Windows XP To Windows 7 Survival Guide – Part 1

In October 2009 Microsoft launched Windows 7 to much fanfare, this launch was less than three years after the launch of the much maligned Windows Vista, and was seen by many as Microsofts last chance to win people back after the debacle of Vista.

Due to the multitude of problems with Windows Vista many people never bothered to make the upgrade, and instead chose to jump Vista completely, this forced Microsoft to extend the support life for XP to April 2014, thus making an upgrade less of a necessity. Now with the 2014 deadline fast approaching people are starting to change over and many are surprised and confused when they do change as the interface, and methodologies within Windows 7 are very different to Window XP.

Within this series of articles we have attempted to create a guide for those jumping from XP to 7 which shows the capabilities, nuances and subtle (or not so subtle) differences between the two operating systems.

Core System Requirements

As with all software, Windows 7 does have some minimum system requirements necessary for it to run smoothly.

• Minimum 1Ghz Processor.
• Minimum 1GB Ram.
• Minimum 16GB hard drive space (20GB for 64-bit systems).
• Direct X9 or later compatible graphics processor with WDDM 1.0 or Higher Driver.

We must stress that these are absolute minimum requirements, yes, Windows 7 will run on your system, but you won’t get the optimum experience with these specs, if you can, use a PC with a much better spec.

Additional Requirements Requirements For Certain Features.

• Internet Access
• For some Windows Media Centre function a TV Tuner and other hardware may be required.
• DVD / CD Authoring requires a suitable optical drive.
• Bitlocker requires the Trusted Platform Module 1.2.
• Bitlocker To Go requires a suitable USB flash drive.
• Windows XP mode requires an additional 1GB RAM and 15GB hard drive space.

Multi-Core / Multi Processor Support

Windows 7 was designed with multi-core and multi-processor support. All 32-bit versions of Windows 7 can support up to 32 processor cores, with 64-bit version supporting up to 256 processor cores. In addition, the Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate versions of Windows seven will recognise two physical processors, whereas the Starter, Home Basic and Home Premium versions will only recognise one physical processor.

Windows 7 Versions.

There are six Windows 7 versions – Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate. All designed to do slightly different things, and obviously aimed at different markets. In this guide the majority of what we will cover is intended for home users, so we will generally use the Home premium version as our model but will touch on the Business and Enterprise editions occasionally.  We will not be covering Windows 7 Home Basic as this is a ‘cut down’ version without all the fancy Aero / visual effects, and is primarily designed for use on machines that barely meet the minimum spec requirements. We will also not be covering the Enterprise edition as this is intended for those in a business setting who want to use it to provide high end corporate solutions.

A summary of the differences between the different features can be seen in the table below.

As you will notice, the Starter edition contains very few features, and has little option for customisation, this edition is intended for use in low power ‘Netbooks’ and many a netbook purchaser has been dismayed upon opening their machine for the first time to find that it’s impossible to do basic tasks such as changing the desktop background, and difficult at best to do others like changing the screen saver. This version of Windows is not available as a retail purchase and only comes pre-installed on Netbooks.

The rest of the Windows versions make pretty good sense, the Home Premium contains pretty much everything a home user would want, the business edition provides a few extra features to assist with things like networking and program compatibility, and the Ultimate edition contains everything available.

Click here to read the next article in this series