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I started messing with PCs in the late 80s; my first OS was DOS 2.11. I’ve used several versions of Windows since then, but I was a Vista-hater; I stayed with XP. I actually chose my laptop primarily because it came with XP Pro while most machines with shipping with Vista. But when I heard about Windows 7<\/a>, I was pretty excited. I put RC1 on a netbook<\/a> just to see for myself. Then I preordered three copies of Home Premium at a deep discount (one for Kat’s gaming PC, two for my machines), hopeful that this time, it would be different.<\/p>\nWell…it’s different. I’m writing this on my laptop, which now features Windows 7 on it, from a fresh install replacing XP. Then I installed Win7 on two more machines, including my quad-core main rig<\/a>. It took me more time to back up my data on these machines than it did to install Windows 7 and see it up and running on all of them. <\/p>\n I was prepared for disaster, and I figured that this would take all weekend. Instead, this was, by far, the easiest PC upgrade I have ever done. Microsoft nailed it. <\/p>\n UPDATE: I forgot to mention a few helpful things. My laptop only had 1GB and it still runs Win 7 just fine; I am upgrading to 4GB next week because I’m a power user d00d and I thought I already had more than a gig, but I was a little surprised at how it handled itself with such low memory. I still recommend 2GB for a minimum. AVG Free works fine for virus protection, and even though I backed everything up, I still forgot a few things. So back everything up and then go through visually and check again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I should not be typing this. It should not be possible. I started messing with PCs in the late 80s; my first OS was DOS 2.11. I’ve used several versions of Windows since then, but I was a Vista-hater; I … Continue reading