Update: Today (Sunday Oct. 18) is the first day you can order laptops from Amazon with Windows 7 Pre-Installed

Windows 7 Release Date This Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

If your current version of Windows is giving you stress, slowing down, or just being a royal pain in the ass, today’s a good day to order a copy of Windows 7.

I have tested the pre-release version of Windows 7 on several desktops and laptops around my basement lab for months, and I like the results.

I know a lot of people want to wait until the verdict is out, but seriously, the release candidate has been out for a while, it was distributed very early and very liberally by Microsoft, and, at the very least, everyone can pretty much agree its better then Vista in compatibility, stability, usability, reliability, and performance.

However, Microsoft has fallen fall short of pricing Windows 7 at a significant discount to recognize the black eye it gaves users with Vista.

Microsoft acknowledged the fact that it needed to make financial amends with Windows 7by offering unprecedented 50% off pre-orders back in June. However, the fact that they expired this offer long before the release date was evident that this gesture was token.

I would guess that fewer than 40% of retail Vista owners even knew about the discount – and fewer still wanted to pre-purchase it before release until it was fully vetted. The pre-release discount was just marketing theatre more than anything else.

There should have been no time limit on when upgrade versions were discounted – at least not for retail Vista owners. The most relevant time to advertise the discount is at launch, at point-of-sale, both retail and online – period.

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade
from Vista should be just $29 – forever – a nod to Apple’s ‘upgrade-which-wasn’t-so-much-a-new-version pricing’ for Snow Leopard.

BTW, I always advise folks that they do a fresh install whenever they upgrade Windows – and usually to splurge on a new hard drive also. This way, you just plug your old hard drive in and keep working if something goes amiss during install and you want to go back to it later.

I am a vapid performance SSD pundit and recommend the 256 GB Corsair SSD, although the insane pricing will understandably keep most people away – some high performance SSDs have actually gone up in price this year.