Microsoft Windows 7

The release date has been made public for the new operating system from Microsoft, Windows 7. October 22 is the day, but I am not yet ready to rush out and advise anyone to install it. We still need to have a wait and see attitude to see what glitches may arise once it is in the hands of the public. It probably will not take more than a month to determine what hardware does not work, even though it is said to work, what software may need to be upgraded to work with the new OS, what other problems may be found with glitches and possible security issues, all of which may have been passed by the beta testers, or ignored, if reported, by the programmers.

If you cannot wait for a new machine, there will be an upgrade program available for machines sold with Vista. Apparently this program is to start around the end of June, according a leaked Best Buy memo, and the actual program has been announced, but no actual date has yet been officially given by Microsoft, nor has a price been yet placed on it—it may be no cost, or it could cost you some money to take advantage of this program. The downside here is that there is no direct upgrade path from Windows XP, just from Vista. If you have a PC running Vista, you will be able to do a direct upgrade, or so they say—in the past a direct in place upgrade was like shooting yourself in the foot, you were better off, in some instances to do what is known as a bare metal install. Whether this will be the case upgrading to Windows 7 from Vista remains to be seen.

If you have an XP downgrade from Vista, you'll need to upgrade to the copy of Vista supplied with your machine, then upgrade to the Windows 7 OS. It may just be easier to do a bare metal install, in this case, directly installing Windows 7. If you just have Windows XP, then you will need to do the bare metal install, since Windows 7 will not upgrade your copy of XP.

I've not found an "official" Microsoft site for hardware compatibility with Windows 7 yet, but two places you might keep an eye on are: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility and http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hcl/default.mspx which should have the information as it becomes public.

If your current computers are doing the work you need them to do, there may be no compelling reason to update them. If your current computers are more than 4 years old, you should at least start thinking about replacement. If your computers are 5 years older, or more, then you should seriously think about replacement. While a mechanical failure can occur at anytime in a computer's life, the older a machine gets, the closer to failure you come. The time to replace a machine is before it breaks down, not when it breaks down. Transitioning from a working computer to a new one is much easier to accomplish than to trransistion from a non-working computer.

 

As always, we, here at LAN Doctor, are here to help you make these decisions and determinations to more efficieintly run your business.Feel free to give us a call, 703.356.3070, e-mail us, info@landoctor.com , or visit our web site at http://www.landoctor.com.