I would like to upgrade my home computer from Vista Home to a version of Windows 7 64 bit, but I really don't want to pay $320 for Ultimate, or $200 for home. I don't think I can get by with an upgrade version. I probably need the full version. I know that Newegg has OEM versions for cheaper, but I don't know if that's what I need or not.

When I experience problems with Microsoft windows, I'm not the person that likes to tinker with finding the solution by spending days at a time solving the issue. I just reload the operating system instead. If there's a lot of updates, I'd prefer to have a newer disk with most of these updates on it so I don't spend 2 days just loading in updates.

I'm also going to talk to our network guy and see what he thinks and whether I can get a better deal though the company I work for.

When I built my machine 2 1/2 years ago, Windows 7 was new and I wanted to wait for the bugs to be worked out of it first. So I ended up with Vista Home 32 bit upgrade at $100 at Best Buy. Also, I made sure that I could run the 64 bit version when I bought my parts.

Cat

When i went to win 7 i bought the oem version. Its the same as the retail . What i have done is load it on, do the updates and make an image to another drive. I also make incremental backups. Truth be told i haven,t had to wipe my drive with Win 7 in over a year maybe more. It is super stable.Spending days finding a solution to a problem is really a thing of the past. I never went for vista as it was a real PITA much like Windows ME.

Ok. I talked to our network guy, and he just suggests just ordering this one, so that's what I'm going to do.

Windows 7 Professional SP1 64-bit-OEM from Newegg for $139.99.

That's what I just did as well Cat. Although I just needed Premium for my purposes and it was 79.99 at www.TigerDirect.ca. I just checked there for you on the "Pro" and it is exactly the same price you show at Newegg. Both Tigerdirect and Newegg are second only to Amazon for online ordering in my books so you should have good luck.

Andrew, there are quite a few other Canadian online retailers that are way better than the three you mentioned. I used to shop at Tigerdirect years ago, but to be quite honest, they're at the bottom of my list (I ONLY go to it for product reviews). Both Amazon and Newegg are OK, but most of their prices can easily be beaten.

One of my favorite sites is Direct Canada . Before I purchase anything, I spend A LOT of time looking for the cheapest price, and more often than not, they have the best price. The guys that run the business are extremely nice and easy-going.

Another great site is NCIX. Their pricing is hit and miss, but they do price match. It's also the first website I go to for product reviews etc. There's a lot of knowledgeable people in their forums.

Those are only two that I'd strongly suggest over the ones you mentioned. I can provide more if you want.

in my experience, most of the time Tiger Direct does not have the best prices, far from it.

can someone enlighten me on premium vs ultimate?

Here ya go, bud - linky.

HERE's a detailed version.

HERE's more comparison. Click on the tabs at the top to switch pages.

So home premium should normally be fine for a htpc. Couldn't understand the need for more in a theater set up.

Just an FYI the RETAIL version of Win 7 includes both the 32 and 64 bit versions, this is why it is more expensive.

For you CDN folks, there is a place here in town that has pretty good pricing for PC Parts I have no idea what the shipping costs are like.

Unless I'm confusing that site with another one that's Canadian with a very similar name, they've totally overhauled their website and it looks WAY better.

you are correct, they have overhauled their site fairly recently.

I got my Windows 7 64 bit OEM today. I'll probably wait until this weekend to install it. I'd like to Format and Partition my pair of 1T drives (on a raid 1) before installing. Does anyone know the easiest way to do this before, or during the install of WIndows 7 OEM?

Currently not partitioned.

Depends. If you are looking to do hardware RAID, you set this up under your MB's bios before installing Windows. The resulting drive will be available for use in Windows but you will not be able to make any changes to the partitions using Windows 7. Alternatively, you can leave them untouched and set up software controlled RAID via Windows7

Some people trust HW controlled raid more, others like the convenience of the SF solution.

The answer as to how you do this the HW way, as you specified, depends on your MB & it's BIOS. You may have RTFM for that I'm afraid.

I'm currently doing a hardware RAID 1. I'm guessing that I can ignore it's a RAID and load Windows 7 the same as Vista. Hopefully, sometime during the start of the install, Windows 7 will ask me if I want to reformat and partition the drive(s). I read that since I'm going from 34 to 64 bit, reformatting is a required step.

If you don't already despise Vista, the switch to Windows 7 will surely seal the deal. You'll be amazed at the improvement.

Sorry, can't help much with OS controlled raid. On my home/home office PC I used the raid controller on my MB because it was already there and it saved me a small amount of $ in the Windows ver. I needed.

Ironically, I have not set up raid on my newer HTPC. I may down the road but right now, I'm just using one PC to back up the other. Now I just need to update my home LAN as I am finally finding 100Mb/sec slow now that I do the occasional large data transfer. Still... not a priority.

Bryan, you will indeed need to do a full install to go from 32 bit to 64bit and yes you will be asked if you wan to set partitions, or at least I always am when I reinstall.

Got Windows 7 Professional 64bit installed with no problems.

Nice! Did you end up doing HW or SW raid?

I already had Hardware raid 1 running with Vista Home, so there was nothing for me to do there. After Windows 7 Prof 64bit was up and running, it took me a while to find it, but the HW raid was also up and running by itself. Easy Peazy.

I didn't bother reformatting, or making another partition, though. I haven't really needed another partition anyway.

The only thing that didn't work out of the box, was the printer. When I went to take a look at the printer setups, it was as easy as the system initializing a list of printers by itself, me picking the closest match (didn't have exact one), and the printer was now up and running.

I did later load in the software from the Gigabyte motherboard disk. But it was working without it, so I'm not sure if that step was even necessary.