How-To Geek

It was a nice article The Geek, unfortunately, the link provided is impossible to connect to. (At least here in Germany)

wonderful, wonderful write up geek. thank you. i should have known you'd do it (much) better than any of the other sites i've visited for the same types of information on W7.

well done. i'm excited to see your future endeavors into all things W7.

Wow. That arrived instantly :)

I got a little further on that link. They sent me an email for confirmation. But from there it went downhill. They could not find my profile - the one I just put in. I am registered with tech net since a long time. So I guess one has to keep trying. A real mess. And every step takes a looooong time.
Ha, I got a step further. they could verify my profile. But then it said. "This site is experiencing technical difficulties. Try again next business day". By that time the 2.5 million license keys will probably be sold out.

OK, so it is AFTER 3PM EST. That explains it.

The Geek did a marvelous job of introducing W7 this morning, for those who might be interested. I doubt Ballmer could have done better. Since computers are still shipping with Vistabloat, there are going to be a lot of folks who are not going to be very happy to have to pay extra to get this functionality on their machines. Considering Vista's history, it seems like it would be in MS's interest to offer the W7 upgrade free to Vista sufferers the world over, once it is ready for commercial release (August '09?). I know, dream on......

I, for one, will be using Vista for quite a while longer, because I need a break from MS's great social experiment, and I need a while to enjoy the fruits of the struggle it has been to get the system working the way I want it. Windows has been in Beta for the last 20 years or more, with some versions being more useful than others. It is nice to see that they apparently learned something from the Vista experience. I am expecting the focus of this website to start shifting over to W7 before long, but I imagine we can still come here for help with any Vista problems. Nevertheless, innovative tweaks and solutions for Vista may start to wane. Some stuff will be applicable to both systems, though, from the sounds of things. Congratulations to those who waited Vista out and can jump directly from XP to W7. I would have done that, too if my old XP machine had not crashed. Now I may just try to leapfrog W7 until W2011 comes out. Maybe they will have a Premium Cosmic version that allows computing above the cloud.

I plan to continue writing Vista, and even XP articles for quite some time.

In fact that's been something of an internal debate between Mysticgeek and myself... we don't want to shift the focus too much over to Windows 7 yet, because it's not mainstream. But then again, there will be millions of people running the beta version, and we need to get on top of it.

It's definitely difficult to satisfy everybody... we have a ton of readers that want us to start featuring Linux content more, and a few that want Mac.

This is going to be an interesting year.

all the sites are down.,..

If this question has been answered, I didn't see it. How many different versions of Win7 will there be? So many of the "cool" features of Vista are missing from this Home Premium that I have and I wonder if it will be the same with Win7. We'll be hearing about all the wonderful features for months and months only to find that you need Win7 Ultimate, or whatever they call it, to get all of them.

Regarding articles for 2009, I would do a gut check against the OS market penetration stats from the tracker of your choice. Looking at the Dec 2008 report from Net Applications, XP is around 65%, Vista is up just over 20%, Mac OS is up around 9%, Linux is less than 1%, and Win7 is barely there. Based on that, there will continue to be plenty of audience for XP and Vista even by the time Win7 comes out. Win7 will have to ramp up and who knows where it will steal market share from, but only time will tell.

That this site has more emphasis on Vista than the stats would suggest is probably a reflection of the lack of maturity of the OS. Win7 is getting a lot of posts now because it is exciting and new but hype can only go so far. The trickle of posts in the Mac OS section is probably because there are better forums for Mac devotees. Or, because Macs "just work" so users never need help. :)

LOL. Nice find :)