I did it! The evening of October 22, I pulled into Staples and bought the 3 pack of Windows 7 upgrade to Home Premium. Not my usual style to change a critical OS on my desktop – usually the only stable computer in my group but somehow this just pushed me.
I first upgraded my Sony Vaio laptop (about 5 years old) that was running the release candidate of W7. This went so smooth I was in awe! No issues, no hassles – worked perfectly. Even found my wireless connection and added it.
Then it was off to the desktop. Turned out my desktop was running Vista Business and this required the W7 professional version to do an upgrade but I could do a clean install – meaning I would have to reload my applications. The Pro upgrade was about $100 more and I did not need the extras so decided to do the clean install. Every once and a while it is good to clean out your computer – a little like the basement (how this this get here????)
I backed up my documents and went at it. Again, very smooth. Re loaded some of my applications – FireFox, Thunderbird, Open Offce – all went great, no problems. Ran into a problem with Corel’s Paint Shop Pro X2 Ultimate. Could not find my serial number. Gave customer service a call and had the number within 10 minutes. Everything went great from that point on.
Email, Web, internet, printers,Magic Jack (that strange phone app!), Blackberry Desktop – all working like they had been there forever.
So far liking the W7 – not sure it was a must upgrade but sure is fun to play with – if you enjoy that sort of thing. Here is a photo of my desktop taken with the new snip tool.
There is enough out there on the web for you to find out the new features and see if it is right for you. But if you are a casual user, I can recommend it heartily!
