10 Reasons to Upgrade to Windows 7

By Scott Steinberg of Entrepreneur.com



Small business owners frustrated with Windows Vista's assorted hardware incompatibilities, ceaseless battery of pop-up alerts and puttering speeds can officially unclench their jaws and ease those quivering fists away from their screens.

Microsoft's(MSFT Quote) new operating system, Windows 7, is finally available for purchase and -- amen -- actually good enough to make even holdouts still clinging desperately to Windows XP want to upgrade after all these years. Albeit no revolution in desktop computing -- it's essentially a revamp of Vista that addresses owners' most common complaints and tightens the user interface -- make no bones about it -- Windows 7 provides a welcome evolutionary step forward for the platform, significantly improving security, stability and everyday convenience.

Granted, some aspects may confuse. Cases in point: Multiple versions with negligible feature differences are offered, you have to manually backup and reinstall data to upgrade from Windows XP, and certain programs (including email and calendar applications) must be downloaded separately from the OS. But these hiccups can't detract from what is easily the most significant upgrade the hoary old software standby has seen in years.

Debating taking the plunge? Here are 10 reasons why you'll inevitably want to earmark room for it in your IT budget:

1. Lower system requirements
Unlike Windows Vista, which required significantly more memory and processing speed to power its graphical user interface, Windows 7 isn't a system resource hog. As such, the same machines you now having running Vista should easily be able to accommodate the new OS, which in many cases loads programs and boots or shuts down faster.

Less money spent on hardware upgrades translates into immediate cost savings, while a decrease in downtime twiddling your thumbs waiting for software to load provides a corresponding productivity boost. Furthermore, even a relatively slow 1GHz PC with 1GB of memory can run Windows 7 (though 2GB of RAM is recommended and 4GB for the 64-bit edition), making it suitable for installation on low-end netbook computers on up to high-end desktops.