Windows 7 at my Computer Club Meeting last Night

My computer club met last night. It's mostly PC folks, but we now have about 45 Mac users. Anyway, one of the more senior PC guys stood up and talked about all the trouble PC users are having upgrading to Windows 7. Apparently it can be a nightmare. Microsoft has established a troubleshooting webpage, and this fellow offered to personally help club member who were having trouble.

After his short presentation, I stood up and announced that Snow Leopard only cost $29, came on a disk, installed in about 10 minutes, and hasn't caused anyone I know any trouble at all.

Generous install estimate for SL. More like 20-30.

VegasGeorge said:

After his short presentation, I stood up and announced that Snow Leopard only cost $29, came on a disk, installed in about 10 minutes, and hasn't caused anyone I know any trouble at all.

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Yes...but given that your computer club is mostly made up of Windows users...what sort of response did you get after your announcement?

Any rotten vegetables come your way, or pie's in the face?

- Nick

I don't know what's more scary, the fact that there's so much trouble with the OS, or the fact that they actually built a site where you can cry about it...;D

VegasGeorge said:

Snow Leopard .....hasn't caused anyone I know any trouble at all.

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http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os...4500-problems-after-snow-leopard-upgrade.html

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/173633-problem-installing-snow-leopard.html

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/167382-problems-installing-snow-leopard.html

...but, you don't really know them personally

come now D3v1L80Y, I think you're being modest, only 3?

go to commercial!

we are a commercial...

go to another one!

haha...this thread is funny..
Did you fall asleep while your SL was installing, and woke up with 10 minutes to go
Mine sure did take about 30-40 minutes... In the end though, I still am running on 10.5.8....SUITS ME JUST FINE

I think the main problem with Windows 7 is that MS did not give users an easy update option from XP.

I don't know quite how they dropped that particular ball, an ability to upgrade and keep your files and applications is the sort of feature that is a basic idea. It is souring an otherwise greatly improved OS

Oh, MS... crazy saps.

darkestritual said:

oh, ms... Crazy saps.

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aye!!

louishen said:

I think the main problem with Windows 7 is that MS did not give users an easy update option from XP.

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And I don't believe they should have. Anyone running a Windows XP install has probably been doing so for quite some time. And with the amount of cruft that builds up over time on an XP machine (or any Windows machine), if you try to do a straight upgrade, it's just going to be a complete cluster. It might cause a lot of heartache in forcing a person to do a clean install, but not nearly as much as trying to do a straight upgrade. Does anyone remember upgrading from '98 or Me to XP? It was a nightmare then too.

Once again, the registry ends up being the Achilles heel of Windows. You can't gracefully port over applications, user settings, etc without breaking portions of the registry. And since Microsoft has adopted an image-based install (rather than extracting and installing individual files), they've made it nearly impossible to do the style of upgrade that Apple can with OS X.

With that said, Snow Leopard is no picnic to upgrade to either. I consider myself fairly savvy with Macs, if not a professional (as I am with supporting Windows). I fought with my personal machine and Snow Leopard for well over a month before I finally found all the answers to stabilize this machine. For a time, I seriously considered selling my MacBook Pro and just going with Windows 7.

An in depth study of advice on upgrading Windows XP, is generally do not bother as it is a pretty treacherous path. Much easier to upgrade from Vista, which is what is was designed for. Bet your comment about Snow Leopard soared like a lead balloon!

Drat cwa beat me by two minutes!

Sur3Mac said:

I don't know what's more scary, the fact that there's so much trouble with the OS, or the fact that they actually built a site where you can cry about it...;D

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Was thinking exactly the same .... A dedicated website just for it WOW

louishen said:

I think the main problem with Windows 7 is that MS did not give users an easy update option from XP.

I don't know quite how they dropped that particular ball, an ability to upgrade and keep your files and applications is the sort of feature that is a basic idea. It is souring an otherwise greatly improved OS

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Must confess it is why i decided to go to SL bc of the ease and the fact it kept my system the same as it was in the previous..... Apart from the obvious software upgrades to 64 bit ......

The comments about the difficulties upgrading from XP makes me scrap my ideas of doing so on my Dell Desktop (and doesn't surprise me).
However, I definitely plan on (eventually) installing W7 on my MBP to use with bootcamp. It appears to run fairly smoothly... for a Windows OS.

MYmacROX said:

The comments about the difficulties upgrading from XP makes me scrap my ideas of doing so on my Dell Desktop (and doesn't surprise me).
However, I definitely plan on (eventually) installing W7 on my MBP to use with bootcamp. It appears to run fairly smoothly... for a Windows OS.

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yeah I agree but what would be the best way of going about it? Installing Windows XP then upgrading to 7 or installing windows Xp, upgrading to vista then to 7? Sounds like a lot of hrs just to get it working, if correctly.

LelandJLK said:

yeah I agree but what would be the best way of going about it? Installing Windows XP then upgrading to 7 or installing windows Xp, upgrading to vista then to 7? Sounds like a lot of hrs just to get it working, if correctly.

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If you're referring to installing W7 on my Mac, I'll just get the full version and install it on a partition of my hd. No need to install an earlier version first.

Full version is roughly $80 more than the upgrade version according to Microsoft's website.

Pages upon pages of SL problems.
MacFixIt - CNET Reviews

i am not a mac user, just an iphone owner. I have been a windows guy since Win3.1

I had no problems upgrading from XP Windows 7 on an OS perspective. I did have a faulty hard drive so I had to start over on a new drive.

The upgrade went very smooth. Poped in the Windows 7 DVD, tell it to install Windows7, it then gives me 2 options, Upgrade or Full install. The upgrade option wont work from XP to Win7, but i KNEW that from earlier this year when running the beta version win7.

so I did the clean install where it formats hard drive and installs the full version of Win7.

I then used PC mover Pro to move all my programs from my Vista machine to my Win7 Machine.

No problems, runs great, no crashes. All my hardware and peripherals work. I only needed to down load 1 driver for my scanner and 1 program patch to make that program work with Win7.

I have never had an OS problem with Windows since I went to WinXP, only hardware or 3rd party programs like Photoshop and such. No viruses, spyware or junk like that.

Windows 7 has been very nice, sure its a small upgrade from Vista, but it really makes a difference.

james515 said:

i am not a mac user, just an iphone owner. I have been a windows guy since Win3.1

I had no problems upgrading from XP Windows 7 on an OS perspective. I did have a faulty hard drive so I had to start over on a new drive.

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so I did the clean install where it formats hard drive and installs the full version of Win7.

I then used PC mover Pro to move all my programs from my Vista machine to my Win7 Machine.

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That's why you had no issues. The topic of this thread is how people were having upgrade issues from XP to 7 (as in taking an existing XP machine, loaded with applications, data, etc and migrating to Windows 7). As you know, this is not a simple operation. From Vista, yes. But for the most part, it requires a clean install.

I have never had an OS problem with Windows since I went to WinXP, only hardware or 3rd party programs like Photoshop and such. No viruses, spyware or junk like that.

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Good for you. Judging by the hundreds of malware-infested PCs I've repaired both at work and in my side-jobs, you are in a relative minority of Windows XP users.