Windows 7 might be cool if the upgrade worked
I preordered Win7 Pro from Amazon. I’ve been using 64-bit Vista for almost a year now and it’s been nice enough.
I decide to do a clean install. The Windows 7 installer works great right up until it won’t accept the product key that came in the package. The “Upgrade” Win7 cannot install to a clean disk and then take the Vista product key to satisfy the upgrade. It’s not even clear how to get a clean install of Win7 now, since it seems the ONLY valid path is to have a copy of Vista installed already. Furthermore, it puzzles me why Win7 Pro Upgrade can’t tell me this instead of offering to do a clean install and then failing 45 minutes in.
It does work with a clean, unactivated Vista install immediately followed by a Win7 Pro upgrade. This was a needlessly frustrating introduction to Windows 7.
Once it is installed Win7 seems nice enough — an incremental upgrade from Vista. It’s not at all clear why Microsoft decided to inconvenience such a small population of people. The vast majority of users will get Win 7 with a new machine purchase. Very few, relatively, will buy Win 7 as an upgrade, but those are exactly the users Microsoft can least afford to make frustrated. These are the users most likely to be the people advising their friends and family about what to buy.