a new brain

[sergebroom]

My laptop - my personal laptop, not the one on loan from my employer - is showing more and more signs that it's 7-year-old. It's slow, for one thing. It's heavy, for another. Replacing parts is starting to turn into an expensive proposition for such an old clunker.

Its replacement willl probably run Windows 7. Is "7" a distinct improvement over the ghastly Vista, and is it not-a-step-down, compared to "XP"? Also, do softwares that run under "XP" experience compatibility problems under "7", and vice versa?

Comments

[ogre-san.livejournal.com]

Win 7 is a vast improvement over Vista, but it does have some compatibility issues with XP apps. Some work fine, some don't work at all.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Thanks. As long as Word works on both platforms, that should be ok. I was asking because my wife is a writer and I want to make sure she'll have a backup machine, should hers need to be taken to the repair shop for a few days because one virus got thru.

[billstewart.livejournal.com]

If you don't like Vista, you can easily repair it by installing Linux, and anything bigger than a netbook has enough horsepower to run VMware, which means you can drag along an XP machine to run Word on (in case OpenOffice isn't compatible enough...) And even with a netbook you could set it up for dual boot.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Windows 7 doesn't suck.

If an XP app has problems on 7, it's probably because it is trying to do something skanky with the registry, Program Files, network ports, windows messages, or some other security risk. Or it may have a hard coded test to for the OS version and if that test fails it says its not compatible. In other words, if it has compatibility problems, you probably want to upgrade or replace it. Most XP apps just work.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Funny that the best thing we can say about a Microsoft product is that it doesn't suck.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Reference these T-shirts from Apple and BareBones.

[come-love-sleep.livejournal.com]

I like Windows 7 okay. It talks down to the user a fair bit, but it's a monstrous improvement over Vista, and to my mind not a backslide from XP, which I mainly used beforehand.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the reassurance.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Win 7 is better than Vista. Much better. Vista sucked. It is better in the way that Windows 3.1 was better than 3.0. It is better in the way that XP was better than Windows 2000 and ME.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

It's all relative, as Einstein would say?