Plain English Technical Advice

Should you upgrade to Windows 7

On October 22^nd 2009, there will doubtless be long queues at PC Stores throughout the land as punters clamour to be 'the first kid on the block' with Windows 7.

Are they stark staring bonkers?

In fact, Windows 7 has been available for some time in 'Beta' and 'Release Candidate' versions which are a sort of 'free gift' from Microsoft, given in return for helping to test the product.

Serious business users may well end-up wishing they had looked that particular gift-horse in the mouth because these versions have a limited lifespan and will need to be replaced with a 'clean' installation of the paid-for Windows 7.

To be clear, a 'clean' installation is one which wipes the entire hard-disk partition so you will need to backup and restore live data as well as re-installing all other software.

So is it worth upgrading at this time?

The first issue to consider is whether your existing PC and peripherals (printers, external disks, etc) can be upgraded to Windows 7 and the best source of advice is probably from Microsoft at Microsoft Upgrade Advisor.

Bearing in mind that software upgrades tend to make Windows more resource-hungry over time, I would be inclined to double the minimum memory (RAM) requirement of 1 gigabyte—I have recently seen a number of Windows-XP machines which are pretty-well unusable with the original minimum memory requirement of 256 megabytes. 

If the relevant software drivers for printers, etc, are not available in Windows 7, there may well be a suitable download on the manufacturer's web site.

With any new version of Windows, there is always a time-lag while hardware and software suppliers produce suitable software patches though some older hardware and software may never be compatible. 

Windows 7 has a 'Windows XP' mode (sadly, not included in the Home Premium edition) which theoretically enables you to run your old Windows-XP programs though we have kind-of heard that story before with both Windows XP and Vista—there is no way that I can get my accounting program (Quickbooks 2005) to work on Windows Vista though most of my other Windows-XP programs transferred OK without using the so-called 'compatibility mode'.  

As with the change from Windows XP to Windows Vista, a lot of the enhanced functionality is already available through regular Windows Updates—for example, you can have the latest version of Internet Explorer (8) with Windows 7, Vista or XP.

Although Vista did include some useful additions, particularly the faster 'search' facility, quite a lot of the change was 'cosmetic' and just made life temporarily more difficult for experienced Windows users.

The Microsoft Windows 7 Tour mainly describes facilities already available in Vista or cosmetic stuff such as different ways to change your desktop wallpaper and Windows sounds—not issues of excessive concern to serious business users.

Further research reveals that some features (notably, Windows Mail. Movie Maker and Photo Gallery), have been dropped from Windows 7 so you would need to make other arrangements if using any of these.

If has been reported that Windows 7 is an 'incremental upgrade' with rather less in the way of new features than was the case with the introduction of Vista—that seems to be a fair assessment of the situation.

For support purposes, I have a Windows XP (Professional edition) system which works perfectly well and I would still be happy to use it as my main business computer.

Now that I am used to it, I am very happy with Vista (Ultimate edition) which I have installed on both desktop and lap-top—though I let the system 'mature' for about 18 months before I committed to Vista on my main business computer.

My Opinion—should you choose to accept it

Unless you have a pressing need for some new facility in Windows 7, I don't think that it is worth the inevitable hassle of upgrading an existing Windows XP or Vista system.

If you are buying a new computer with new applications software, it makes sense to go for the latest operating system though I would be inclined to put-off the purchase for a few months unless you really fancy being part of the Microsoft testing programme.

Adding contacts to Outlook and Outlook Express

The easiest way to add an email address to your contacts list is to 'harvest' the address from an incoming email.

In Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Mail (rebranded OE for Windows Vista), the method for doing this is identical:

1. Open the email message
2. Place cursor on the appropriate entry (email address or name) in the 'from', 'to' or 'cc' section and right-click
3. Click 'Add to....' to complete the process (Outlook Express has 'Add to Address book', Windows Mail has 'Add to contacts', 'Outlook has 'Add to Outlook contacts')
4. Repeat for each contact that you wish to add

In Outlook Express and Windows Mail (but not Outlook), you can set the options to automatically save any new contacts when you reply to a message:

In Outlook Express, Tools/Options/Send - tick "automatically put people I reply to in my address book".

In Windows Mail, Tool/Options/Send - tick "automatically put people I reply to in my contacts list".

Note that if you use the 'Reply All' option when responding to a message, you will get the entire recipient list in your address book.

I mention this because I regularly get newsletters, etc, which come with an unsolicited 'gift' of the sender's entire mailing list due to the simple error of using the 'Cc' box rather than 'Bcc' which hides the recipient addresses.