All of the PC’s in the Juchems Blaine household are now on Windows 7.  Most of the ones in Plainfield are as well, only one left there!  Windows 7 is great operating system that really takes away many of the reasons to be a rebel and stick with XP or be lazy and stay on Vista.  If not having the most secure and feature rich Windows operating system out there so far isn’t enough to get your rear in gear, here are a few more reasons to move.

First off, if you have Vista, upgrading to 7 is a complete cinch.  Get the same version of 7 that you have of Vista (ie, Ultimate to Ultimate) put in the disk and away it goes.  I have done this several times with no ill effects.  Be prepared to free up some space on your C: drive and reinstall your video drivers.  It might take a bit, but it is so easy its almost criminal.  You don’t have to pay someone to do it 🙂

With XP, you need to be prepared to wipe it out and start fresh.  Also, if your PC is older than Vista (late 2006) you should be prepared that things like wireless cards and printers may not work.   Look for drivers before you go for the upgrade.  Beyond that, make sure you have your media and keys for things like Office are at hand, back up your important data to a couple different places, put the DVD in and enjoy!  It will preserve anything in your “my documents” folder if you choose to not nuke your XP partition when installing but you shouldn’t rely on that.  In my experience, installing 7 plus running windows update once after the install will catch an incredible amount of diverse hardware.

Lastly, avoid buying a retail copy of 7.  NewEgg OEM is the way to go. Buy the 64 bit if you can, only buy the 32 bit version if you have to.  If you buy it now, you can expect to have a solid five year lifespan on that Operating System. Might as well jump in early!

–Nat