Upgrading from Vista in a small shop

[rickself]

As I am finding out, Vista is one slow dog. I started this job a month ago with 25 years in prepress. We are a busy packaging and carton shop. The PC I inherited is a Vista running HP Pavillion 64 bit, 4 gb ram Home edition. I am running Adobe CS4 and in line to purchase Pitstop. I am so used to Macs but this is what I have and there will be an iMac in another month or two.

SO trying to make the best with what I have for now. We have an HP Z3100 44" printer for proofing. Our shop is a one man prepress (me), in the midst of purchasing CTP.

With that all said, I want to dump Vista for Windoze 7. This HP is home edition. WIll Win 7 home edition be adequate or should I go the extra $75 for Pro? Will CS4 play better with Win 7. Our anticipated rip will be a harlequin in either a Dell or HP box.
ANy thoughts and advice would be more than appreciated.
Rick

[mattbeals]

Go Pro/Business

[Joe]

If you are connecting to a Windows server file server on your network...if it is a Windows 2003 server it works fine out of the box. Windows 7 home will not connect to Windows 2000 server shares out of the box. There is a registry hack that will allow it to connect to them.

[postnetnc133]

Are you able to upgrade right from vista to 7 or do you have to do a full install? I have heard mixed comments on this. Same with XP to 7 I was told you cant do an upgrade it has to be a full install. Then there is there 32bit vs 64bit which to go with and will your equipment work with either or. All thngs I have been hearing mixed reactions on. Partly why I am hesitating on the upgrade.

[wonderings]

Are you able to upgrade right from vista to 7 or do you have to do a full install? I have heard mixed comments on this. Same with XP to 7 I was told you cant do an upgrade it has to be a full install. Then there is there 32bit vs 64bit which to go with and will your equipment work with either or. All thngs I have been hearing mixed reactions on. Partly why I am hesitating on the upgrade.

If your upgrading from XP, you have to do a clean install of windows 7, no upgrade directly from xp to 7. If you have vista you can do an upgrade to windows 7 without a clean install, though I would recommend just doing a clean install and starting fresh.

I am going to be wiping vista from our iMac and putting in Windows 7, which from what I have seen is faaaar better then vista and finally a good OS from Microsoft.

[Greg_Firestone]

I used to run Vista Business on my macbook either in parallels or directly in Bootcamp. It was pretty rough in parallels since I only had 3Gigs of RAM. Within the last year I upgraded it to Win7. Huge Difference. I don't need use Bootcamp like I used to.

As was recommended by others, do a clean install. Just make sure you have your original driver disks. Better yet, go to HP's website and download all the latest driver versions the computer and burn it onto an CD. Make sure you include your network card drivers as you won't be able to download them from the network.

Greg