I’ve done a few WinXP-to-Win7beta upSETgrades for an Internet cafe, and listened closely to what the users have said.

With just a half-gig of system RAM and an on-motherboard video robbing a bit of that RAM, WinXP runs most basic applications juuuust fine; Win7 runs moooostly fine, with occasional 1- or 2-second screen freezes.

Upgrading system RAM to 1GB helps a little. Moving away from on-motherboard RAM-stealing video is more important, but you needn’t spend big money on video.

I can say that a $175 gamers’ video card is waaay over the top. The way Woody has worded his article makes a middle-to-high-end video card sound like a necessity for Win7, but honestly, it’s NOT.

You can get middle-of-the-road Win7 performance (as measured on the Windows Experience Index included in Win7) with a very low-end US$ 50 modern video card. Just be sure the video card has with DirectX 10 and 256 to 512 MB of dedicated video RAM.

With 1GB of system RAM and a DirectX 10 / 512MB video card, your Win7 will run smoothly, even with Aero “glass” and all the other supposedly performance-sapping features turned on. In fact, turning Win7’s “performance-sapping” video features on & off seems to make no performance difference at all!

For Win7, you certainly don’t need a high priced planet-melting GPU, all the cooling towers, airconditioner fans, windmills, and Harley Davidson pipes that come with US$100+ gamers’ video cards.

There’s no reason to go to the bleeding edge of technology to make the pre-SP1 version of Win7 run adequately.

True, Win7 temporarily has the benefit of being more resistant to rootkits than WinXP. But when & if Win7 gains acceptance, rootkit writers will bother to write viruses specific to Win7.

Why move away from WinXP? It works. It works well, and cheaply (damned important, in today’s smoking ruin of an economy) on existing hardware.

The vast majority of software runs on XP, but the same cannot be said of Win7. Even with Win7’s “compatibility mode”, there’re no guarantees because your CPU may not have working virtualization built into it.

Win7 erodes your privacy and your rights.
In finding the right driver for your hardware, for example, it no longer offers you the option to search locally for drivers WITHOUT also searching on MS’s webspace.
Hell, it even loses the personal pronoun in “my computer” and “my documents”.

Remember how WinXP’s SP2 replaced huge chunks of WinXP? There’s no guarantee that Win7’s first software patch won’t bring back the piggishness and DRM invasiveness that made Vista a steaming pile of …anticonsumerism.

Vista showed us what’s on MS’s mind, and it isn’t “please the end user”. It’s “DRM at any cost; please the entertainment and software industries, NOT the end user”.

Expect Win7 to be an upSETgrade like Vista. Stick with WinXP or make the jump to Linux.

I, for one, will not be upgrading to Windows 7. Not unless the program is revealed to be a major improvement over the Vista HP 64-bit OS I am running now.

I have no doubt that my PC would be able to handle MS’s new OS. My machine is currently using the Intel i-7 chip and I have 3gigs of DDR3 RAM, plus I also have the ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics card.

I will be looking to you though to tell me if Windows 7 is worth the upgrade, considering the system I am running now. I look forward to your personal review.

Thanks!