Windows 7 not all that!
After paying almost £22background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px; for two copies of Windows 7 to put on our netbooks we are pretty cheesed off with the Home Premium version of Windows 7.Apart from the trouble trying to get it installed and licensed in the first place, it was really surprising, no, shocking, to find that we couldn't join it to our network for occasional file sharing. It will network fine with other Windows 7 machines, but not with XP and in particular not with Samba, on which our network is based.
That is, common and essential functionality that is available in free linux software and in earlier versions of Windows has now disappeared from this crippled version of an operating system, which costs almost as much as the hardware on which it runs. It has been crippled to induce users to purchase the even more over-priced "ultimate" edition.
So if you have a laptop that you use occasionally to take work home, or to share work with colleagues, or with other machines in your home, don't get Windows 7 Home Premium. Stick with XP until Microsoft wakes up and stops treating us like suckers.
Apart from the networking issue, and the difficulties in a nanny interface that tries to do everything for you, and tries to stop you doing anything yourself, the new Aero features are okay, but a poor substitute for the loss of basic functionality which one would absolutely expect at this price.
And just one last point. Why does software that is released at $119 in the United States cost £11background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px; in the UK, instead of the £75 it ought to cost based on official exchange rates? Why are UK users being fleeced in this way? "Rip-off Britain", indeed they do.
We won't be upgrading our remaining machines to Windows 7 in the near future, that's for sure.
