And it is a pretty happy day. Our experience with Windows 7 at the office has been very positive. I have been running it as my only OS after an in-place upgrade from Vista a week ago. I have almost no complaints. Ryan Voss installed it on his laptop, a lower-end, three year-old HP nx9600 with a CoreDuo T2200 1.8 GHz CPU and 1.5 Gig of RAM earlier in the week and reports that it runs much better than Vista did on that computer.
Here is our bottom line:
If you have a new computer that came with Vista, run the upgrade advisor, and if you don’t have significant hardware or software issues, go get Windows 7. You should DEFINETELY run a full backup of your important files before trying to upgrade. If you have Vista Ultimate or Business you can use the PC Backup Utility to do this.
If you have Windows XP, things get more complicated in a hurry. The Microsoft minimum requirements for Windows 7 are: 1 GHz CPU, 1 GB of RAM for 32 bit and 2Gb for 64 bit, DirectX 9 compatible video card with Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) capability. We think that for a decent user experience, this will really be something like this:
- CPU:Minimum: AMD Athlon XP 1600+ or newer including Athlon 64, Athlon X2, AMD Phenom and AMD Opteron.
Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz or newer including Celeron 1.8 and above Celeron D, CoreDuo, Core2Duo. - RAM: You can never be too rich, too good looking or have too much RAM. We think 1GB is too low, especially on older hardware. Considering the relative cheapness or RAM (1 GB for as little as $40) we think 1.5 is going to be a minimum acceptable level on older computers. 2GB is better. Windows 7 will support up to 4GB in all the 32 bit versions.
- Video:Most consumer computers have integrated video cards. This means that the video sub-system is on the motherboard and shares RAM with the system. That is why more RAM is better. Most integrated video cards made in the last three years or so will meet the Windows 7 requirements. If you don’t know what type of video card you have, right-click my computer, select Manage, expand device manager and expand display adapters. (See photo) Also, this thread on the Microsoft Developer’s forum has some links to manufacturer’s pages.
If you have Windows XP you will need to perform a clean install of Windows 7. A clean install means the process of wiping out the previous (Windows XP) installation on the computer and installing a brand new operating system. The Windows 7 install media includes a migration utility to help this process along by copying your personal files to an external drive. But you will still have to re-install all your productivity programs.
We think Microsoft has gotten Windows 7 right. I feel pretty confident in saying that pretty much everyone will be using it within a couple of years. Microsoft currently plans to end support for Windows XP professional in April of 2014. The transition from the huge population of Windows XP users to the new OS over the next couple of years is going to be trying for the end users. For people like me it is the best thing to happen since the release of Windows 2000. But, Apple kicked all its users off the Classic OS back in 2002 and they haven’t exactly suffered for it.
