[MP-Ryan]

And depending on your school's MSDN AA setup, you might very well get 7 Pro for completely free. It seems like I might be the odd case, here at the University of Guelph, but every piece of software in the Guelph MSDN AA site is free. 100%. Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate/Professional/etc, Windows 7 Pro, Windows XP SP3, Vista Business, Server 2003 and 2008, I could go on. They've even thrown in a copy of MS-DOS 6.22!

I'm green with envy.  When I was at the University of Alberta they were not part of MSDNAA, the cheap bastards.

[The E]

That's the standard MSDNAA setup. Basically everything MS makes that isn't a game or Office product is available for free over MSDNAA.

[Mongoose]

I know my brothers are able to get a free copy of 7 Ultimate (of all things) at their school.  We sure as hell weren't at ours, at least as far as I'm aware.

[Klaustrophobia]

our school was class-specific.  i got access twice, but before 7 was out.  so now i have about 6 keys for vista and xp in various editions.

[BlueFlames]

blah blah blah

blah blah blah

I think you guys may have (at least partially) missed the point of my asking if Mamba knew about any of those differences.  If he doesn't know what the differences between editions are, then he obviously doesn't have any plan to utilize the additional features offered by Ultimate.  He's still shown a willingness to pirate Ultimate, though, either ignorant or uncaring of the fact that people who provide pirated operating systems aren't always just trying to nobly provide that software for free.  I wanted to know if he had done the cost-benefit analysis himself or if he had completely outsourced that to "like 20 people" who were themselves stupid enough to recommend a brand new computer be downgraded to (pirated) Windows XP, and in the case of the latter, nudge him toward doing that analysis on his own.

[SypheDMar]

Here's an important rule of computing, especially for someone like Mamba who is obviously an 'intermediate' level user

Love the quotations. In same boat with BlueFlames.

[FlamingCobra]

Windows 7 Ultimate has XP Virtualization

[LHN91]

So does Professional, actually.

XP Mode - unless you have some oddball legacy program like, oh, idk, an old version of SAS statistical software or FlexiSign 7 or earlier, you'll never use it. It emulates a Pentium 1 era integrated GPU (S3 Trio), and is thus more or less completely useless for any kind of gaming, except for games that would be better served by DosBox anyways.

So in essence, you're wasting time, effort, and risking a potentially compromised system for next to no benefit. XP is more or less a dead, pointless OS nowadays, unless you have some sort of specific, esoteric reason to keep it around. And besides, every version of 7 technically has XP virtualization. Install XP in VirtualBox. It actually runs better, as it has proper access to your physical GPU.


tl;dr: Just clean up the bloatware, do your recovery discs up, and stick with 7 Home Premium. Linux is simple enough to add in later, if you find you need it; and on many newer laptops (in my experience) it's a pain to get the GPU working in Linux without manual setup involving command line work.

[BlueFlames]

Windows 7 Ultimate has XP Virtualization

And is this worth the trouble and risk of running a pirated copy of Windows 7 Ultimate to you?

As the owner of a Windows 7 Professional box, and a Windows XP legacy box, I have nearly zero need for a working Windows XP installation right now.  I have a Windows XP virtual box set up on my Windows 7 machine, but I've honestly only booted it once, just to see what it could do.  My XP legacy box only really gets booted, when I need to shuffle files off of it and onto the newer computer.  With a two exceptions, everything that I ran in Windows XP works in Windows 7, only sometimes requiring compatibility mode.  The exception is MechWarrior 4, which requires a beefier graphics card (and I think a later version of Direct X) than what Windows 7's XP virtual box emulates.  The other is Microsoft Office 2000, which I've since replaced with Open Office.

I'm just speaking from my experience, but to me, there is little to no value in the XP virtualization offered by the higher-end versions of Windows 7.  It's certainly not something worth risking the use of a pirated OS.  If you really need an XP environment and cannot afford a legitimate upgrade to Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate, then you're best off keeping your old computer around.  Either that, or you can use a third-party piece of virtualization software and use your old XP discs to install XP on your virtual box.

Now, if you want to switch your Windows 7 interface to Mandarin (and then learn enough Mandarin to switch the interface back to English), then Ultimate might be a little more essential. 

[FlamingCobra]

This is really, really embarrassing. I can't get to the BIOS screen of my ASUS. I turn it on, I get the ASUS splash screen for a split second, and it boots directly into Windows.
Pressing the ASUS key does nothing. (I don't even know what it's for)
Pressing F12 does nothing
Pressing F1 does nothing

It always boots directly to windows.

I don't like this. I don't like this at all.

[MP-Ryan]

This is really, really embarrassing. I can't get to the BIOS screen of my ASUS. I turn it on, I get the ASUS splash screen for a split second, and it boots directly into Windows.
Pressing the ASUS key does nothing. (I don't even know what it's for)
Pressing F12 does nothing
Pressing F1 does nothing

It always boots directly to windows.

I don't like this. I don't like this at all.

RTFM.

Or hit the Delete key.

[FlamingCobra]

Manual had something on an internal recovery utility (F9) but nothing on BIOS.

Delete did nothing.

I eventually tried ESC because my parent's totally unrelated HP Pavilion notebook uses ESC to enter the BIOS, and it clearly says so on the boot screen.

That worked. Why a message saying "Press ESC to enter BIOS" isn't on the boot screen, I'll never know. You'd think something so important would be clearly stated. That's how it was on all computers when I was growing up (except it was always F12).

[Scourge of Ages]

Well realistically, 98% of users if not more, never ever need to go to BIOS. So it's not surprising that most laptops just boot past the option as quickly as possible.

[Mikes]

Well realistically, 98% of users if not more, never ever need to go to BIOS. So it's not surprising that most laptops just boot past the option as quickly as possible.

That's simply a Bios function that most mainboards have nowadays. Quick / Long Boot (with details) is usually a toggle. Seen it on multiple laptop and desktop systems. ... most vendors appear to enable it before purchase.

[Nuke]

on my asus it was f10. not that laptops usually have much in terms of bios options, preferring instead to hardcode things which they consider optimal for that product. the thing i despise most about laptops is their mostly proprietary nature.

[Klaustrophobia]

i just swapped out the RAM in mine and am trying to swap out the hard drive.  configuring the laptop to do this is proving to be a mother****er.  the rescue/recovery utility that i previously used to back up the entire hard drive no longer seems to be there, and the one inside windows is too dumb to do it to an external hard drive.  i'm not ****ing burning 20 DVDs.

[Ghostavo]

You can make a copy using Windows Backup...

Although I find it less troubling just to manually backup stuff and reinstalling the OS.

[Klaustrophobia]

windows backup on XP apparently requires a floppy disk.  i have no idea why, but that was the first thing i tried.  a manual backup isn't working because i get about 3 files deep in just about any folder before windows finds something it can't access and aborts the entire copy instead of just skipping those files.  or even giving me the option to tell it to. 

my original idea was to pull the HDD out of the laptop and hook it into the desktop as a secondary drive and do all the backing up and disk cloning from there.  however, hooking up the laptop drive first made me hang on the BIOS loading screen the same way the external drive i just got does, and then it went into a continuous restart cycle when i hit the reset button on my case.  you can plug in SATA drives hot right?  seems like that might be what i have to do.

[jr2]

You could use a program like fab's autobackup (that's what I use, and it's pretty cheap (EUR 4.90) -- just be sure to specify any additional folders you may want.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

Unlike PATA, both SATA and eSATA support hot-swapping by design. However, this feature requires proper support at the host, device (drive), and operating-system level. In general, all SATA devices (drives) support hot-swapping (due to the requirements on the device-side), also most SATA host adapters support this command.[1]

SCSI-3 devices with SCA-2 connectors are designed for hot-swapping. Many server and RAID systems provide hardware support for transparent hot-swapping. The designers of the SCSI standard prior to SCA-2 connectors did not target hot-swapping, but, in practice, most RAID implementations support hot-swapping of hard disks.

[Ghostavo]

a manual backup isn't working because i get about 3 files deep in just about any folder before windows finds something it can't access and aborts the entire copy instead of just skipping those files.  or even giving me the option to tell it to. 

Are you copying any system files? What exactly do you intend to backup?