Consumer Reviews

I knew from the day that I installed the Windows pre-beta copy of Windows 7 that I received at a Microsoft event almost a year ago that Windows 7 was going to BR a huge improvement over Vista and XP. The first machine that I installed it on was a Lenovo T43 laptop. This machine could not reasonably run Vista (from a clean install)…I could not even surf the web on it. I installed a clean version of 32-bit Win7 on this machine and it turned it into a new machine. I did not have to download a single driver to get it to work and the whole install took less than a half an hour. Now this machine is perfectly functioning and I can use it to surf the web and stream youtube videos, etc. If you want to take full advantage of all the graphical elements in Windows 7 you will need more hardware power, but the point is that Windows 7 tends to upgrade your machine because of all the incremental performance enhancements that were made to the operating system.

I have installed Windows 7 on probably about 20 machines in the last year and I have not had any issues with it not installing drivers. That is good because I suggest you do a clean install. When I decided to upgrade my office machine back in August I used the File and Setting Transfer Wizard to back up all my programs and settings to a external drive and then did a clean install, then restore my programs and settings. This worked better than I expected it would. Almost everything I needed was where it should have been. The few things that were missing still could be found on my hard drive. I ran into one problem where I tried to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7. There was a problem late into the install process that force the Windows 7 install to be rolled back. It is due do some driver/service/hardware not acting the way it should that causes this, but it is happening to a few people out there I know. The good thing is that if there is a problem like this your original OS is restored perfectly.

There is not a lot of new features in the operating system. Some of my favorites are the new mobile broadband (cellular) integration into the wireless network user interface. You don’t have to install a cumbersome application from the cellular card maker anymore (if you have a card that supports the new driver model) and you cellular driver doesn’t install all the extra COM ports. Also, I really like how they handle the taskbar when you have more than one of the same application running. When you click on it you get a small screenshot of the application (if you have the aero theme support, otherwise it is more textual). This also works great with IE, because all the tabs are show no matter how many instances of IE are running at the same time. I hated trying find tabs if you have multiple instances of IE running that multiple tabs open in each of them…this problem is fixed now. Finally, XP mode is a nice feature that you can have with a little setup work. It allow you to run a virtual XP machine inside Windows 7. It takes a little work to setup and doesn’t run you application as fast as they would natively. You need a faster CPU and extra memory if you plan on using this a lot. But, hopefully the average user doesn’t need to use this.

So far, I have not found any application that ran on Vista that don’t run on Windows 7.

Also, if you plan on using more than 3 GB of RAM you need to buy a 64-bit version of Windows 7.

Hope this helps.

I’m in the IT Industry, so I consider myself an early adopter. I purchased the Iphone 3G on launch day. I purchased the Motorola Droid on Launch Day. I bought Leopeard the day it came out and immediately installed it. Same goes for Snow Leopard. You get my point. With Vista, on the other hand, I completely avoided it like the plague after hearing of all the problems. Then, one day, I accidently forgot to select the XP Downgrade on Dell’s site, and my new laptop came shipped with Vista. I tried to love it, but me and Vista just had a love hate relationship, starting with the simple fact that Nero CD Burning software was not working with Vista (eventually fixed with an update that took several months)… And ended with my hatred for the interface in Vista! So, I ended up deleting Vista and installing XP Pro.

Fast forward to Windows 7… About 2 days after Windows 7 came out, my XP Pro machine at work got infected with spyware. After spending 2 days trying to clean my machine with all the latest products (Malwarebytes, Spybot Search & Destroy, and Symantec Endpoint), I finally said SCREW THIS, and I backed up my data, reformatted my hard drive and installed Windows 7 instead.

If for no reason other then SECURITY, I highly recommend anyone still running the obsolete Windows XP to move to Windows 7 because as time goes on, Microsoft will stop updating XP, and your computer will be at much higher risk for viruses, spyware, and malware. With Windows 7, I’m sure that risk exists, but let’s face it, it’s like running Mac OS. There aren’t a lot of people using it yet, so there are significantly less threats out there. And of course, 7 has much better protection built into it. I would still recommend the following to protect yourself: 1. Do not use your computer as the administrator, browse the web with another user account that only has limited permissions. 2. Do not use IE! Use Firefox and install Adblock Pro as well! 3. Don’t visit web sites that give you free music, games, tv shows, etc.. LOL

Anyway, as far as the overall experience in 7, I am still getting used to the user interface. I *LOVE* the aero peek where I can preview my windows I have open, and it nicely organizes all your Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, etc windows into 1 nice little icon instead of having hundreds of open windows.

Startup and shutdown… I think these are a little slower the XP Pro, especially waking back up from sleep mode. However, I have significantly LESS problems now when I put it to sleep at work and then wake it up at home. Before, when I would come home, my system would hang for 5 minutes trying to access our network file shares, now it seems to know that I’m not at work any more and comes up much quicker.

Stability… I have yet to have anything crash! Seriously Microsoft, you guys rock!

Systray & Clock – I Love the new design! Especially how it corrals all your systray icons into a little center where you can disable them! Finally I can stop that annoying Adobe and Java updater from constantly nagging me! And, HELLO! It shows the time AND the date now, what a novel concept huh? ;)

Compatibility.. Well I don’t have 5 million programs, so I can’t speak for that, but everything I’ve tried to run so far has worked.. Except the Cisco VPN, I had to tweek a few things to get that working, but I was able to finally get the VPN working.

Hardware compatibility.. EVERYTHING worked out of the box on my HP EliteBook laptop that is about 6 months old. The laptop does have a “designed for Vista” sticker on it, so that probably makes a big difference. The only thing that isn’t working is the scoll function on my touchpad, but I’m sure if I go download the Synaptics drivers it will magically work. Even the Media Buttons on the top of the laptop work and the SD card reader! No extra drivers to download and instal… HUGE plus Microsoft, you are bridging the gap between Mac and PC!

That leaves me to my final point… Windows 7 vs Snow Leopard… Used them both, and honestly, I don’t miss the stupid dock in Leopard at all. I am not a fan of the dock, I actually got Rocket Dock for my PC, and I ended up uninstalling it. I do miss the “Stacks” in Leopard… I also miss the “Corners” and “Expose”… And perhaps the thing I miss the most about my Mac is the program called Bento from FileMaker! But are those functions enough to make me want to use a Mac over a PC? Not so much!

Loving Windows 7, and hoping to discover more of the exciting new features when I have time, but day to day functioning, I was up and running pretty quickly and I am a happy camper with Windows 7!

I own a 3-year-old Dell XPS 410 with an Intel Core 2 6700 CPU @ 2.66GHz, equipped with a RAID 0 650 GB dual hard drive, 4 GB DDR2 RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB “Direct X 10″-compatible graphics card. Sadly, I have been displeased with the performance of my computer ever since I chose to upgrade from Windows XP Media Center Edition to Vista Ultimate 32-bit a mere few weeks after initially purchasing my computer.

After several years of using the miserably sluggish, sporadically buggy Vista Ultimate 32-bit OS, I have recently upgraded my computer to Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit. All I can say is… WHAT A DIFFERENCE.

The last time my computer ran this quickly was when I used it with Windows XP, with which it came pre-installed with. It retains all of the best features of Vista, while adding lots of performance and visual tweaks that really adds to the overall user’s computing experience.

The new layout is smartly designed, attractive and intuitive. I especially appreciate the new taskbar setup with the “jump list” and “peek and shake” features (see Amazon’s above product description for more details), while the best holdover feature from Vista, “Windows Search” works better than ever. The new networking setup, Windows Media Center, the improved desktop gadgets setup, Windows Media Player, the back up and restore feature, the redesigned defrag setup, the built-in security features… all have of these features been subtlety but effectively improved over their Windows Vista counterparts. My computer really does feel like a new machine thanks to Windows 7.

All of my software (including Adobe Master Collection CS4, Microsoft Office 2007 Professional, Kaspersky Internet Security Suite 2010, Roxio Creator Pro 2010, Microsoft MapPoint 2010, Microsoft Student 2009 and WinX DVD Ripper) works like a dream, and I have thus far experienced zero compatibility issues with any of my 32-bit software using Windows Ultimate 64-bit; even my two-year-old Dell printer works without a hitch. Not a single driver conflict has arisen so far; this is by far the most stable Microsoft OS I have ever used.

As a matter of fact, much of my software seems to actually run better now than it ever did when I was using Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit… and that’s where I am most pleased with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit: its fine, smooth performance, right down to the quick start-up and shut down times. This is the OS that Microsoft promised, and failed, to deliver with Windows Vista, as it really does compare favorably with Mac OS X… an occurrence I never thought I’d live to experience, quite frankly.

This is probably the first time in years that I have not regretted being an early adopter (I’m cursed with poor impulse control); this is something I can’t even claim with Windows XP (as I recall, I experienced far more driver compatibility issues with XP when it first debuted).

If I have one minor (and I do mean minor) caveat with Windows 7, it is with the removal of USB flash and external drives; it doesn’t seem to power down the drives when I properly eject them, as is the case with Windows XP. This was also the case with Windows Vista when I installed the SP2 patch, and I am unclear as to whether this is a USB driver issue or the USB “safely remove hardware” feature has been altered in some way.

All caveats aside, I cannot recommend this OS enough. For PC users, this is as good as it currently gets.