With the release of Windows 7 coming in Oct, those of you looking to purchase new computers should consider only buying a machine that already has Windows 7 on it. There will be a lot of sales I'll bet on machines with Vista already on it that will say Windows 7 ready and offer a coupon for a "free" upgrade. If the deal is good enough then I say take it, but be aware that sometimes that an in place upgrade of an OS can cause problems. Most of the time it works fine but those times it doesn't can be frustrating and lead to a lot of problems getting back to square 1. If you have an old machine and are going to upgrade it from WinXP then I would seriously recommend just doing a fresh new install. Backup your data, locate your install disks for critical programs. If you downloaded them from the web find the email invoice and check and see if you can download it again. All your programs have to be reinstalled with a fresh install. If your hard disk is old, buy a new one you can get huge disks now for 100$. Everything I have read about Windows 7 is positive. So maybe it's time to give up on WinXP. Lots of gurus have been running the beta for awhile and declared it much better than any version of Vista and much more stable. A guy I know sent around an email for his clients regarding Win7. It's below.
One other thing, if you are buying a new machine and it is offered have them set you up in Raid 1. This involves having 2 hard disks usually the same size. From Wikipedia on Raid 1: it used to be something that you only found on servers and required special controllers and stuff that the average person couldn't do. But now modern motherboards pretty much all support Raid on them and just have to be set up correctly. The advantage is that if you have a HD failure on drive 1 in the array, the contents are duplicated on drive 2 and you won't have lost any data and the drives can be swapped a new drive put in and you are back in business. You should still backup your data, and infact in todays world it's easy to backup offsite. There are services that do this for very little (relatively) Carbonite is one such service. That way if some disaster strikes the computer..you know like lava flow or brush fire...your data is in the cloud (new term for internet).
No doubt WinXP isn't going away anytime soon. It's very solid and if you are in business you have to think of the cost of upgrading the entire network and maybe having to buy some new equipment. Old Apps apparently run really well in XP Mode on Win7. But for most of us it's a very worth while upgrade, that will handle our video, webcentric, lives better than XP. If you are buying new, it's easy and in fact you won't be able to buy anything else but Win7 soon. I do wonder how long companies will sell new computers with an option to have them put XP on them like they do now with Vista computers.
We've been running RAID drives on AMAT systems for quite a while. It makes it so nice. When you have a disk crash, you continue running on the other disk. Insert a new disk in place of the crashed disk and all the info is automatically written to the new disk in the background while running normally. RAID comes highly recommended by me.
I know your right but didn't they tell us the same thing with Win98, WinMe (Forget "Me" it was atrocious) and XP when Vista came out. It sounds more like advanced computing power with a good shot of creative fear mongering at times... Besides I'm a business throwback, I grow the food that enables the nerds to have the energy to create such wonders... I'm more concerned if its going to rain or not rain most days...
Early reports on Win7 are quite good... I've got one machine running Vista and my laptop runs XP...no problems with either and will not upgrade until some software conflict causes the necessity. Generally I have found that upgrading an OS is not a good thing...I never change something that is working. I usually will upgrade software versions of programs that I use a lot...just to keep up-to-date and not have to upgrade from version 3 to version 9... But sometimes I have regretted it when the new version had more bugs than the old.