If you weren't aware, Windows 7 Home Premium and Professional upgrades were available a few weeks ago for a significant preorder discount. At $50 for the Home Premium upgrade, they got me to bite. I'm currently running XP Professional 32-bit, so this will be an upgrade for me in several ways.First of all, I plan on running the 64-bit version. Second, I'll jump from DirectX 9 to 11. Well, my video card currently only supports 10, but games won't really take advantage of 11 for a while anyway. Third, I'll finally be using the new Windows interface. It's a little frustrating trying to help other people that use Vista while I stumble around on their machine trying to figure out where all the administrative stuff got moved to. As someone who takes pride in being the best at troubleshooting PC problems, it's also embarrassing.
When I reformat for the new Windows install, I also plan on installing the latest version of Linux Mint. I'm currently running Ubuntu 8.10 x64, and I really haven't been using it much lately. I'd like to get to the point where I'm habitually using Linux for everything except Windows-only games. I think Linux Mint will help make that happen because I have been happily using Mint 6 on a laptop.Windows 7 is scheduled for release on October 22nd. Coincidentally, Ubuntu 9.10 will be out around the same time, so Mint 8 x64 should be out shortly after that. However, I'm not sure I want to jump right into Windows 7 as soon as it hits the streets regardless of how well the beta has been running for everyone. Ubuntu 10.04 (April 2010) will be the Long Term Support version which has more of a focus on stability instead of new features. I think we can expect Mint 9 in early May. At that point, Windows 7 will have had half a year to work out any early issues, and so will driver developers.
Therefore, I'm not sure what course I want to take. Should I install Windows 7 with Mint 8 in November 2009, or should I wait for Mint 9 LTS in May 2010 and give Windows a chance to be "broken in?" Let me know what you think. Either way, the comparisons should be interesting.
I might even go nuts and throw in a hardware upgrade of some sort. Around April, if Newegg has a good combo for 4GB DDR3 and a DX11 video card, things could start to get crazy!
1 comment:
We are testing Windows 8 Professional x64 for an AutoCAD lab at a school with good results thus far. Needed a beta version of Kaspersky AV as well to test, but things look very positive. On some older PCs with AMD processors, we repurposed them with Ubuntu 9.0.4 and that as well is working well.
Our main labs are Mac OS X and looks like Snow Leopard may wait for a while.
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