Metropol

Is it worth upgrading to Windows 7 Home Premium from Vista Home Premium? Is it actually the case that you cannot run "XP" programs on it? What does that actually mean? If a program will run in Vista without compatibility settings, then will it be OK in 7? I am quite tempted by the low price, but are there any major advantages (apart from the new UI)?

I think you're getting a bit mixed up about a thing called "XP Mode". Essentially, big companies with bizzaro internal apps that require IE6 / require strange parts of XP that were removed in vista or similar have available to them a thing called XP mode. This is essentially a fancy virtual machine of XP.


For the most part though, if it runs on Vista, it's 99.99% certain to run on 7.

The advantages include it's quick, explorer windows don't have to have a good ponder about their contents before it appears, there isn't that odd random hard disk chugging vista liked to do, and UAC nowhere near as insane as it was in vista. There are still trial versions floating around if you fancy trying a dual boot.

Hymagumba wrote:I think you're getting a bit mixed up about a thing called "XP Mode". Essentially, big companies with bizzaro internal apps that require IE6 / require strange parts of XP that were removed in vista or similar have available to them a thing called XP mode. This is essentially a fancy virtual machine of XP.


For the most part though, if it runs on Vista, it's 99.99% certain to run on 7.

The advantages include it's quick, explorer windows don't have to have a good ponder about their contents before it appears, there isn't that odd random hard disk chugging vista liked to do, and UAC nowhere near as insane as it was in vista. There are still trial versions floating around if you fancy trying a dual boot.

Ah! Thanks for that. I might well have a play with a dual boot before taking the plunge.

Dr Lobster* wrote:anybody care to post their windows experience index?

Ditto - 4.9

However, as for my own experience of Windows 7, well after just eight hours I've gone back to XP. (Thank you Norton Ghost!). Yes I know that sounds like a ridiculously short time, but I have been using RC versions of 7 for a while. The 8 hours was using the final release.

I rely a lot on the video output from several media cards and Vista/7 just cannot display it as well as XP due to Microsoft removing and then reinstating but changing video overlays.

I'm not happy to put up with permanently disabling Aero - or indeed having all the apps temporarily disabling it just so I can get a good picture. (On Windows 7 it's like watching a poorly compressed Freeview picture compared to XP having an HD satellite picture. Okay - a little exaggerated, but for me still very off putting.)

I'll keep 7 as a dual boot, but for the time being, I'll stick with XP.

Are there no new Win7 drivers or apps to take the input from the video recievers?

Just installed Home Premium after using an earlier build for over a year.
It was a fresh install and reinstall all apps from scratch.

Kaspersky didn't work with the RTM version so had to buy an upgrade
I cant get the experience index to give me a result as it keeps giving me an error. (I was able to do it before)

Still love the ability to pin things to the start menu and taskbar - that's a great idea. Also love the ability to move the items on the task bar.

One thing which has really surprised me is that (for now at least) if you have a netbook and want a full blown Windows operating system then Microsoft's official solution is still to continue licencing Windows XP Home for this purpose - it's fair enough that they missed the boat with a Vista for netbooks, they were a product which exploded out of nowhere, but I would have thought that a version of Windows 7 optimised for small screens and limited storage and processing power should have been a priority.

I've been playing around with the trial version of 7 Enterprise and as with the earlier betas and RCs, it does seem good stuff - yes it's just an updated Vista, but it's arguably what Vista should have been in the first place. However as I can't run it properly on my current hardware, I'll leave the reviews of it to others, and look at the other issue - will XP finally die?

It was released 8 years ago.
It was an update of an operating system released 10 years ago.
It was officially replaced 3 years ago.
The operating system that officially replaced it has itself now been officially replaced too.
It was officially discontinued over a year ago.
Mainstream support ended 4 months ago.

That should be a fairly long list of nails in XP's coffin, yet It's still by far and away the most popular operating system in the world. It still supports virtually all current hardware and software.

Even Microsoft, who have never been worried about forcibly killing off older operating systems before (both Windows 95 and 2000 were sent to early graves because Microsoft didn't want them around any more) but they just won't dare to it with XP - their much vaunted 'Support Lifecycle Policy' has been thrown out the Window for XP. It will still run the latest IE and the latest Office (it's even going to be able to run Office 2010).

XP is greatly extending the lifetime of hardware which should by rights be obsolete by now (my desktop system is still powered by an 1.3Ghz AMD Athlon Thunderbird (Socket A!) and the display is still driven by a 64MB NVidia GeForce 4 graphics card - both almost 9 years old).

Despite this, hardware like this can still run a fully secure operating system, can still run a modern browser capable of displaying anything the internet can throw at it, can still run all the latest applications software, and can still do everything which myself and millions of others worldwide need from a computer.

I have allready decided that I'll probably move over to Windows 7 at some point. The thing is, I can't see when that's going to be. Whilst I can justify the cost of the operating system itself, I can't viably run it without making significant hardware upgrades, and I can't justify the cost of replacing my motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics card just to run a different operating system where I'll only do the same things that I do now.

Although Microsoft have done much better this time around, I don't at all think it's a done deal that XP is going to miraculously die over the coming months - I reckon there's a good chance that the unsupported date in 2014 is going to come around with a significant number of people still left on XP.

Tremble before my mighty dual core pentium: 5.3 was my rating

Sput wrote:Tremble before my mighty dual core pentium: 5.3 was my rating

Haven't checked the rating yet, but IIRC I got a rating of 1.6 on the RC!

cwathen wrote:

Sput wrote:Tremble before my mighty dual core pentium: 5.3 was my rating

Haven't checked the rating yet, but IIRC I got a rating of 1.6 on the RC!

I thought I was bad when I got 3.2, Install updates and it rockets up.

To echo Cwathen's comments above, I must confess I purchased a new laptop on Monday and it was delivered on Friday. I immediately downgraded it from Vista to XP. As it is a brand new super-powered dual-core etc etc machine I obviously have the ability to upgrade to 7 somepoint in the future, but for now, while XP does everything I want and more, the words are "why bother"?