installed it too. it went really smooth, took about 1.5 hours. and win 7 kicks vista's ass. with spike-toed boots! its a pretty good upgrade, its a lot better than xp and orders of magnitude better than vista. much easier to use, much less whiny and a lot more customizable. the only downside to it is that the boot time is slightly longer than it was with vista, but it seems to be more resource efficient, less ram being used, less cpu being used, etc. anyway, im just gonna play devil's advocate and recommend it. if you are in the US or UK, you can get one with a student email for $30 or 30 euro.

g'day.

Yep, I've upgraded to it from Vista as well. Nothing but good news so far.

yeah but there are a few tiny things that bother me a bit. first, when you save a desktop theme, you can't delete it (or i dont know how), second, when you move your mouse over the taskbar icons, then move it to the desktop, the icon remains highlighted, so a small popup appears with the icon's description. its not even a major issue, but its like a brand new Mercedes with a tiny scratch mark on the door (compared to vista which i thought was a 1948 ford f-1 with a jackhammer being taken to the roof)

That sounds like a bug to me. At least assuming Win7 didn't introduce keyboard navigation for the taskbar, which is not possible in XP as far as I know.

I have a question, did you have to save a copy of the files you wanted to keep before upgrading?
I ask because I have a free upgrade to Win7 (Came with the purchase of my laptop) and the only thing keeping me from upgrading is that I'm not sure if I have to backup my all my game folders...

i did back them up just in case, but no, all my old files were still there. in fact, everything was still there. it had an option for an "upgrade" or a "custom (advanced)" installation. apparently the upgrade keeps all ur stuff but the advanced formats ur HD and does a clean install.

that being said, a lot of my drivers needed to be updated, and my printer doesnt even have a driver for win 7 yet (grrr)

also, make sure to make a vista recovery dvd/cds because if your HD crashes and u need to do a new install of win7, you can't use the upgrade disk, you have to use the vista install, then upgrade the vista. other than that, i think just to be safe, backup the stuff you *really* need (school/work), just in case my computer was weird and didn't delete the stuff but other computers might. but i think you should be fine.

Great! Thanks for that info, I won't be doing the upgrade myself, Geeksquad will handle it since I have the free upgrade.

Be careful with GeekSquad, even with very simple problems they'll reformat your hard drive.

Do backups first (I learned that the hard way).

I've heard my share of horror stories about the geek squad, too. For example, a friend had a computer and determined the problem was one of three cases. He gave it to the geek squad, told them what he found, then the geek s quad charged him $75 to find that the problem was one of three cases... and that was all they did.

Also, you can delete a theme in Windows 7, but not when the theme is in use. Select a different theme, then right-click on the theme you want to delete (that is not in use) and click "delete".

Oh, and I, too, have Win 7. Got it for free about a month ago. I like it. I think that my 64-bit Win 7 might get a slightly higher FPS in modern games like Crysis compared to Win XP 32-bit, but not by a whole lot.

well, knowing geeksquad, i think u should do it yourself, its very simple, unless you have no idea what you are doing, then call nerd battalion or w/e.

To install Windows (or almost any other OS)

1: Put the disk in the drive and reboot the computer.
2: Many computer automatically boot from the disk. If not, you may see a quick prompt when you start the computer to press a button to choose boot device. Otherwise, go to bios and change disk drive to first boot device.
3: Click "next" a bunch and input computer name, install key, etc.
4: Make a sandwich.

well, for me, i didnt even have to boot from disk. for an upgrade i just put in the windows dvd, it launched the program, i made sure everything was fine, (had to uninstall itunes since it was incompatible with win7, it tells you), and clicked install. it took about an hour and a half and the computer restarted on its own. like i said before, very easy and smooth. im actually surprised, i thought my computer was going to burst into flames and eat my face or something, you know, cuz it was windows. but no, it went nicely.

1995 called, it wants its stigma back.

I'll be sticking with XP for now. My current PC has a cheap upgrade to Vista. I had it for one day, at which point it froze like nothing ever froze before and I had to reset it (Vista Entertainment index - 3.4). A while back I had a new PC for one day which came with Vista. Neat, I thought (Vista Entertainment index 5.9), except the casing was broken and I had to send it back. Now I won't be getting a new PC for a long while. I'm spending all my money on that trip to iceland.

I'll use XP til I get a new PC... my dad runs win7, he like it. I think it takes a little time to figure out, but other than that it's pretty good.

I will get Win7 (64-bit Ultimate probably) when I buy a new GPU, then I'll have a complete system upgrade.
I've been using XP for the last 8 years, it is about time for a new and fresh scenery to look at and work with. Win7 seems to be working very good so I see no reason not to make the switch.

I was having some minor computer problems at the time, so I literally just stuck the disc in and hoped for the best. All you gotta do is press the Upgrade button, and it works even if you're down 3 HDDs and a sound card.

I would recommend backing up your C Drive and doing a full reinstall though. Everybody I've asked so far has said it ran faster and worked better with a reinstall.

Have they disabled that horrible horrible thing called UAC?

Nope. It's a little less intrusive now, though.

you can adjust its levels now. i set it to no protection or w/e its called. it is now identical to how it functioned in vista when i disabled it. btw u can turn it off in vista as well, look here for several methods:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/12/1 ... ows-vista/

Why would you want to turn off the front line defense of your system? Silencing some of its excessive features is fine (like needing to confirm file renaming), but turning it off completely is a bad idea in my book, especially if you're an "accident prone" user.

UAC is the equivalent of using a nuclear cannon to defend yourself against spiders.

you dont need all that security stuff, because if there is a hole in the system, Microsoft knows about it before anyone else (usually) and i can bash them all i want, but those guys are sure good at keeping their OS patched. just update every week and use windows firewall and firefox, and you will be fine. i haven't used any active anti-spyware/virus software for years, i just do scans now and then, and the only time i got anything was some vundo a few years ago which i cleared up with hijackthis and vundofix. besides, im not sure UAC even works in reality the way its supposed to on paper. i have a strong feeling it doesnt.

I haven't seen a virus or spyware invade my PC in many many years myself, users like us are not exactly the demographic of UAC or anti-spyware/virus software though. I would rather keep UAC on heavily silenced and ditch all those monolithic 3rd party defense programs and use the computer power for something actually beneficial.

But why do you think UAC does not operate as advertised? Do you have some evidence that give you a reason to doubt?

i do not. i just dont feel like it would stop a real attack. i feel like there are easy ways to get around it. i gotta look into this, but a system that annoying on the surface cannot possibly have been done correctly in the core.

looked at it very briefly. as i suspected, all it does is just give u limited administrative privileges during normal operation and asks you if something needs higher permission. basically it makes you run on a limited account like in XP but sometimes gives you administrative access. this means absolutely nothing. you could get viruses if you had a limited account on XP, and you can therefor get them with UAC enabled. gotta look more into the mechanics but that is how wikipedia said it worked, and if that's true, then its teh sux.

umm... I think this might help. Has anyone heard of a program called Rising Anti-Virus? My dad uses it on win7. It's very helpful....

The internal functionality is what matters most. And you're basically saying the reason why this is useful to avoid (mild) attacks; if automated malware wants to execute it can't do that because it doesn't have permission and the OS would therefore alert you. Of course the more heavy attacks will try to invade outside the scope of UAC but this could still be useful for accident prone users.

Lemme toss my 2 cents into the pot about security in Windows. I have been using free firewalls and antiviruses and have done well for myself so far. For a 32-bit system, I have always been a fan of the free Zone Alarm firewall. For 64-bit system, Zone Alarm is not an option, but Commodo is fine for me. I like these because they use a white-list, meaning that nothing is allowed to see the internet until you say it can. It is easy enough to tell the firewall that certain programs are trusted and can always access the internet.
For antivirus, I've used both AVG and Avast. They both seem to work well and can catch viruses when I scan files.

One thing I noticed, though, is that I rarely ever get a program that tries to access the internet and catches me by surprise. Also, my antivirus rarely finds something suspicious unless I specifically scan a file, even though it scans all executable. I have always told people that the user is the best antivirus there is in the entire world. Know what you are doing and have a healthy amount of paranoia. That is the best way to avoid viruses and such.

I guess im gonna be one of them guys that runs XP untill he's the last man on earth doing so. Ive got too many old games that I like too much to go switching to a new OS.

Nothing against Win7 it sounds great.... but im affraid of compatibility issues with old games and older things I use.

Dualbooting Win7 and XP is an option.