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Microsoft reportedly plans Windows 8 upgrades all the way from XP, wants us to just let go of the past
Microsoft has been promising a cheap-and-cheerful upgrade path to Windows 8 for those who buy new PCs. But what about that five-year-old PC in the basement? If the historically well-connected Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet is right, the upgrade path will go further back -- much further. Although upgraders will still want Windows 7 if they need to carry over absolutely everything, tipsters claim that settings can transfer from releases as old as Windows Vista SP1. Those with truly ancient PCs (we're looking at you, corporate customers) can even bring over personal files from an OS as dated as Windows XP SP3. Like we saw last time around, some of the 7-to-8 upgrade rules are a bit Byzantine -- 7 Professional users can't step down to the non-Pro Windows 8 release, for example, and it's equally verboten to change language editions or move from 32- to 64-bit code without a full-scale reinstallation. The extra-long olive branch will be slightly unusual for Microsoft if it's confirmed, but then the company is also trying to move along a user base that in some cases has clung to XP for more than a decade. Redmond is no doubt eager to get rid of our dependency issues.
Windows 7 edges out Vista in thorough gaming benchmarks
Looking to find out what's the better gaming experience out there right now -- Windows 7 beta or Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 -- the folks at PC Perspective put both operating systems through the ringer with help from seven graphics cards running the gamut of price ranges. Overall, three ATI Radeon HD and four NVIDIA GeForce cards were pitted with six games and applications in one of the lengthiest benchmarking features we've ever read. AMD / ATI gets credit for being the first to release combined drivers that work on both OSs, and with one lone exception, performance on the Windows 7 machine was equal to or better than Vista. That said, the recomendations for each system is the same: ATI gets an advantage here for cards in the $120 to $130 range, but the competition is much closer as you start looking at more expensive models. Hit up the read link for technical details that you can shake an anti-aliased stick at.
