In an earlier post I detailed the upgrade of my Vista partition to Windows 7 Eval and how smoothly the process went. Well I’m afraid that the shine has gone off Windows 7 and after looking at the upgrade prices I’m hacked off enough to say that I’ll not be bothering. I upgraded my laptop from XP to Vista because I was starting a new job and it’s what they used – so I thought I should get up to speed before I started. I later configured the laptop to Dual Boot with Ubuntu but Vista was always my default Operating System – if I wanted to boot into Ubuntu then I had to remember to wait around for the Boot Menu instead of just turning it on and walking away. Recently I was lured into installing Windows 7 and at first I was quite impressed and do admit that it is a massive leap from XP (and probably Vista). As most people say, it is what Vista should have been.

The problem I have is that all this has happened in about 18 months and I resent the fact that I’m now ‘expected’ to cough up another £140 for an upgrade. What’s more infuriating is that this is only £10 cheaper than buying the full version, i.e. not an upgrade. What is going to happen in another 18 months – will I have expected to put my hand in my pocket for another £140 for Windows 8? Not a chance, they can take it from my cold, dead hands!

So what am I going to do? I’ve been asking myself the question “What can I do on Windows that I cannot do (or don’t know how to do) on Ubuntu?” and have come up with a pretty short list:

  • I’m a Developer working with Microsoft technologies on a day to day basis – I need to be able to run my Development tools , i.e. Visual Studio, in a Windows environment. But outside of work I’m concentrating more on Open Source development – which I can do on Linux.
  • I own an iPod and regularly download Podcasts and sync music from my collection using iTunes (which will not run on Linux)
  • Transfer from Video (e.g. camcorder footage) to DVD complete with Menus etc.

That’s it! Everything else I can think of such as surf the web, read email, online banking/shopping etc I can do on either Operating System.

So here is my plan; I not going to buy the Windows 7 upgrade. Before it starts restarting itself in protest I intend to scrub the drive clean – both partitions. Then I’m going to install Vista on a 40GB partition and give the rest (120 GB’ish) to Ubuntu. That way I can still drop into Windows to do some adhoc development work if I need to and in the meantime Ubuntu can hold my music etc (which it can’t at the moment due to it being on the smaller partition).

No doubt my work PC will be updated to Windows 7 in the next few months but until then I can live without it. Maybe I’ll buy a copy when I’ve calmed down a little (maybe not), when the price comes to a more sensible level or when/if Vista starts to hack me off (although I could always drop ‘back’ to good old XP).