Finally! You’ll get to start playing with what I’ve had installed for months and, well, to be honest it’s an exciting time. For me.
It’s 7:42 AM, I’m on campus in Studios West’s theater, watching a co-worker NOM on a blueberry muffin, and waiting for the launch event to start in New York… yes, I’m excited enough to have gotten up that early to be here. On top of that, it occurred to me in the shower that a number of users will be going from XP to Windows 7 – that is going to be very, very interesting to see, since they skip the intermediary view of Vista: going from XP blue to Seven glass? Nice!
For what it’s worth, for as good as 7 is – and it is good – its goodness started in Vista and, to be technologically blunt, Vista wasn’t as bad as most people would have had you believe. Vista was an improvement on XP, as 7 is an improvement on Vista… it’s the nature of software. I actually look forward to pointing out to people which of the features they love in 7 …that they missed out on for the last few years because they were in Vista. Reminds me of when Office exposed a ton of functionality with the Ribbon and were able to say “That’s not new to Office 2007… that was in Office XP.” But I digress…
Windows 7 – go get it.
Oh, and if you have a netbook or notebook without an optical drive, we’ve got that covered too: The Microsoft Store allows you to buy Windows 7 online, download it to a USB thumb drive, and install it from there.
Yup, I plan on putting 7 in my laptop (when it arrives in the mail from pre-order). My laptop came with XP preinstalled (along with a sticker that said “Vista-Compatible”), and I am going to be leapfrogging over Vista directly to 7. I don’t know how many folks will do the XP-to-7 upgrade like me since I expect most folks will just go out and buy an new PC with Windows 7 pre-installed.
After playing around with the release candidate of 7 for a few months now, I’m looking forward to the real thing. I think 7 will be a winner!
By the way, check out the comments from folks who were asked if they were going to go out and buy Windows 7 immediately.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/10/21/windows-7-launches-tomorrow-are-you-going-to-bite/
And yet more poll results on whether consumers will take the plunge and upgrade to Windows 7…
http://forums.mercurynews.com/poll/will-you-upgrade-to-microsofts-window-7-operating-system
In my own informal poll, I asked two of my friends and they said they plan to stick with XP on their old PCs.
so …. what does it allow you to do that you couldn’t do previously?
just saying. os’s are dead. go buy an iphone.
oh wait.. :)
So says the man that rushed out to buy Snow Leopard ;)
I actually went though the process to upgrade my brother’s PC from XP to 7 this weekend (talked him into upgrading to 7). Luckly his PC wasn’t very old and wasn’t loaded down with lots of applications and settings, so it went smoothly. One problem was – his Apple Personal Laserwriter NTR which is nearly 20 years old – was not supported in Windows 7. I was able to get it working with another driver (HP LaserJet IIp Postscript driver). However, he also used this PC as a print server on the network, and I couldn’t get his Mac Mini (Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger) configured so it would print remotely to the LaserWriter (which did work when it was a print server running XP). Home Group Networking is nice if all your machines are PCs running 7, but you have to factor in a few Macs might be on the home network as well. Maybe my brother ought to run out and buy Snow Leopard. Upgrades all around! :-)
Can you say – hotcakes?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10401449-56.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0
Been running the final version of Win 7-64 since it was released to MSDN, very happy with it, minus a couple niggles – of course, there were far more niggles with Vista :)