full disclosure - i'm a vista user, and happy with it (i'm not trying to run it on a paltry 1MB machine)

from what i've heard you CANNOT upgrade from a pre-Vista operating system directly to Windows 7 without archiving all your files, then reinstalling all your apps and files after you change OS.

this is the kind of SNAFU that immediately confirms that W7 could not possibly be the best operating system.

what W7 actually is, IMHO, is a collaboration between Dell and Microsoft to jump start the sales of windows based PCs - and new editions of MS Office etc.

You'd either have to be idiotic to market an OS upgrade which requires all the deinstall-reinstall of apps and files, or diabolically evil.

by definition, neither a diabolically evil or idiotic company could have produced the world's best OS.

You also can't upgrade from any non-Intel mac (any Mac before Aug. 2006) to the latest Mac OS. So each side has its upgrade troubles.

Uh, what? You mean your entire documents structure is not automatically mirrored to an external drive for a quick reconnect/reconstruct?

But seriously, OS upgrade never is and never was a good idea. Nobody is using as many applications that they cannot be reinstalled in one day. Even when building a development box - it usually takes a few days only when you document the whole procedure while doing it.

Farhad Manjoo:

You also can't upgrade from any non-Intel mac (any Mac before Aug. 2006) to the latest Mac OS. So each side has its upgrade troubles.

That's a broken analogy, Farhad. That's like saying you can't upgrade from Windows 3.1 on a 386 to Windows 7 - and that's the same processor architecture.

A non-Intel Mac can run Leopard. An Intel Mac can run Leopard. You can upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard. Therefore, the failing is not in the OS.

I don't think it's a completely broken analogy, if you're running Leopard on a non-intel Mac, you cannot upgrade to Snow Leopard. They could have provided the ability for Snow Leopard to run on PowerPC's, but chose not to. Not that I think they should have.

Should Microsoft have provided an upgrade path from XP to Win 7? That's a tough question. On the one hand it prevents people from attempting to upgrade older machines that wouldn't have the tech specs. On the other hand, there's clearly a lot of recent systems out there running XP that clearly *do* have the specs for it.

Regardless, it's never been a good idea to do an upgrade install on Windows anyway. Clean installs always seem to payoff in the end.

It's not a perfect analogy, but in many ways the Mac situation is worse: If you bought a Mac in late 2005 -- even the top of the line Mac -- your system will simply not run the latest Mac OS. That's not true of PCs. If you bough the top of the line PC in 2005, you can still run Windows 7. You'll just need to do a bit more work (a clean install) to get it to work. That's better, no?

The circumstances are different enough as to make the analogy weak. For any system for which it is technically possible to upgrade, Apple provides a very simple upgrade. Yes, Apple changed hardware architectures, which leaves schmoes like me (with the most powerful PowerPC system ever made) without a software-only upgrade path. But as far as I know, there's no technical reason Microsoft requires XP users to buy an external HD and do a backup before upgrading. Perhaps there's a compelling argument against Apple switching from PPC to Intel, but I can't think of one. When Apple originally decided on the PPC architecture, it was arguably more advanced, with more potential than Intel. But over time, whatever advantages the PPC architecture had disappeared, especially in the mobile segment. It's hard to make an argument that Apple's approach is less consumer-friendly due to the switch. On the other hand, the forced backup seems like a remnant of old MS behavior, in which consumers' needs and desires were secondary to other considerations. Given how many user-friendly improvements W7 is reputed to have, that's a shame.

i post a lot in other frays, too

whenever i posted something critical of bush, respondents would reply "yeah but clinton was worse because of such and such"

whenever i post something critical of obama, the same thing happens - people flame me and say "yeah but at least we don't have bush"

responding that you don't particular care for leopard doesn't elevate Windows 7. we're still left with the unacceptable options of wiping our XP machines clean and starting over, or buying an entirely new machine preloaded with W7 and starting over.

unacceptable, no amount of spinning on your part is going to change that farhad.

i upgraded from XP to vista on my machine, and have no obvious problems

i bought my daughter dani a vista machine 2 years ago, as her first pc. it wouldn't work with the printer she had.

go figure