E-Dribble

The house parties have fizzled out and the paid advertisements in the form of reviews has come and gone. That’s right, Windows 7 has been released.  So what does everyone think? Well, if you’re looking for a calm and unbiased response, don’t ask these guys.

A growing number of people are getting locked into an endless reboot loop during upgrade, destroying their Vista installs and leaving them with no OS.

Woops.

Microsoft must be working day and night to try to resolve this issue, right? From TFA:

According to Microsoft’s head of support, however, the endless reboot problem isn’t on the company’s top list of concerns. “It’s very early in the process,” said Ben Bennett, the director of Microsoft’s Windows consumer global support group, in an interview Monday afternoon. “In terms of the top issues of customers who choose to upgrade, the XP-to-Windows 7 [upgrade] is up there on the list for lots of reasons. The netbook upgrade scenario — how do I upgrade my netbook to Windows 7 — is also a big one. And another is, ‘Where are my applications?’ after people have upgraded. They wonder what happened to e-mail and photo editing, for example. Those are the top issues so far.”

So, they’re more concerned with those upgrading from XP to 7.  Well, that makes sense.  I’m sure that was their plan all along.

At least I got to keep the paper hats and confetti.

The release date of Windows 7 was leaked; Oct 23, 2009 is the date they begin telling you that it’s the best selling operating system they’ve ever designed, regardless of whether it actually is or not.  If pressed, they’ll be able to give you numbers to show this. That’s because they’ll threaten to ruin any hardware vendor that dares to ship a box with anything but 7 on it.  Regardless of whether that serial number is used or not, it is a sale and thus counts towards their impressive sales numbers.

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A while back, Steve Ballmer began telling everyone, most notably his corporate clients, that you will rue the day that you didn’t install Vista if you want Windows 7.  It’s just like the “rinse and repeat” portion of the instructions on your shampoo bottle.  They know that Vista was a stillborn, but still can’t help themselves from trying to sell some licenses.

Let’s move on though.  They have been assuring consumers that they needn’t worry about the hardware requirements for 7.  If your computer can run Vista, then you can run 7.

Umm, yeah.  About that.

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In spite of Microsoft’s insistence that they’ve created the ultimate OS with Vista, it seems that most reports still have XP outselling it.

This is of course, in spite of the fact that XP is no longer officially sold. Need a copy of XP? Head on over to NewEgg, where a loophole gets exploited to sell legitimate OEM copies of XP Pro.

Oh and that whole deal where Ballmer insisted that Vista was the most secure OS ever?  Yeah, he was just kidding.