[Tandum (Robin)]

Please don't bash Microsoft in this thread. This is just a heads up.

Windows 7 is due for Public release on October 22nd. XP is almost 8 years old and about to be withdrawn from the market. I have been running various versions of Windows 7 for several months now and I believe it is one of the best Windows yet.

I have recently received the release version so I bought a new hard drive today and installed the 32bit version on my astro laptop. I have been running the 64bit version exclusively on my desktops until now.

All my astro applications and cameras installed without issue however if I used the QHY5 drivers from the QHY website instead of Gama's site, it thought the camera was a some sort of TV card and would not install it. The only problem I see at the moment is with the WSC polar alignment program. It throws up a .net error for trying to write to restricted registry areas and fails to ask me for my registration information when I start it, but it runs regardless.

The software uses about 700meg of ram at idle and I find it quicker than the previous XP installation on this 2gig single cored Celeron laptop with 2 gig of ram. This may be because I can now run the hard drive in AHCI mode instead of IDE mode which is significantly faster, or it could be because this new hard drive spins at 7200RPM instead of 5400RPM or it could be both.

If your about to buy a pc, make sure you get one with the Windows 7 Upgrade option. Your a mug if ya don't.