by Mike Stanley

Created on: August 01, 2009

For many of the people running the older Windows XP operating system, thoughts of upgrading may have crossed their minds. The first thing that comes to mind is should I upgrade to Windows Vista? The short answer to this question is no. You might be thinking if I'm one of the many that hate Vista, and you'd be wrong. I have Vista installed on my main PC, and I actually love it. So why am I telling you to forego the upgrade to Vista? Because Windows 7 is about to hit the market, that is why. All the things I love about Vista are much better in Windows 7, and it's more stable as well.

If your running and OS older then XP, then chances are your hardware is likely to old to run Vista, and you don't qualify for an upgrade to Win 7. However, it should be noted that Win 7 will run on older hardware then Vista will due to the more advanced resource handling. The decision on older systems is a harder one, and should be left to those that are more familiar with installing operating systems. For the others that are running XP, the upgrade path to Win 7 is available, and considering how much more efficient Win 7 is than Vista, the choice to skip Vista would be a wise one in my opinion. Win 7 is the newest OS from Microsoft, and has most of the features from Vista as well as new ones not seen in Vista. The biggest selling point though is how Win 7 handles memory as compared to both Vista and XP. Win 7 also will make better use of multi-core processors such as Intel's Quad Core, and AMD's Phenom processors. If you running XP on a multi-core CPU then you're missing out on fully utilizing those CPUs as they can be. Also, 64bit support in both Vista and Win 7 is better than in XP as well.

One of the biggest improvements that most people hope to never need is Win 7's abilities to recover from errors. Throughout my experience in beta testing Win 7, I never once had a blue screen, or any errors that cause the system to become unresponsive. For that matter, I rarely had any errors at all, short of driver errors due to no Win 7 compatible drivers being available in the beginning of the testing. Even those were few, far between, and later corrected completely once new drivers were released. The stability of Win 7 in the beta stages proved to be greater than Vista at service pack 1. For those still interested in moving to Vista and waiting for Win 7 to mature more look for Vista SP2, as the second service pack adds a lot of stability to the operating system.

So the answer to the question is really more about personal preference, as both OS are very solid and perform well on newer hardware. On older hardware, Win 7 will definitely have a huge advantage. Also of note, Win 7 will be available as a Family Pack in limited quantity, and the rumored price set at $150US. This Family Pack offers a license to install the OS on up to 3 PCs, so that amounts to a great deal over buying three separate boxes.

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