Windows 7 - is it worth upgrading to 7

i am currently running my laptop on vista and saw that microsoft are offering students windows 7 for £30. i was wondering is it worth me purchasing it, also i was going to get the downloadable one rather than buying a cd, is there a way in which i can reinstall 7 on my laptop if i need to reinstall my os for some reason in the future or do i need to purchase the cd version to be able to do that?
cheers

The downloadable installs are normally in the form of .ISO files which are actually DVD images and require to be written to disk, (needs a specific burn option not just copied), therefore re-installs should not be an issue.

However, if you purchase an upgrade install you may need to upgrade a activated and validated copy of vista to enable re-installation.

This may or may not be an issue but we will only know for sure after the actual upgrade disks are available for testing

For a start, yes, you should upgrade. You will notice increased system performance in comparison to running vista.

Also, the download version, will download an ISO image, which you should burn to a DVD in order to install on your laptop. You do not need the CD version in order to reinstall.

Tom

I think it depends on your hardware too. Some members of my family are running old CPUs and one still has an IDE hard drive. I have told them to wait until they are ready to buy a new computer then upgrade to Windows 7. No sense in upgrading on an old machine, then having to buy it again in 3-6 months. Some of the hardware people are still using is amazing. My sister is using an AMD that was made in 2002 or 2003....that's getting pretty old.

well my laptop is less than a year old, is mine out of date already

If it runs vista at an acceptable rate for you then I would say it will run Windows 7 without any problems - and will probably be an improvement

cheers guys, i have just bought 7 and now waiting till i am able to download it now

As to your original question, I'm using a 5-year old Tablet PC which came with XP and I upgraded to Vista -- and the performance, usability, and reliability improvements with Seven have been amazing!

I should mention that I upgraded the memory from 512MB (with XP) to 2GB (for Vista) -- and that got me some decent realtime performance out of it. With 512MB, it was so slow as to be unusable.

But, everything works (and that's saying a lot on this box) with Seven, even the XP-era drivers loaded in compatibility mode.

So, I would heartily recommend upgrading to Seven for your laptop.

Especially at the student discount price, it is well worth it, imo.