W3WN
04-02-2014, 07:09 PM
Just an FYI for those who want or need to stay in the wonderful world of Windows, but do not wish to subject themselves to the horrors of Windows 8.x:
You CAN still buy Windows 7.
I received on Monday a Windows 7 Home Premium DVD purchased from Newegg.com. $99.99 plus 1.99 S/H. I could have gotten Win 7 Pro for about 50 bucks more, but since this machine is for the boss, and we have no plans to run a domain in the house, there's no need for it. Also, I got the 32 bit versions; the 64 bit versions are the same price.
These versions of Win 7 are not (officially) for an upgrade, but for a new install.
DVD comes with a COA sticker, meant to be peeled off & affixed to the machine. It's a small sticker, very hard to read. So I took a picture of it, and then used the camera's view screen to expand the sticker & read it.
Since this was going on a Dell OptiPlex GX620 (the Dell OEM Vista & Win 7 DVD's don't work... well, they do, but they require a key, since the machine predates Vista) with a clean hard drive, should have been no problem. And it wasn't. Smooth installation, even let me split the drive into 2 partitions without a hassle.
In short: straightforward installation. Of course, since Win 7 has been out for a few years, there are a few patches. I'm downloading them right now. Once that's done, a couple of hours to transfer data across the network from the boss's machine to this one, and I'm done.
I'm told that Newegg isn't the only retailer selling these versions, so you might find something cheaper. I could have got some disks off of eBay, but there's always a question about how legal the license is (and more importantly, whether or not the key's been used before!). In my case, considering the cost of the machine (free!!! Thanks Mike N3BSQ!!), and the expected remaining life for Win 7 (at least 6 more years), it was well worth it.
...and I still have the Raspberry Pi and a Ubuntu machine to play with...
You CAN still buy Windows 7.
I received on Monday a Windows 7 Home Premium DVD purchased from Newegg.com. $99.99 plus 1.99 S/H. I could have gotten Win 7 Pro for about 50 bucks more, but since this machine is for the boss, and we have no plans to run a domain in the house, there's no need for it. Also, I got the 32 bit versions; the 64 bit versions are the same price.
These versions of Win 7 are not (officially) for an upgrade, but for a new install.
DVD comes with a COA sticker, meant to be peeled off & affixed to the machine. It's a small sticker, very hard to read. So I took a picture of it, and then used the camera's view screen to expand the sticker & read it.
Since this was going on a Dell OptiPlex GX620 (the Dell OEM Vista & Win 7 DVD's don't work... well, they do, but they require a key, since the machine predates Vista) with a clean hard drive, should have been no problem. And it wasn't. Smooth installation, even let me split the drive into 2 partitions without a hassle.
In short: straightforward installation. Of course, since Win 7 has been out for a few years, there are a few patches. I'm downloading them right now. Once that's done, a couple of hours to transfer data across the network from the boss's machine to this one, and I'm done.
I'm told that Newegg isn't the only retailer selling these versions, so you might find something cheaper. I could have got some disks off of eBay, but there's always a question about how legal the license is (and more importantly, whether or not the key's been used before!). In my case, considering the cost of the machine (free!!! Thanks Mike N3BSQ!!), and the expected remaining life for Win 7 (at least 6 more years), it was well worth it.
...and I still have the Raspberry Pi and a Ubuntu machine to play with...