot from it. It asks you what drive to install it to and it leaves you alone from there. When you return you have Windows 7. No hassles, no PhD in computer technology needed.
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Corporate support: If you have done an kind of corporate IT work, you know how few companies keep up with the times. Some national banks still run Windows 98 simply because the software vendor went under years ago or they customized their internal software so heavily, they can't afford the time to make a full rewrite for a new OS. Win 7 natively supports all of these old-school clients and provides a means to perfectly emulate whatever OS they require. Need Win7 to pretend it runs WinXP, no problem, set the compatibility setting to XP. Need actual XP, because the software is reliant on XP-specific calls? No problem, just run XP in a virtual machine (which displays as a normal window, without alerting the user to the emulation)
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touch support on your notebook? Win7 is leaps and bounds in this department.
From my experience, anyone calling Win7 'Vista 2.0' hasn't used it, let alone researched it.
I didn't just fall off the Windows tree, either, I'm an MS beta tester, currently testing Office 2010.. you know, Office 2007 with maybe some eye-candy
