Win 7 Gets a Good Start

[MTI]

Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade, Family pack, held the top spot. Home Premium Upgrade was second, and Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade was third. It was a clean sweep for Microsoft in Amazon's top five, as Microsoft Office 2007, Home and Student edition, was fourth while Windows 7 Professional Upgrade took fifth.

Though not scientific, the listing is generally seen as a good indication of a product's popularity, given the large volumes of transactions that occur on Amazon.

Microsoft said Friday that Windows sales for its fiscal first-quarter were off 39% year-over-year, though much of the decline was due to the company's deferred recognition of $1.5 billion in revenue during the quarter to account for a program that let consumers who purchased a Vista PC during the weeks leading up to Windows 7's launch to upgrade virtually for free.

The full version of Windows 7 Professional is $299, with upgrades going for $199. Windows 7 Ultimate is priced at $319, with the upgrade version at $219. The full version of Windows 7 Home Premium is priced at $199, with an upgrade from Vista or XP costing $119.

From the MS website:

If you want to run Windows 7 on your PC, here's what it takes:

1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor

1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)

16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)

DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

Additional requirements to use certain features:

Internet access (fees may apply)

Depending on resolution, video playback may require additional memory and advanced graphics hardware

Some games and programs might require a graphics card compatible with DirectX 10 or higher for optimal performance

For some Windows Media Center functionality a TV tuner and additional hardware may be required

Windows Touch and Tablet PCs require specific hardware

HomeGroup requires a network and PCs running Windows 7

DVD/CD authoring requires a compatible optical drive

BitLocker requires Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 1.2

BitLocker To Go requires a USB flash drive

Windows XP Mode requires an additional 1 GB of RAM, an additional 15 GB of available hard disk space, and a processor capable of hardware virtualization with Intel VT or AMD-V turned on

Music and sound require audio output

It will be exciting to see if the business community takes this opportunity to not only get the Enterprise license, but to also deploy the upgraded harware to run Win7. That would be a boost to chip and hardware makers.