BCEagle91

> GET 7. if you are still on XP, you are a fool, plain and simple.

I have 15 XP (at least) systems. Even with the family pack (supplies appear to be selling out quickly), that's $750 to upgrade systems that are running perfectly fine. There isn't a direct upgrade from XP to Windows 7 and that would mean rebuilding all of the user accounts on the systems. A rational analysis for those on XP would be to count the costs for upgrading to Win 7. It frequently doesn't make sense.

excelblue

If you're getting a new system, then sure. Otherwise, if XP is working for you, there is no reason for you to upgrade, or else something might just break by chance. With software being as complicated as they are in this day and age, you never know. If XP is posing problems though, then keep reading.

I find Win7 to boot faster than XP, be just as stable, while offering a much more modern computing experience. It's much more polished than Vista, the code base is a bit more mature, and it's just a wonderful operating system.

BCEagle91

> I find Win7 to boot faster than XP, be just as stable, while offering a much more
> modern computing experience. It's much more polished than Vista, the code base
> is a bit more mature, and it's just a wonderful operating system.

I agree with your comments. I suspect that they've done some work on threading to improve runtime performance and I think that they no longer preload legacy shareable images which improves memory consumption and boot time. Shutdown time is improved too. Nowhere as good as Mac OS X (shuts down in four to six seconds on my MacBook Pro) but much better than the half-minute that Vista used to take.

If you have a really old system running XP and are unhappy with the performance, it might make a lot more sense to just buy a new system. Processors, memory bus speeds, memory, disks are a lot faster than XP-era components and there's far more support for newer devices. If you need compatibility with older devices, you can just keep your old machine around for that.

sgdude

ive had vista since launch. it doesnt suck and i have had no issues since sp1. Vista IS better than XP and 7 is better than Vista (as OSs get better after each iteration almost always), so yes, 7 is the way to go. Go 64 bit, and you can get it for $30 through microsoft as long as you have a .edu email. They offer BOTH professional and home premium for the same price. GET PROFESSIONAL x64 since it's better. You have until January.

ljuvlig

I use XP, and I have tried 7, but frankly, my laptop's specs are so bad that I just can't run 7 comfortably. I have 1gig of ram, so that isn't the problem. I have an integrated GFX card (950 mobile intel chipset, kill me now), so I have to like, disable most/all w7 effects to get a good run speed, in which case I might as well run XP.

BCEagle91

I have Windows 7 up and it's using a gig of RAM doing nothing. I suppose that you can use VM but that's slow and will add wear and tear on your disk. Windows 7 is better at using threads so it will make better use of multicore processors. My laptop has 3xxx Intel Integrated and Windows 7 runs fine with that. 950 must be pretty old and I can imagine subpar performance.

Vista had a lot of problems which I mentioned a while ago. It generally runs fine on high-spec machines but it ran like a dog on my laptop. It had a few corruption bugs that were really bad. If you didn't run into them - okay. If you did, it was bad news. It was apparently fixed in Windows 7 so I suspect that it will be fixed in Vista SP3.

One other thing about Vista - the nag popups are annoying. I still have two Vista machines which I don't plan to upgrade. Those are Core i7 machines which have no problems dealing with the inefficiencies of Vista.

OperaDad

I am a long time user of XP, have helped my kids with their Vista machines, and just built a Win 7 computer. Since I am use to XP, I don't like how some things are done differently in 7.

They both run my programs, which is the purpose of the OS. It is hard for me to compare speed because the XP's are Pentium 4's, and the Win 7 is an i7. So what if 7 boots or shuts down faster? I only do that once a day.

I hate the taskbar in Win 7. In XP, I can click right to the window I want. In Win 7, I have to click to the application, and then to the desired window of that application. The idea is to reduce the steps to do something, not increase. That's just one of the quirks that I am trying to figure out if there are options to change how Win 7 looks.

On a related issue are the trees. I like trees. I like how a lot of XP defaults to trees. It helps to keep things organized, and get to something quickly. While you can get to the tree structure in Win 7, it seems like you have to force your way down the tree, rather than glide through with XP.

shogunzek

Oh course there is a way in W7 to change the taskbar to the look of XP/Vista. I'm not sure of it now because I'm on my XP partition. I haven't really used W7 that much because I have all of my important files and programs on XP, so switching back and fourth when I want to use a certain program isn't worth it and neither is reinstalling all of my programs. If I were to get a new computer I would definitely use the W7 OS.

ljuvlig

For the record, you can change the superbar to resemble the taskbar you see in XP. You just go to properties, and switch it from "always stack" or something to "never stack". I've only used 7 once, so I don't remember it step by step.

ThisCouldBeHeavn

If you just go to the taskbar properties, there are several options for the buttons

OperaDad

Got it. Thanks. Taskbar, taskbar buttons, select "never combine" or "combine when taskbar is full"

That looked like the Quick Launch area, so I was looking for something like that. I didn't know they changed the name to Taskbar Buttons.