Windows 7 owners are having problems installing their new operating system, especially over Vista, according to comments on Microsoft’s support site. Many find their installation goes into infinite reboot after 62% of the installation is complete. Switching off and rebooting doesn’t help either because the system no longer recognises the older operating system. Microsoft says the problem occurs because the Iphlpsvc service stops responding during the upgrade. But others may also be to blame. One user who followed Microsoft’s fix said it took 48 hours to get a working installation, with installation runs taking 10 hours a time. Even then he had to delete his wireless card and get the operating system to find it again. Sounds like something to be avoided until Microsoft get their bug fixes sorted.

Mirosoft Windows 7, due to ship on 22 October 2009, has received good reviews as the Operating System that Vista should have been. And it would appear that the large percentage of businesses that have held onto XP rather than go to Vista are no doubt planning to migrate to Windows 7. But Microsoft may be making it harder and costlier for them to do so. Under Microsoft’s planned enterprise licensing rules, businesses that buy PCs before 23 April, 2010, with Windows 7 preinstalled can downgrade them to Windows XP, then later upgrade them to Windows 7 when they’re ready to migrate their users. But PCs bought on or after 23 April 2010 can only be downgraded to Vista which will be of no help for XP-based organizations and could cause major headaches and add more costs to the Windows 7 migration effort.