Customer Reviews for Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Upgrade

Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Upgrade
by Microsoft Software

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Software Reviews of Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Upgrade

Customer Review: Very clean and stable. A definite upgrade!
Summary: 5 Stars

I've been running Windows XP since shortly after it was released, until about a month ago. XP is a stable operating system, and works with almost all the software/hardware you'll want to run. Vista didn't seem like much of an upgrade, so I ignored it.

Windows 7 seemed like it had promise. I had friends using the beta and the release candidates, and they only had good things to say. So I snatched up a copy a little while back and installed it on my desktop. I'm running all the software I used to (WoW, AIM, Google Talk, Ventrilo, aMSN, Windows Live, Google Chrome, Norton Antivirus, etc) with more stability than I had with XP. The look and feel is a definite upgrade, and the way the OS handles system resources seems much better than what we had with XP.

I haven't had much experience with anything too "legacy." But then again, I saw this as an opportunity to ge rid of all the old stuff I hung onto and never really used.

Customer Review: Questionable Investment of Time and Money
Summary: 3 Stars

The big question for many users is "will the 200+ dollar investment and several hours of time justified by the actual and perceived benefits of the upgrade?" From my perspective, the answer is *possibly* as general performance is incrementally improved. Personally, it may be many months, however, before I get a suitable payback for the time I have invested during the upgrade process. Sadly, there are some annoying bugs in Windows 7 that are having an immediate impact on my productivity.

To its credit, Microsoft did do an excellent job with its upgrade process technology that allows users to keep all of their programs and files. Basically, everything should be as you left it except for various task bar and star menu links. It reminds me of a comment made by a construction contractor faced with gutting the Pentagon in the 1990's who suggested the job was like changing a black-and-white television to a color set with no interruption in programming. This must have been no small feat for Microsoft.

My goal for the upgrade was merely to increase the performance of my already fast HP Elitebook mobile workstation with an X9100 dual-core processor and 4GB of RAM running Vista 64 bit. I wasn't a Vista hater to begin with but I am always looking for a speed boost. Various IT personnel with whom I have spoken and who tested Windows 7 for months before its release raved about its speedy performance. As I continuously run a real-time full-text search application on my notebook called X1, I have taken the approach that any performance enhancement is worth the investment.

After installing Vista and then subsequently installing the graphics drivers for my Nvidia Quadra graphics card, I can say that Windows 7 is visibly faster in some aspects. Oddly, my one performance benchmark, the 3DMark06 (below), didn't conclusively demonstrate a performance bump.

The biggest improvements thus far appears to be with opening various Microsoft applications. While I have not timed this scientifically, the launch process appears to be about twice as fast. Other actions, such and launching a new tab in IE Explorer (i.e. new iexplorer.exe process) appears to be dramatically faster (> 3X). In all, Windows just seems to be running faster when under high stress environments.

Some of the new window manipulation features do allow the user to save a couple of steps. For example, one can drag an application window to the top border of the screen to have that window application maximize and fill the screen. Similarly, one can drag a window to the right or left, causing that application window to fill ? of the screen on that particular side of the desktop.

Yet, it seems that overall, Microsoft seems to be focusing more on mouse usage and less on keyboard shortcuts. Power users who work on Wall Street are trained to use keyboard shortcuts instead of the mouse in virtually all possible circumstances. Once learning a few dozen of these keyboard shortcuts, one's productivity can increase significantly. For some odd reason, Microsoft seems to be moving away from providing such capabilities to power users as evidenced in their release of Office 2007 where many of the most important hotkeys were changed or removed. Likewise, in Windows 7, there are changes to the hotkey functions that will IMPEDE power users.

Some of the aesthetic features are a matter of taste. The Personalization functionality allows for a collection of high resolution desktop pictures to change throughout the day. Corresponding to a particular theme are system sounds so, for example, when you select American scenes them, a banjo will sound when you have an alert whereas in previous versions of Windows a beep would sound. Vindows7 adds additional transparency capabilities to the user interface. Yet, many of these such as the transparent application window frames have dubious value as they give a cluttered appearance.

Be aware, the setup - even from Vista it is time consuming. I have excluded steps that I felt were necessary but not critical to complete the install such as the 45 minutes needed to backup 20 GB of data on the drive.
Time required for the setup (HP Elitebook Mobile Workstation):

1) 3.0 hours of research (reading reviews, speaking with IT personnel)
2) 0.5 hours choosing the appropriate version and purchasing the software
3) 0.5 hours backing up data (as a precaution)
4) 0.75 hours uninstalling conflicting HP Protect software and turning back on needed processes that I disabled
5) 1.5 hours installation time
6) 0.5 installing Windows updates immediately after installation
7) 0.5 hours installing Nvidia Quadra drivers (suggested by Windows 7 installation process
8) 1.5 customizing layout of taskbars, start menu, visual effects and other Windows setting
9) TBD - learning curve
So, in total, this took up 8.75 hours of my time, which hopefully will pay off at some point.

The X1 real-time search application is my biggest processor hog by a long margin. It is one of the reasons I purchased a very high end notebook and decided to invest in the Windows 7 upgrade. I can't say there is a big performance boost from that perspective. It does seem that there are fewer hang-ups in Windows 7 than with XP or Vista, but it still happens. Yet, when a program does hang ("application not responding") - any program, the user finds the same annoying messages "are you sure you really want to close the application, really?" It is still mystifies me why there isn't a more aggressive kill function, much like what exists in old-school Unix.

In all, I would say the upgrade is worth it. Windows 7 does appear to slightly improve performance and many enjoy the new aesthetics.

BUGS
*Conflicts with Adobe Acrobat - can't move/ resize windows in some strange instances - seems to be getting better after Adobe upgrade
*iTunes controls (top of window) don't work on a second monitor when the screen is full screen
*Adobe controls (top of window) don't work on second screen when the screen is full screen
*Window jumps around, can't move properly when there is an alert windows
*Front panel/activity pane gets stuck

Design Flaws
*Icon spacing on Task Bar is too large
*Links on Windows menu have a less control
*Still no way to aggressive kill stubborn applications

Performance Benchmarks 3DMark06 - As you can see, the CPU subscore is much LOWER in Vista. However, I can't say I have seen anything slow down. It may to do with the benchmark code.

HP Elitebook - X9100, 4GB Ram, Quadro FX 770M

********Windows Vista*********
5/30/2009
many process on,both monitors on
4831 3DMarks
1849 SM2.0
1829 HDR/SM3.0
2731 CPU

5/30/2009
several processes off,both monitors on
4828 3DMarks
1840 SM2.0
1832 HDR/SM3.0
2733 CPU

5/30/2009
sim to #2 w/ nb mon off
4862 3DMarks
1849 SM2.0
1853 HDR/SM3.0
2730 CPU

5/30/2009
On battery power
4904 3DMarks
1866 SM2.0
1868 HDR/SM3.0
2752 CPU

5/30/2009
On battery power
4903 3DMarks
1867 SM2.0
1866 HDR/SM3.0
2753 CPU

5/31/2009
Plugged in, many services disabled
4858 3DMarks
1845 SM2.0
1850 HDR/SM3.0
2751 CPU

6/3/2009
Plugged in, Standard services enabled
4954 3DMarks
1887 SM2.0
1892 HDR/SM3.0
2740 CPU

*******Switched to Windows 7*********
11/1/2009
4767 3DMarks
2098 SM2.0
1894 HDR/SM3.0
1521 CPU

11/1/2009
4869 3DMarks
2110 SM2.0
1963 HDR/SM3.0
1607 CPU

11/2/2009
4949 3DMarks
2092 SM2.0
1906 HDR/SM3.0
1874 CPU

11/2/2009
4924 3DMarks
2093 SM2.0
1900 HDR/SM3.0
1829 CPU

11/2/2009
4889 3DMarks
2085 SM2.0
1902 HDR/SM3.0
1765 CPU

11/2/2009
4997 3DMarks
2173 SM2.0
1939 HDR/SM3.0
1727 CPU

11/2/2009
Updated Nvidia Drivers for Windows 7
4986 3DMarks
2180 SM2.0
1932 HDR/SM3.0
1705 CPU

Customer Review: Well worth it!!!
Summary: 5 Stars

I bought a new computer 2 years ago, expecting it to be much faster than the one I had at the time. Unfortunately, the operating system loaded on it was Vista. I was so disappointed in the slow, slow speed! It got worse over time, even though I was constantly trying things to speed it up. I finally came to the conclusion that I needed to get rid of Vista. I bought Windows 7 Professional, loaded it in several hours with a minimum of difficulty (and I'm no computer whiz!), and my computer has been working perfectly ever since! It loads programs, web pages, and everything else 10 times faster than with Vista. I've been using 7 for a month now and have had no problems with it whatsoever. Well worth the money for the upgrade! Thank you Microsoft, for realizing that Vista was a bad idea and for correcting the problems.

Customer Review: Best version of Windows
Summary: 5 Stars

Starts up and shuts down faster than Vista.No annoying pop-ups,you have full control over UAC and it can be turned off.
Win 7 runs faster than Vista and is non intrusive.I bought the upgrade version and was going to do a clean install but decided
to upgrade instead,that was a mistake.After 3 calls to Microsoft for 3 different problems I was told to do a clean install.
The clean install went very smoothly and only took about 40 mins.a lot of the garbage that accumulated over the past 3 years
was gone.Windows installed all the drivers and updated the security files.The only updated driver that I downloaded was for
my HP printer.I suggest backing up your system before the upgrade as I fogot my email contacts and some photos.