Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Upgrade
by Microsoft Software
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Software Reviews of Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Upgrade
Customer Review: DO NOT UPGRADE
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought both Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional pre-release. Disregard all of the hype of the last 6 months - Windows 7 is NOT worth the cost, the time, the risks, or the hassles of upgrading. My most reliable computer is still my Windows XP.
In addition - if you have the Vista Home Premium - you can NOT use the Windows 7 Professional upgrade.
With Windows 7 you get slight improvements on the task bar and interface - however - you risk losing your data, having to do a complete reinstall of ALL of your programs, and then - when you finally have it installed - many of your programs will crash with Windows 7.
DO NOT UPGRADE - if you have a working system. The improvements are very marginal.
Customer Review: Disastrous!
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought the computer for which this was destined three years ago. I'd intended to upgrade that machine to Vista, so I added a nice video card. Then Vista was released, and it proved to be disastrous. I passed. In the mean time, I doubled the RAM in my computer, and I watched when MS released the beta of Windows 7 as tech writers hailed the new OS as a huge improvement. With this in mind, I decided to take advantage of an offer to purchase the Windows 7 Pro upgrade for $100.
After a few days, I finally got around to installing the 32-bit version of Windows 7 on my computer. What a mistake! First, I had difficulties locating drivers for components made by well-known manufacturers: ever heard of Linksys? Belkin? Some of these I never found. Then, in the first week, I was getting the blue screen of death (BSOD) more than a half-dozen times per day, often in the middle of the night when no one was working on the computer. So much for stability!
The BSOD issue prompted me to install the 64-bit version. In this case as well, I have been unable to find drivers (including for network cards).
Now, contrast my Windows 7 experience with my Ubuntu 9.10 experience. I installed 64-bit Ubuntu. All the drivers were available, and the operating system is fast and stable. It's also free and easy to use, looks great, and includes tons of terrific free applications (including OpenOffice, the first office suite to give MS Office a run for its money).
I only have a few reasons to run Windows: I'm a software developer, and some of the applications I develop use technologies targeted at Windows. I also have other software (e.g., Quicken and the music notation program Sibelius) for which Linux versions aren't available. My solution will be to run Windows in a virtual machine. Otherwise, I'm going to stick with Ubuntu for the rest of my computing needs.
My recommendation: download Ubuntu and, if you're still a bit nervous about a new operating system, pick up a book like this: Beginning Ubuntu Linux, Fourth Edition. As for Windows? Don't even go there.
Customer Review: To the People who don't understand the upgrade path from Microsoft
Summary: 5 Stars
The upgrade works fine if you follow the upgrade path that Microsoft has taken the time to outline and document.
[...]
If you are trying to upgrade a "home" version of Vista to Win 7 Professional it's not going to work the way you expect, you have to get the "ultimate" upgrade and then it will work, without having to re-install your applications.
I'm very pleased with Windows 7 and it appears to be a good, logical next step in Microsoft's evolution of operating systems. I have experience over the past 25 years with Windows, Mac OS, Linux, DOS, so on so forth and think this is a solid entry into the market.
Anyways, I hope this post helps clear some of the confusion I'm seeing in these reviews.
Customer Review: Big Improvement Over Vista Once Tweaked, Still An Annoying OS
Summary: 2 Stars
1) Can't make the taskbar show behind windows, why not?
2) Quicklaunch wasn't an option, but found a trick from a non-microsoft website to make it appear, and it looks ugly as there is no dividing line.
3) The taskbar was cluttered, and had to unclutter it, which took me a month since I was busy with other things. It's got this pin a program to the taskbar function, which is stupid, since isn't that what quicklaunch for (and like I said quicklaunch was removed)? This alternate version of quicklaunch is inferior since it limits what u can put in it.
4) MSPaint has been mangled. Instead of simply putting zoom out on one toolbar, instead, some idiot put a zoom in and out toolbar or tab whatever separate from the main toolbar, and the main toolbar only has zoom in, so then you have to switch back and forth between tabs, what a moron designer. On top of that the color picker is off-center, so that when you pick a color it's picking the one above the pixel you have it over, really annoying if you don't have the time or aren't in the mood to learn to use something like adobe photoshop. (Update: I tried to find the vista version of pain as a torrent, but there is none, so I copied it, with great difficulty from my vista netbook to the w7 one (I had to defeat that permissions nonsense to move the w7 version of paint, a big ordeal) and... the vista version didn't work, said something like, "can't open this document" when I clicked on it. Sigh.
5) If you use Windows 7 on a net book prepare to be extremely annoyed since the built in dialog boxes and menus (ones that have a lot of options) don't resize to fit the screen, so that you either have to set the taskbar to auto popup mode or move it to the left or right, if you don't you can't click the bottom buttons like yes, no, ok, enter, skip etc. The same is true for firefox dialog boxes beyond the basic "yes" or "no" type.
6) The network manager is worse then in Vista and XP, unlike those two the network manager is stuck in the right corner of the screen, and you can't switch on the fly when you're in the process of trying to connect, instead after you select a network to connect to it closes the menu and you're forced to wait till connects or can't to try again. How about allowing the user to keep the menu open so thathe/she doesn't have to repeatedly click to open it if there's a failure or the connection is to slow? Duh?
7) That user account nonsense, same kind in vista, is active from the start. How the Hell could bill gates and whoever is in charge now not learn that that is one of the big reasons people hated vista? And here's another sick stupidity:
8) PERMISSIONS WAS ALSO CARRIED OVER! DOES ANYONE AT MICROSOFT USE VISTA OR WINDOWS 7? SO YOU ENJOY SEEING, "SORRY YOU DON'T HAVE PERMISSION TO CHANGE THE NAME OF THIS SHORTCUT" and other stupid messages like that? This permissions nonsense is basically a torturous insane computer geeks version of "Are you sure?". Might be some sicko's joke, who knows.
Not the biggest deal, but some useless folders and files or file and folder names that come with w7 or maybe install with updates, can't be deleted or changed.
9) MSN messenger / WLM icon doesn't show in the system tray, so it can be taking up memory when you think you've exited out. I have to close it from the task manager which is a pain, SINCE:
10) like in vista, that nutty thing happens where you have to go to another screen to access the task manager, why bill, why?
11) Minor annoyance: when your viewing a folder, and capitalize or decaptilize the first letter of some folder (and maybe file) in that folder , it doesn't appear to make the change, you have to click into another folder to see the change, maybe "refresh" will work too but not sure.
12) Still no option to "select all" files or folders in a folder.
13) Still no list or details view for the desktop.
14) Automatically makes a new folder or file sort alphabetically causing the possiblity of losing track of it. XP doesn't do this annoying thing.
15) Bunches up icons in the upper left hand corner at startup or when you force explorer to crash.
16) The taskbar freezes a lot.
17) Forcing explorer to close messes up the order of the items in your quicklaunch, and there is no default order, so it's virtually random every time making it so you can't even memorize the default order!
18) God damned 18: im not even going to say what 18 is but it is a big problem and I'm not getting paid for this and the stupid amazon moderators won't allow me to reply to comments or make comments or participate in forums because they've declared me to be hateful even when I was telling one of their pet stalkers: CARL FLYGARE to stop harassing me and voting repeatedly on his own reviews and voting mine down repeatedly (though he's left me alone for a few months, mostly). Anyways...
PROS:
1) Very fast SDHC scanning speed in comparison to vista and xp; big headache relief.
2) Seems to be much more stable than xp and vista, seems that way. I haven't experienced any crashes yet.
3) Seems to be more resistant to browser-hijacking trojans. I got the same ones on vista as I did on windows 7, but it seems the trojans are more aggressive on firefox in vista then in windows 7, but that might be because for Windows 7 msoft gave me soft downloads that scanned for trojans and found some. It might do that on vista (I recall getting anti-trojan downloads for it) but I got the trojans recently and haven't been using vista as much since it's on a slow HP mini netbook that gets sickeningly hot to the touch.
4) Nice theme selections.
5) Seems to load the desktop much faster than vista, but it might be because I have 2 gigs of ram on my w7 netbook and only 1 on my vista one. Update (12/15/09): I learned the VIA processor on my HP 2133 (the one with vista on it) is much inferior to Intel's Atom (in my W7 netbook), which is probably why then Vista seemed slower to me than W7).
6) Biggest pro: I've used W7 heavily on my netbook now, and it won't crash, at worst explorer freezes temporarily. To me this is like mankind's first trip to the moon, a major breakthrough since every other OS I've ever used had problems with total freezing or total crashing (previous Windows versions, Linux and Amiga). I'd say that for this reason alone you should make the switch to W7 if you don't want to learn a new os or be sad over a limited amount of software or inferior software on some other OS like Linux (no offense intended to linux users).
Conclusion:
So, billions of dollars gets us the same belly-stabbing annoyances, and for how many more years? I get the impression that there are programmers at microsoft that deliberately do stupid things thinking that they will be asked to stay on the job longer to make the next batch of improvements in the next version of Windows, like maybe they think they'll be in danger of being laid off if they make a "perfect" version of Windows. If that's the case, then they and their managers should be fired and whichever programmers are responsible for these annoyances and "oversights". I think they should also be taken to a world court and tried for treason against humanity for being complicit in trying to drive world insane.
I think we all should look for an alternative operating system. Peronsally don't like linux, too geeky for me, ReactOS might be good one day but I don't like that there is some user with 666 at the end of his name helping develop it. And don't want to use OSX because of it's narcissist developer, who I think is way more elitist then MS.
Customer Review: College Dropout
Summary: 1 Stars
Bill Gates obviously never took Unix 101, doesn't care to be bothered to spend a Billion or so to make a software product that actually works for years and years with no problems, and definitely got really poor scores on "plays well with others". Anyone that buys Windows 7 should also play the Lottery. I'll buy a windows product when I can make a folder named "prn" on it.