Acer Spills Windows 7 Release Date Comments

Windows 7, who cares?

I'd rather save my money in times like these than upgrading an OS, which could mean bugs, lack of drivers, upgrading older printers and peripherals, maybe even the PC, as well as application software and utilities, plugins, shareware, codecs... , that may not be fully compatible with the OS, and continuous patching, re=patching, SPs not just for the OS but also for the other applications to work with it. I have better things to do and buy with my time and money, when XP is doing everything I really need.

Thanks for your reviews.

I care.

XP has been a great workhorse, but it's time to move on. From using the beta, 7 is a fine OS and I'm looking forward to running the final product.

@BBen - But look how shiny it is!!

@BBen

"Windows 7, who cares?"

IT Professionals, experienced users, advanced users, people who are holding off buying a new machine until the new OS is available, retailers, hardware manufacturers, software vendors, IT trainers, the media, Microsoft, Apple (yes really), IT departments and me for a start!

@BBen, what your saying makes total sense, but I'll be upgrading as I'm currently on Vista, and to be honest it isn't as bad as some people make out, turn of UAC and it's actually workable, apart from copying files slower than I could type them. :) DRM maybe?.

Apart from that if we all decided to stick with OS's we felt comfortable with, then we'd all be using Windows 3.11 now, or even MS DOS?.

Also for important stuff I tend to use VirtualBox so my main OS isn't that important.

At least I know when I'll be buying my next laptop now. I've skipped the whole Vista generation and everyone I know that has used the Beta of Win 7 has been raving about it. I've got a spare HDD for my ancient (but still usable) Dell XPS Gen 2 laptop so I'm tempted to have a play with the release candidate to see if it can get me all excited too.

This seems comical. It's almost like the ACER execs decided to make up a date & have a laugh just to get some extra exposure. October seems awfully soon for Win7 to be ready.

@BBen: Bah humbug. Lighten up Scrooge, Win7 is the future and a much more efficient (and prettier) OS and really will save you time. Try the RC, that costs you nothing. The saved time more than makes up for the cost.

@Vivid: People rave about Win7 (as I do myself) cos it's just a better Vista, and Vista actually is fine now with SP1. But nobody can rave about Vista cos it's too bogged down in bad press now, so they give it all to 7 instead.

@HK

Microsoft will never admit it, but Vista was always meant as a stop-gap release a la WinME.

An October release date seems entirely plausible. The betas and RCs are stable and polished so RTM can't be that far off.

Vista is tainted in the eyes of Joe Public. Rightly or wrongly many people don't want it. I still build more machines with XP than Vista but signs are Windows 7 will gain acceptance. And deservedly so based on what we've seen so far.

The timing on this is pretty poor, with service pack 1 released Vista adoption is starting to ramp up so by the time the free windows 7 offer starts you're going to see 40-50% of people using vista, a lot of whom will have only had their PC for a year.

Have to disagree on the WinME comment. It seems to me Windows 7 is closer to Vista SP2 given the timing. Granted it's had a bit more visual tweaks than you'd normally get in a SP, but they had to distance themselves from the Vista brand/feel.

Irregardless, as long as the networking & memory issues are fixed, I'm happy it's coming. The x64 RC seems pretty stable, but without installing my plethora of workstation software on it, most of my tests are meaningless.