I am pretty sure official price for W7 after 31 dec 2009 is £149

The only reason it will stay £65 would be if it doesnt sell. Can't see that happening with all the positive reviews and general forum consensus.

Besides, competition from Chrome is still far far away.

From ZDNet via CNET



Not saying its gospel or anything, but most places are reporting that home premium will be selling for around £65 - any I haven't seen any mention of it going above that - not sure if it makes any difference to your decision.

Windows 7 is a lot faster than vista:)

PC Pro benchmarks say otherwise.

PC Pro Clicky

The GUI might "feel" snappier, but that's where the improvements end.

hmm, not seen that before but I do question it a bit as it was based on the RC, not RTM and the test's appear to be based on highly CPU intensive things, not regular day usage like opening a browser (where delays are really noticed!)

Ross

The RTM benchmarks in c't seem to show that it is on a par with Vista SP2 in general terms, which is, in most tests, marginally ahead of XP in terms of performance - on a Core i7 machine...


Waking up from sleep, all of them managed between 9 and 11 seconds.

The two times for the boot are to desktop and display a website and to desktop and start playing a video.

It is the way the desktop responds to the user which makes it feel faster. With 7, much like OS X, once the desktop appears, the user can start working, whereas in XP and, to a lesser extent, Vista, it means that the user should be able to start doing things "shortly".

The automatic defragmenter also doesn't work as hard in the background, letting files fragment more, before shuffling them around, as they have found that for fragmented files with large fragments, there isn't much of a gain by defragmenting them, so the large fragments are left alone until it gets to a critical point.

MS have also reduced the number of mouse clicks to carry out certain tasks, which means that the user feels things are done quicker, because they have to do less.

If you're coming from XP (like me) 7 would appear to be a no-brainer. Perhaps from Vista it's a different story. But I'm far from the only one who has been using XP or 2K and completely ignored Vista.

Very interesting Dave. As a former salesman and (very) amateur psychologist and philosopher, I have to say there's a lot of truth to "perception is reality".

Ross, u r right that W7 is £65 recently, but it has already gone up to £80 in most places. That was a special offer price for pre-order (it was actually £50 right at the beginning but the uptake has been so strong, that price is going up and up).

The point was that once it is officially released on 22nd Oct, pre-order discount no longer applied. And after 31st Dec 2009, it will go upto £149.

Unlike other products, retailers cannot discount from the official price too much as MS have great financial muscle and iron clan legal contracts with reseller.

The reason we can't discount software is that our buy price is only a couple of pounds less than the retail. In most retail markets theres a big profit (usually 200% or more) so things like clothes shops can do 50% off sales and still make a profit.
In the IT industry the profit margins are usually less that 5% (with software more like 3%)