Centauri's Thoughts

When the information technology guys discover how painful it can be to upgrade their current PC hardware to Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows 7 — the successor to the much-maligned Windows Vista — they may be tempted to switch to Linux or Apple’s (AAPL) Mac OS X.

Part of the problem is that you can’t install Windows 7 beta directly from Windows XP. Instead, you have to upgrade to Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later before attempting an install — a process the Channel Web team found to be non-trivial.
Among the scariest quotes in their report:

• “While Microsoft has assured the world that if the hardware works with Windows Vista it will work with Windows 7, the reality is that is misleading at best.”
• “We’ve almost lost count of the number of blue screens we’ve seen in the CRN Test Center during the Windows 7 evaluation process.”
• “We tried to do the upgrade on an Acer TravelMate, but were stopped in our tracks by Bluetooth driver incompatibilities.”
• “On a series of 3-and-a-half year old ThinkPad T43s, an IBM security processor refused to let the notebooks boot up with Windows 7. We needed to crack open a couple of four-year old desktops … to add memory just to try to get a system image.”
• “Across the XP-Vista-Windows 7 landscape, Microsoft has fostered an ecosystem that now holds out the prospect of a mind-numbing number of incompatible drivers, unsupported devices, unsupported applications, unsupported data, patches, updates, upgrades, “known issues” and unknown issues.”

Bring it on! It cant happen soon enough for me to see legions leaving the crippling M$ world and come to their senses.

The entire article can be read at http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/02/25/windows-7-trouble-on-the-upgrade-path/