Posted 10/04/2009 at 10:44:49pm

And the point of you braggart, chest beating post is ............?

We should all go apply for a job there?

Ask us to be happy for you?

People are talking about mainstream discounts etc they are trying to get Somehow I do not think that getting a job where you work would be considered mainstream. I am sure that everyone is happy with the price you were able to secure, but it is not an action result item that amounts to much. Had you stated as a BTW if you work for X, please be aware that you product cost could be X, that would make some sort of sense. I have had regret on a few I wish I could have pulled back, and may be the same in your case.

Posted 10/04/2009 at 09:21:58pm

OK folks, what I am concerned with is the upgrade process which even MaxPc at last check is still a bit foggy on some issues, but I really do not expect them to have all of the answers at this juncture in time.

If I have to repartition a drive to basicly put xp or vista in a corner of a drive in its own partition to do an install, OK well I have plenty of drive space to spare with a TB boot drive, and I can squeeze that partition down to 50 or sixty gigs as a holding tank, and then I have it all backed up to my Windows Home Server, and if my WHS does not get trashed which is always possible. The idea is to keep the old OS installed going by the info available, if I have to do a win7 reintall fresh...now then there is the other hot rumor that the old os when it is deected will have its license key destroyed when I use an upgrade edition........This would and should be a MS coffin nail if the rumor bears out...but they are smarter than that....I hope.

I feel pretty confident that MS is keeping a lot of this information quiet to prevent exploits that their security folks will work on until release date and that to me is logical. However for the end result, as Max PC has stated, do not make it harder to upgrade for paying customers than to pirates. More than anything, more than anything, more than anything, more than anything.......do not punish me if my hard drive crashes or my motherboard blows up, or my power supply fries my motherboard, or anything that happens beyond my control to prevent me from getting a system up and running again just because I bought upgrade editions for my household. There is no doubt that MS made a great price point for millions of pre-order copies of something so many of us bought in blind faith that they would be fair in the upgrade process.

They also produced a product that works and feels incredibly good to operate.

I have totally enjoyed running both the beta and the RC7 and am more than pleased with the way it runs. I have also spent a great deal of time and some expense with the x64 version to insure compatibility with everything that I want to run, going so far as buying an interface from the UK to insure 64 bit compatibility with radio controllers. So, like many people out there, I am more than ready for Win7 x64.

So with October 22 being so close to the 31st, I am hoping that Freddie, Jason, Michael Myers, and the rest of their comrades do not jump out of that box at the end of the month that so many of us have invested so many pre release dollars into.

Posted 08/28/2009 at 04:32:22pm

I wonder if the "accounting and personel changes" at a certain big box helped the bottom line? 

Posted 07/12/2009 at 05:19:36pm

Family hand me down PC's...... Nah won't help them....The license will be zapped.

Charities.....Oh by the way, you will need to go buy a new $100 license for this $50 PC...We had to burn the license I was going to donate to upgrade MY new computer.

Pirates....If there is strength in numbers, they will probably add a few.

Honest Joe Enthusiast ....Well there is a pretty good target but no help.

I can't think of but one single thing that will come out of this.....MS wants to burn up those old licenses out there. The one thing that I wanted from them was a product that worked well, that I could upgrade to, and that I would want to spend money on to upgrade all of my PC's....But I also need an OS product that comes through when the hardware fails, when the software fails, and I have to pick up the pieces and start over.

Sure we can do the Acronis image..etc...Can you imagine that MS meeting...."Well this upgrade thing....ya know everyone has an old drive laying around that they can restore from after we zap their old licenses." "We gotta stop this piracy stuff."

Now we become slaves to additional hardware and software costs purely for the purpose of supporting the Operating System? See straw.....see straw break camel back.

I am all for killing software piracy in its tracks, but what MS needs to realize is that I pay for the product I use and the more difficult that it becomes to use, the more I want to look elsewhere to get the job done, and I am sure I am not alone in that quest. I may not make a ton of money for Microsoft, but currently I have 6 OS licenses....that number can go up or down. If it goes up, I spent and send more money to MS. If it goes down, it means that MS has become more trouble than they are worth sending money to anymore.

Posted 06/28/2009 at 04:19:06pm

Assuming the info you have from technet is accurate, it makes the whole upgrade process even more confusing as they consider xp a qualifier but say xp can not be upgraded directly as with vista. That would mean that with xp you would have to have a third party app to create a partition slide, or maybe a second hdd already installed and ready to go. With vista either play pattycake with the existing OS or use the partition slider?

Who knows, until some better leaks are out there, but gotta buy now....right? 

Posted 06/25/2009 at 02:30:59pm

My real concern is how the upgrade versions will physically work. While only an opinion, I do  not think MS will go back to letting us plug in an old OS disk to do a clean install. If it goes like Vista and you have to install twice, I'm OK with that, although it takes quite a while. If upgrade will work by "partition sliding", I can live with that, if it works by doing a verify then wipe, I can live with that after backing up to the server (although that is a pretty brain dead approach) However, if it only works by playing pattycake with the old OS files, then that would not only be brain dead, but also arrogant.

If the report is correct that means that only two versions, both upgrade, will be available. My understanding from other sources just fyi is that if you are using a remote pc to a Windows Home Server, you must have the Pro version, as with XP to access your WHS remotely, so looks like I will need one Pro and two Home Upgrades. Trying to take a pragmatic approach.....it will be worth $200 to get rid of clunky Vista, after actually enjoying Windows 7 for a few months.

Don't know about everyone else, but even after all the fixes and cleaning up driver problems and having the gap closed a bit on XP's performance, my biggest issue with Vista is that it is still for a lack of a better expression....a clunky interface. I find aside from the performance improvement in W7, the clunky factor is gone and the intuitive factor that XP, when new, is back..... 

Posted 06/25/2009 at 01:27:53pm

should be able to, since you would be upgrading to a retail version. 

Paschal

Posted 06/03/2009 at 02:35:42pm

I would like to hope that as vista is ageing they will at least fix the very poor fuctioning internal search feature so if you are looking for UAC, add printer etc that it would actually work, cuz it works pretty well in Windows 7. My guess is that it will not get fixed because that is something I really like in Win 7 that works that doesn't work well in Vista, and that would remove some incentive to purchase Win 7.....Oh that's right.....like Windows ME.....ripoff....then reward later, but collect both times.....Nevertheless, the big guys get it wrong sometimes, and I have to say that Microsoft is getting it right with Windows7. It is lean, clean and mean. They know where they went wrong with Vista and put great effort intogetting it right with 7.

For the most part, I have had few driver issues running win7x64 with my new and older hardware, and from my experience so far, Win 7 will be my divorce from the 32 bit OS to go with 64. This is a great opportunity for Microsoft and all Software vendors to get on the 64 bit train, and while not forgetting the 32x base push their marketing into the x64 arena.

Posted 05/08/2009 at 09:49:46pm

No, no dual but triple boot here with one case and two 500 gig drives....one is dedicated xp......the other is split.....it does double duty with win vista home premium and win 7 x64.....and I might even add onto that that I used the Vista partition tool to shrink the vista drive by 60 gigs without issue to accomodate the win 7 install. No Probs here, pretty happy so-far

Posted 05/08/2009 at 09:38:39pm

Microsoft as well as many companies have been down this same path before. MS did not do so well with Windows ME, although it had decent enhancements leading up to XP, which blew away the past. Vista came out, and the big fault with it was very poor coordination and execution of a half decent product on the part of MS and or vendors that have to do the driver thing to make an OS actually work.....period. No matter who was at fault, the release of the OS left such a bad taste in the user mouth, no one really got the warm and fuzzies when problems were fixed.

I started with Win 7 32, and it was too easy to use, so when the next round was available this week, having 4 gigs of ram in the machine, I jumped to the x64 version just to be testy and make it fail....Down to two devices which are not supposed to be win7 supported anyway and if I get them to work, I am a doulbe thumbs up on this OS. Looks good, has a fast engine, and it works, Outside of Windows Home Server, best product out of Redmond in about eight years.