Can you upgrade an old XP PC to Windows 7? Should you?

How old is too old? I had a chance to think about this question twice over the weekend. Once while pondering my fifty-somethingth birthday (as of today, I am the same age as Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons combined), and the other while deciding whether to upgrade my friend Lisa’s four-year-old Sony notebook to Windows 7.

The birthday will happen whether I want it or not. But as for that Sony? That took a little more thought. It would have been a no-brainer had this been a two-year-old PC that Lisa had downgraded to XP to avoid the tribulations of Vista. But this machine, once a triumph of Sony hardware engineering, could easily be deemed ready to retire.

After careful consideration, I finally decided to go ahead with the upgrade, taking careful notes and snapping lots of screen shots along the way. The XP-to-7 odyssey was an interesting one, with surprising results and several lessons I can share with anyone contemplating a similar adventure. Along the way I also tried out a new edition of Laplink’s PCmover software, which is specifically designed to ease this sort of migration. I found some surprises there as well.

Free Photo Editors for Windows

1. PhotoScape
On first glimpse, I thought Photoscape was going to be a dud, but I dug in deeper and realized why so many readers of this site have recommended it as a favorite free photo editor. It is jam-packed with features, while remaining very easy to use. Photoscape provides several modules including a viewer, editor, batch processor, Raw converter, file renamer, print layout tool, screen capture tool, color picker, and more. I'm very impressed overall at what has been packed into this free photo editor without sacrificing ease of use.

GIMP for Windows
GIMP is a popular open-source image editor originally developed for Unix/Linux. It does have an interface and features parallel to Photoshop, but with a steep learning curve to match. Because it's volunteer-developed beta software, stability and frequency of updates could be an issue; however, many happy users report using GIMP for Windows without significant troubles.

Paint.NET
Paint.NET is a free image and photo manipulation software for Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or Server 2003. Paint.NET started development at Washington State University with additional help from Microsoft, and continues to be updated and maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Paint.NET features layers, painting and drawing tools, special effects, unlimited undo history, and levels adjustments. Paint.NET is completely free, and the source code is also available for free.