Conclusion
For those of you who don't want to read through the whole test, here's the bottom line: W7URC works a whole lot better than Vista ever did, and backward compatibility -like with the hardware you've already purchased- seems to be addressed by the Microsoft developers. Thanks for listening, Redmond. I have already reserved my copy of W7 (for $40) at Micro Center; it's so much better than Vista that I have decided to keep the W7URC in place instead of Vista. I have some reservations about Microsoft's proposed pricing. Currently at Microsoft Store, W7 is selling the upgrade from XP & Vista for $120 for the Home Premium edition (no Home Basic for America) and $220 for the Ultimate Edition. (Presumably, the retail versions will be higher priced. I got the $40 upgrade price when Microsoft was offering the new W7 at a deep discount; one hopes that the deep discount will survive till the official unemployment rate falls below 5%.) (Update: Home Premium retails for $200, according to Information Week.) Further, for $120 (Home Premium), you may not even get backward compatibility; unless your willing to fork over $200 - $220 (W7 Professional and Ultimate, respectively), your favorite XP programs may not run in W7.
(I still prefer my Ubuntu (currently 9.04 - Jaunty Jackalope). Ubuntu works, it's easy to use, and I don't have to worry about security all that much. And it's FREE (as in no money, and as in free to adapt and share). Perfect for the Home user who just wants to get online, get email and have a working (and compatible with the rest of the world) Office Suite. Ubuntu offers your form and function. What more do you need? Of course, it's a whole lot more than that, but that's beyond what most people want from their PCs.)
Vista the Listless
Vista has been an operational and marketing nightmare for Microsoft. Most businesses decided to wait and see how Vista worked before going ahead with company-wide upgrades. A wise decision on their part. Why quit using XP when it works?
And PC & PC Peripheral manufacturers (HP Laser Printers come to mind) simply decided not to make Vista drivers for their products. (One client has an HP Laser all-in-one which have no scanning drivers for Vista; that's an expensive add-on to a peripheral with little functionality in Vista.)
Vista claimed to be able to run with 1 gigabyte (GB) of RAM. To paraphrase Inago Montoya: They keep using that word, “run.” I do not think it means what they think it means. It needs a minimum of 2GB, preferably not less than 4GB. (I ran it on my Dell Inspiron E1505 laptop with 4GB, after being told it would work w/ 1GB. (Thanks to this experience, I am now a devoted Ubuntu user and promoter.)
The worst part about Vista was its lack of backward compatibility. A plethora of applications simply would not work in Vista. For the business users, this was (and is!) completely unacceptable; from the perspective of the Home PC user, it is a major hassle, and not one most users are going to tolerate.
The Tests
I first tested W7URC in a VirtualBox (Vbox) on my Ubuntu 9.04 desktop. It worked well enough, connecting with most everything, but with fewer resources than the environment I wanted. The Vbox was limited to 2.8 GB RAM and 32-bit (altho' I've yet to test it in a 64-bit environment).
First Test specs
VBox ver. 2.2.4
1.5 GB RAM allocated to Virtual Machine within an Ubuntu environment
running on Intel E7100 Core2Duo
Second Test specs
Dell Inspiron E1505
Intel T2300 CPU @ 1.66 GHz L1: 2 x 32 Kbytes L2: 2MB
RAM: 4GB (2 x 2GB)
On my first test, things went OK. Install was slow, but that had more to do with the virtual resources. Nothing really to write home about, except that the limited resources made the system somewhat sluggish.
Once installed, I started W7. With 1.5GB RAM, loading Windows took over 2 minutes. When I changed the settings to use 2.8GB (max'd out), W7 loaded in 90 seconds. From password to productivity, it took 20 seconds (1.5 GB) and 13 seconds (2.8GB). In other words, W7 wants RAM to work properly. RAM is relatively cheap, so get if you get W7 with at least 3GB RAM.
Once loaded, the Internet started right up, and I downloaded and installed (in order of installation) ClamWin (Antivirus), Firefox 3.5 and OpenOffice3.
I then easily connected to the Network -something I wasn't able to do as easily when I ran Vista in virtual mode. All thee PCs (Dell Dimension 2350, the E1505 laptop and my own build on which I ran the Vbox) were recognized.
Rebooting was painless, albeit a bit sluggish with the limited resources of the Vbox.
For my second test, I got out a 2.5" NTFS formatted 120 GB drive and replaced my laptop's Vista hard drive.
The install was quick. I was up and running in 25 minutes. (Just like Ubuntu, I thought.) Once loaded, it quickly found my wireless network. I checked for updates and mapped the network drives. Unfortunately, unlike Ubuntu -which can mount the shared Windows drives and manipulate files therein, W7 cannot see the shared Ubuntu drives on the network.
After that, I loaded security software, Firefox 3.5 (and was able to install my add-ons with a CLEO pack; thanks Chuck!) and OpenOffice 3.1 (Which is better than Microsoft Office 2003 (IMHO) and compatible with MS Office 2007 (fact, not opinion)).
I proceeded to install other apps. By and large, most worked without any adjustments necessary. Scribus (a great, open-source desktop publisher app similar to Microsoft's Publisher) didn't want to install in W7, but it was easy and painless to have Scribus load as though it were in an XP environment (W7 even suggested it!). Likewise, Songbird (from the folks who brought us Firefox and Thunderbird, an open-source multimedia app similar to I-tunes) runs in a faux-XP environment that requires W7 to change its settings. As soon as I close Songbird, w7 resumes the settings I chose.
With the greatest of ease, I install Yahoo's Zimbra desktop email client (an excellent -free!- replacement for Outlook).
Frankly, W7URC works so well that I simply hooked up my old Vista hard drive via USB, migrated all that I wanted to keep, and have gratefully left Vista behind.
My biggest concern is that one of W7's different versions -Home Premium- will not give you the most important function: backward compatibility with XP. You'd think for $120, Microsoft would allow you to use your programs from XP. Now, you'll have to shell out an additional $80 -or buy all new versions of the programs you love in XP. Hopefully, Redmond is still listening and will include XP compatibility with Home Premium.
My recommendation: If you're a small business running Vista, and you absolutely need to run Windows-based programs, bite the bullet and buy the upgrade. And, as was shown in late June, early July, the price is not fixed. Negotiate with Microsoft and/or your tech vendor. If you're a home-based user, unless you're getting a good deal (under $50), either stick with XP or make the leap to Ubuntu. You'll save not only on the cost of W7, but also on any new non-free apps (all software applications on Ubuntu are free).
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