“Two hundred dollars. Are you shitting me?” I asked the clerk.

“$199.99 plus tax,” the timid man corrected, undoubtedly wishing by now that he could crawl under the counter and hide.

“I can buy a netbook with Windows 7 on it for $200.”

“Would you like to look at a netbook?”

“No. Give me the damn box.”

Anything off a shelf is more expensive than free, so after blissfully converting to an open source household years ago, the idea of paying for an upgrade has become alien. If that seemed unusual, the idea of paying serious money for what is, in effect, a patch for a previous failure seems batshit fucking loco. With the right contractor, $200 would supply the purchase and installation of a Toto bidet and would likely result in less shit on my hands than Windows 7.

After a morning of intense retail struggle, I at last had the product in my hands in front of its intended recipient. For me, Windows 7 was a performance upgrade. I had heard from a number of friends who jumped in during the beta that the overall responsiveness of the operating system had dramatically increased. Being a tablet user, this was crucial as the laptop had sacrificed horsepower for light form factor. Even with four gigabytes of RAM, Vista takes an eternity to boot and frequently slowed to a crawl for even basic web operations.

Stoked to see the performance boost for myself I plinked the entirely too goddamned expensive DVD into the tray and got going with an in-place upgrade. To cut to the big reveal, I never made it past the compatibility screen.

My laptop is the Lenovo X60 tablet, very popular in the tablet PC scene if a couple years old.  Made by a major manufacturer and Microsoft partner, I would have expected the upgrade to run smoothly.  I made it exactly one screen past the license agreement before hitting my hard stop.  During the compatibility check, it told me to uninstall a program that came installed by the laptop manufacturer.

The hitch?  No such program is listed in Add/Remove Programs.  Windows 7 was telling me to get rid of a program that Windows Vista said didn’t exist.

After three hours of repeated attempts and uninstalling a shitload of the manufactuer-loaded software, I found in a forum that I needed to rename a system file in order to clear the false incompatibility message that prevented my upgrade.

In Linux or OSX, this would be simple enough.   Open a command terminal, gain superuser privileges, and rename the file with one command. Definitely not something the average fuck-stupid user would consider appropriate for an OS upgrade, but for my nerdly patience an acceptable obstacle to navigate for a better performing laptop.

In Vista, however, renaming a system file is fucking impossible. Because of the revamped, short-bus security model in Vista, two commands are required to just get the permissions to change a system file – even as the most privileged user on the machine. However, once those permissions are gained, one still can’t rename the file if its in use, even if it is non-critical to the system running. According to the research I did in that three hour timesink, the only other option for me is to do a fresh install which I’m not going to do.

This is not 1999. Operating systems are not some mystic, ethereal projects only one company can manage any more.   The entire Internet can be searched in seconds.  The human genome can be sequenced in a week.  After nearly two decades of development, Windows should be able to just fucking work.

For Mac and Linux users, in-place operating upgrades are ordinary.  My Ubuntu desktop has retained all my installed applications and preferences since Breezy Badger, which was released four years and seven upgrades ago.  The hassle of reinstalling and reconfiguring my OS is just not acceptable any more.

So my review of Windows 7?  Well, the box looks great, but I wouldn’t pay $200 for it.

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