Current Event Articles: Sciencetext Tech Talk

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Sciencetext Tech Talk

Posted: 29 Jun 2010 05:00 AM PDT

Windows 7 has been around for an age, in Internet terms that is, Microsoft’s latest version of its operating system for personal computers, desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablet PCs, and media center PCs was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009 (OEM release) and then general retail on October 22, 2009, a mere three years after the release of its doomed predecessor, Windows Vista. Personally, I stuck with XP until I had to replace my HP Pavilion notebook, worn out by typing hundreds of thousands of words

Anyway, my new-ish Dell Vostro (just about the only widescreen notebook with a matte display I could find) has a Windows 7 sticker, which I assume means it is entirely compatible with Windows 7. It was with trepidation that I plugged in my ancient Samsung parallel port printer via its USB to parallel adapter cable, but it worked first time, as did my Epson scanner using VuePrint and my various external hard drives. Nice.

If you’re not buying a new machine with 7 pre-installed, then you might wonder whether you could upgrade. Rule of thumb would suggest that anything that works on XP or Vista will work on 7, but Microsoft has an advisor program that can validate this. If you’re building a machine yourself from scratch then their compatibility program would be useful. Thanks to ghacks for those links.

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