Review by John Keitz

I have spent years hating Vista, so I was eager to upgrade. I bought an HP Touchsmart PC which came with the free upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium 64. With all the bugs and problems Vista had, I thought this had to be better right? Hah! no such luck!nnFirst, the good. I gave two stars for two reasons. First, the UI is prettier and more polished looking. I like the cycling wallpapers. Second, DirecTV2PC actually runs more smoothly under Win 7 than it did under Vista, but like most programs, it takes much longer to load and be ready to use. ALso, Media Center is updated to look slicker and offer some more information, but it is slightly more sluggish than the Vista version. In all, if I wanted a Mac (for a pretty interface, but not much productivity), then I’d get a Mac.

Now, the bad (or at least as much as I can fit). I used the upgrade rather than a clean install because I only had my computer for less than a month and I didn’t have much running on it yet. I used to boot up in 41 seconds with Vista. Windows 7 is over 90 seconds. Still not too bad, but over twice as long. Most programs take longer to load in Win 7 than they did in Vista. (I have a Duo Core 2.4 Ghz machine with 4mb ram, so that’s not the issue.) Then there are the programs that stopped working and the settings lost. It took the better part of a day of frustration to get it to actually start serving music to my DVR’s like it had been doing in Vista (weren’t settings supposed to be retained?). Then, I discovered that I can no longer print. I had no problems printing with Vista, but my network access to the printer is now gone (it just cycles trying to connect until it gives up). There are other problems too, but I think you get the point.

Then, there is the excitement over the touchscreen enhancements to Windows 7. Only, I find out, the enhancement is a virtual keyboard. The same virtual keyboard that HP was kind enough to include on the original Vista install for my Touchsmart! Seriously, that’s it?nnWhat a bust! I am really wishing I had stayed with Vista (and I NEVER thought I say that!). The upgrade was free, but it still isn’t worth the cost.

UPDATE: I can print once again (I found drivers on my own and as I started installing the drivers Windows 7 took over and started installing drivers itself. If it had worked this way from the start, I might not have been so harsh.).