Win7 is a nightmare in Europe.

1) I got an email for pre-ordering it. The (obviously limited) offer was available for only 7 minutes in Amazon.de, the Alternate shop was not available and similar stories happened in other shops.

2) The European version will come without any browser. And you cannot get into internet to load a browser because you dont have a browser. You need a data stick or a CD with a browser installation.

3) There is no update version for Win7 in Europe. You need a complete new full installation, losing all your installed software.

4) Prices in Europe are about the double of the America prices.

For me this means: I will not buy Win7 from any European dealer, no matter how cheap they offer it to me

But I might be interested in importing an US version. But I have no experience how it deals registering, upgrading from my German Vista-version and what other problems might occur.
This is a bad situation and forces me to stick to Vista for a while.

The reason for all this is the struggling with the EU monopoly commission and the dumb MS attitude. They could just offer some other browsers during the installation process as an option but no, they remove IE and don't let you update from previous versions, just to demonstrate their power in an evil way.
And in the end they even double the prices compared to the American people.

I wish MS very bad sales in Europe but as you can see from the pre-ordering: this is not the case. The ugly, the dumb and the stupid just buy it like crazy.

thats why i keep xp on my hard drive. might not be too up-to-date, but at least it runs stable, doesn't have any unnecessary tools and/or skins, doesnt need too many ressources and so on... at least i'll keep xp as long as possible. still thinking about switching to ubuntu, linux or somethin like that, but i'm not sure about the gaming compatability and such things. ah well.


i'm pretty sure that win7 will be the same fiasco as vista was. if not way worse.

Yes, but since I need 64-bit support I was forced to install Vista.
But apart from this I still would use XP for sure.
Most companies I know use XP and new hardware comes with XP pre-installed and an option to upgrade to Vista. Nobody uses it. It was even the other way around. I had to make some downgrades from Vista to XP.



I am not that sure, since Win7 gets lots of good previews and the release candidate got lots of good words and good benchmarks. So many people are interested in it.

yeah, many people have also been interested in vista, i was talking about the many errors and glitches vista had. and about the many updates it took to make vista run stable. when it first came out, it was nothing but one huge building site, if you know what i mean. i'm rather sure that win7 will have the same problem. just my opinion though.

Yes, I understand this. But I think Win7 is some kind of Vista2. So it is just more stable from the beginning. Many users proved it with the release candidate and the beta versions. It will not be that bad compared to Vista but the marketing is very bad especially in Europe. I get a worse product for a higher price compared to the rest of the world.

ah, ok. i kinda missed the beta tests and that stuff. but i see where you're coming from. all i can say about that is: i agree. bad marketing just sucks, especially the higher price.

Well the missing brwoser is not Microsoft's decission.
They were forced since the EU complained about monopoly and browser comeptition.

The other solution would have been to provide several browsers to select from on initial isntall, but that's probably not what Microsoft wanted. So it's the other way round. No browser at all.

now THAT's typical.

I have no problem with not having IE. The problem is the missing update version and the higher price.

I cannot install everything, all modeling tools, all 3d-engines, all programming tools, my virtual environment and not to forget administrative tools, Steam and the games. This takes weeks.
No chance to install Win7 without an upgrade procedure.

Microsoft seems want people to switch to other OS,
like Apple, Linux or the new Google OS.

Vista proves, that MS is struggeling with improvements.

Not to offer any browser is a terrible misfit.
How should a grandma who got a new computer cope with that.
They could simply offer a "quickinstall" special
browser, to download one of the popular browsers.