Edward Mendelson gets it wrong on Windows 7 upgrade process
I had to really respond to this joke of an article by PC Magazine affiliate website AppScout which discusses the 'smooth' upgrade to Mac OS X Snow Leopard compared to Windows upgrades and Windows 7. A lot of misleading paragraphs:
I've just upgraded a heavily customized OS X system from OS X 10.5 (Leopard) to OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), and I'm amazed at how smoothly the upgrade went. I've never seen an OS version upgrade that so completely respected the customizations I had already made to my system, and I've never seen an upgrade that produced so few glitches. I'll get to the details in a moment, but first a word about my experience with Windows upgrades.
If you've ever tried to upgrade your Windows system to a new version of Windows, you probably don't want to repeat the experience. Applications break, your system doesn't behave the way you want it to, and you'll probably spend a day or two sorting out problems before your upgrade system works as smoothly as it did before the upgrade. The good news is that Windows 7 seems to provide a relatively smooth upgrade path from Vista, but I still had to waste time customizing my Windows 7 desktop to get back the settings that I had carefully worked out in Vista.
Read the entire article here
I could not get to post my comment there, so I decided to respond with a blog post here.
You are misleading readers with this article. The minute you started bashing Windows upgrades, I immediately knew where this story was heading. You talk about Windows not preserving your customizations? What kinda customizations could you seriously be talking about? I have done an upgrade from Windows Vista Ultimate 64 Bit SP1 to Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit RC and I never experienced any problems at all, everything migrated smoothly. I have been running this installation of Windows Vista since December 2006. It preserved my desktop background, my Gadgets (Notes were migrated to the new more powerful sticky notes app), all my Start menu items remained in their place.
Learn more: http://tinyurl.com/cdzhfs
You talk about the upgrade being a smooth one, yet you still had to do a fair amount of tweaking before and after upgrading. So, you are telling a lie already that its a smooth upgrade, applications were broken, you had to reset and reinstall some things. The only thing not working in my Windows 7 64 bit upgrade is Apple Bonjour (and I am not surprised) and VMWare Workstation 6.1 (it works but the VMWare tools are buggy, I plan on replacing it with the free Windows Virtual PC anyway). I can get an update for the VMWare for free which enables compatibility, but the updates are too large and annoying - I don't get this with the free Virtual PC XP Mode.
Learn more here http://tinyurl.com/mdejy4
Considering that Snow Leopard is a minor upgrade to 'Leopard', why are you even surprised by the smooth upgrade? Its just a Service Release that fixes many of the problems that 10.5 users have experienced since October 2007. The 7 GBs of space you get back is no surprise, they made the installer more intelligent, this is something Leopard users could do themselves by not selecting certain languages and printers during setup. Also, Snow Leopard is Intel only, so some of the universal binary PowerPC code has been removed reducing application size significantly for many of OS X's built in applications.
To end this, not everyone agrees with your views about a smooth upgrade, it varies. Rafe Needleman of CNET, concludes: "Regretful upgrade: Snow Leopard incompatibilities" http://tinyurl.com/n4zgm8
Please stop writing articles you believe Steve Jobs will stumble upon surfing at home drinking mint tea.
Updated: September 2nd, 2009 - 6:31 PM - Thanks for the correction Corrine!
Written by Teching It Easy: Windows Vista, Live & 7. Read more great feeds at is source WEBSITE
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