The much anticipated release of Windows 7 is finally upon us. This Thursday, October 22, Microsoft's latest operating system arrives on the scene looking to win over skeptics disappointed with the much-hyped but often criticized Windows Vista. Whereas its predecessor got off to a rough start with plentiful compatibility issues and incessant "allow or deny" prompts annoying users, Windows 7 represents a major leap forward and has generally been regarded as a snappier and more polished operating system.

Read the full guide at:
http://www.techspot.com/guides/211-windows-7-launch/

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Nice Guide.
I have been running Win 7 x64 RTM for awhile now and I really like it. I have not had any problems with drivers or applications (using it for business). When I’m working on any older OS I miss the features of Windows 7.

Very nice synopsis of pertinent articles. Thanks! Any idea when you will have a suggested tweaking guide out for it?

Just wanted to say this is a very thorough guide, that calls upon many useful articles. I'll be linking many of my friends back to this page!

Yes thanks for this guide, it definitely cleared up a few worries I had about upgrading to windows 7. I won't be upgrading until I have to though. Plus I didn't know the OEM would be so cheap... I will probably go with that option when the time comes.

well thats the problem it still reminds me a lot of vista, for me its better then vista but still not as good as XP... but i guess i cant stay forever with XP, i will have to install this junk after a while

for me its not a question of cost, its simply preference, vista and even 7 are really stupid in the way to you do anything ... i read is before and i have to agree "vista was designed with the idiots in mind", for the advanced , knowledgeable used it a horror having to use such OS

I am intrigued by your comment siiix, would you list some of the ways that XP is superior to 7?

You could always stick with XP. No one is forcing you to move to 7. If you love it so much and if it's not broken... don't try to fix it - especially if you're just going to think of it as junk anyway.

Except for the part where if you are an "advanced and knowledgeable user" you could have fixed all of Vista's problems in no time. You just garbled BS down and believed it, and only thought about that while using the OS so you refused to look for anything good.

This down load has spyware in it, check the first two highlighted and you get an advertisement not for Windows 7 and it also causes my malware checker to send out an alarm.

My processor score jumped from 5.6 in Vista to 5.9, interesting?

Love 7 so far, it's so much less "clunky" than Vista and it has a lot of handy features to boot.

thank you for this. helped me alot in comparing windows 7 to vista, and allowed me to go ahead and make my purchase with confidence! thanks again

seems like its the perfect time to replace my mobo and processor for something more
up to date. Just in time for Windows 7

Put a new hard drive in my Lenovo T61 and installed 64-bit. RC-1 ran on this PC without any issues - but not W7-HP. Would not recognize my Nvidia video card, no matter what, and I had three base devices that could not be recognized. Then, just like MS was watching me struggle, the most serious issue - the video card had a downloadable fix, as well as one of my base devices. So while I still have two unrecognizable base devices, the PC is working fine so far. Adding 64-bit W7 and doubling my RAM to 4GB has made this run much smoother than the 32-bit Vista machine it was purchased as.

Now about those other 2 base devices.....

felt kind of stupid when i had to call tech support...

when doing a clean install with student upgrade, i didnt realize you dont put in the product key when they ask for it during the installation. just go through the process without it and follow the steps from this site and that will do it. i kept trying to install with my product key and got an error.

We'll be upgrading our Vista 64 bit machine to Win7 month. Hopefully it will be less annoying afterward.

Very nice article ... thanks. All the information in one place with links to additional information IF NEEDED makes it much easier to read and not get bogged down in an article that goes on and on discussing things that one may already know. I am going to need this knowledge sooner than I would like, so I now know where to go to get it.

Saving up money to buy this one. Heard so much positive comments on this :-)

I think there are some Windows 7 parts really overrated, especially the interface. After all, it still doesn't have a decent file manager, but it's good they solved the performance issues everyone had with Vista. I will probably move on to Windows 7 in a few months, if user reports are going to remain as positive as it happened so far. After all, I had Vista for over 2 years now, but I only used it probably less than 2% of the time I spent with Windows XP...

Once again TS shows why it's an excellent resource for the public. I work in IT for a living and have for more years than I care to admit.. For the newbie W7 q's though I just send people here to learn instead of re-iterating it myself.