Should I upgrade to Windows 7

Question: Should I upgrade to Windows 7?

Answer: I’ve been using Windows 7 for about 2 months now and so far I’ve been very happy with it. Some people may be intimidated at first because the look and feel is more like Vista than XP but Microsoft has made many improvements to the things that made Vista cumbersome and annoying such as the UAC or User Account Control. If you’ve used Vista before you’ll recognize this as the annoying box that pops up every time you change a setting. UAC is still present in win7 but it is far less intrusive. It does pop up when you’re installing or updating programs but it does not when you change you’re screen resolution.

There are some really good new features in Windows 7. There is a search feature built into the start menu. This is present in Vista but they made some changes in 7. Now you can search your documents by not only filename, but content and author as well. So if you can’t remember the name of the document, you can search using keywords. Another feature is XP mode. This allows you to run programs that won’t run on Vista to run in a virtualized XP environment. This is the main reason most of the corporate world did not upgrade to Vista. There are some system requirements to do this. Your processor must support virtualization so older PCs will probably not be able to use this feature.

Back to the original question: Should you upgrade to Windows 7. My answer is… Maybe. Microsoft is going to continue support XP through 2011 under its Mainstream Support life cycle and then through 2016 under the Extended Support. This means security update and hotfixes will be offering into 2011 then just security updates into 2016. For more information about Microsoft’s Life Cycle Policy for XP and all other Microsoft products go to support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/. Also there is no direct upgrade method available from XP to 7 so you have to do a full install of 7 then reinstall all of your programs and files. My advice would be if your XP PC is running fine and you don’t want to take the time to backup all of your files and install a new OS then don’t. XP will be supported for a long time. But if you’re in the Market for a new PC anyway then you’ll probably be happy with Windows 7.

Written By Cooper Self
cooper@goldrush.com
Gold Rush Internet, LLC
209-736-0111 ext.14

If you have a question for our technicians, please email us by clicking here.