Windows 7 is due out soon UK October 2009 out and the major makers are promising free upgrades (so don’t forget to claim your free upgrade!!!!) to the new system for recent purchasers of machines with the MS Vista operating system whereas the Mac Snow Leopard OS upgrade is already available but as far as I know it’s all to be paid for. If you are a Mac user then the Snow Leopard OS upgrade is probably a no brainer unless the pennies are very tight because it’s not an expensive thing to do if you are already running Leopard.
For my way of thinking unless Windows users already have a good spec machine running Vista then the upgrade to MS Windows 7 seems way too complicated. I am sure that most of us would get there in the end, and I include myself as Mr and Mrs Average in this respect but do we need that amount of aggro?
All that talk about loading to a different drive or repartitioning the drive and running 2 operating systems in tandem etc etc come on – life’s too short for all that stuff isn’t it? Maybe you are fascinated by the challenge and in that case “all power to you” but for most of us normal folk it’s probably safer to wait until the machine gets replaced and then buy a new one preloaded and ready to go.
If you are already running MS Vista and have the necessary RAM and hard drive capacity it looks within the realm of a “not too hard an upgrade”. But if you still live in 2001 and are running MS XP then it can be a complete pain and the machines from back then and especially laptops may not have the RAM and hard drive space to run the new MS Windows 7 operating system let alone the 64-Bit bit!
Snow Leopard’s 64-Bit support speeds up calculations x 2 as well as still being 32-Bit compatible for the older apps. If I were considering an upgrade to Windows 7, I think I would what to be sure I had the hardware to get onto the 64-Bit version. MS Windows 7 needs: 1GB RAM for the 32 bit version or 2GB RAM for the 64 bit version. 16GB of free hard drive space for the 32 bit and 20GB of free space for the 64 bit version of the operation system.) Other system requirements apply in addition to the above so if you go onto the Microsoft website you can get a little program download that will check our your system and what additional memory you might need to be able to do the upgrades.
Some high level multi machine users are holding off upgrading to 7 because they fear that Microsoft will have the spate of teething problems that will necessitate that they issue a service pack of fixes which could be many months away whereas it seems that Snow Leopard for the Mac users is a more trusted upgrade that they can feel confident to go for straight away.
Snow Leopard looks like an easy and relatively painless upgrade procedure because most of the differences between it and the previous Leopard system is “under the hood” and a bit like the step up from Vista to Windows 7 and not quite the giant leap from the older MS XP to Windows 7. I don’t suppose either of these new operating systems will convert the die hard Mac aficionados or avid Windows fans away from their respective allegiances and of course it is all about choice isn’t it?
It does seem however that MS Windows 7 will balance some the arguments between the camps of Mac vs Windows. As for me, well my machines are “as used by Noah” and so probably not worth the expense of all of the hardware upgrades that would be necessary to run newer softwares. It might be interesting to try it just for the experience but on the grounds of cost and time it is not going to happen. There are just too many other things that need fixing as well to make it a worthwhile rebuild. Its frightening what beasts of machines some people are running these days and some of the gamers out there are moving mountains of cash in search of speed, speed and more speed. Would you like a run down on the pros and cons of Solid State Drives vs. Spinning discs now there’s another post?
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