I have had many friends and acquaintances ask me about where or not they should up grade to Windows & or not.
My general rule of any upgrades of software from simple to complex is that you should never be the first to upgrade unless your purpose is to test the software. Now before you even think about upgrading you need to make sure that you have BACKED UP your computer files and more than once. Also make sure that your backups are good by trying to restore a file or two. The restores only have to be some small text files, but it is the only way to insure that you have proper backups. Remember if you upgrade you are going to be moving around and or erasing a lot of data on your hard disk so be careful!
Now that you have a back up let’s look at the many possible options out there.
1) You buy a new computer with windows 7 on it. I can’t see any reason not to run the computer with windows 7. From a clean install it see fairly stable and is a much better choice than running Vista on the computer.
2) You bought a computer of the past month or so and have a free upgrade to windows 7. In this case I would be tempted to go ahead and upgrade to windows 7 from vista. There is no need to learn vista at this point and the odds are that if things are running under vista the upgrade should go smoothly.
3) You have had Vista for a while this becomes a trickier questioning. If you have had nothing but problems and still having troubles with Vista then I would say go ahead and up grade. On the other hand if you have had a fairly stable usage of Vista then you should wait and let Microsoft discover and work out any problems they might fine. If Vista is working for you then you should not feel like you are in a rush to upgrade.
4) I suspect that most people will fall into this category which is people who are still running Windows XP. My basic advice is again to wait. Let’s see if Microsoft has really done a good job and that Windows 7 is as stable and good as they claim. But while we wait people should do several things.
The first thing to test is whether or not your hardware will support windows 7. If you have a computer over a few years old you should always make sure that you have a fast enough processor, memory and so on. Microsoft makes a software tool that you can download to see how your computer stacks up.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/get/upgrade-advisor.aspx
The second thing that we all need to do is to learn a little bit about what windows 7 before you stat using it. The new interface is the wave of the future and there is no reason that you should not become familiar with it before you start using it.
To help you with this I ran across a good online article by MSNBC / PC World to help get you started learning about the new interface.
What you need to know about Windows 7 - In-depth look goes over the basics of Microsoft’s new OS
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33329246/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/
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