Oh I agree. I went for the software4students win7 upgrade last month. I had some other reasons but at £40 "why not?" is a perfectly good way of justifying it. Do it.
You have to burn it as an "ISO image" to the disc so it's a bit different as you can't use windows or nero etc but it's perfectly do-able. Imgburn is a free bit of easy to use & reliable software.
R.e. Exporting. Though it's an "upgrade" it does require a fresh install. When you fresh install you will loose everything as I'm sure you know. Copy/pasting from an external HDD is fine for music etc but it won't work for programs and settings. Windows Mail virtually implodes all your email accounts if you do not go "file > export" (this saves everything in one really handy file that can be file > imported in Windows 7's version of windows mail). Obviously this is only relavent if you use the program Windows Mail. Take a look at the youtube vid above, as I prefer to do things manually tbh I don't know exactly what is and isn't covered but, windows vista has a built in program that tries to save as much of your files, music, documents & settings etc as possible in one big folder (which you then "import" into windows 7 and everything is supposed to work and be exactly like your old PC in terms of what is kept where and settings etc)
I agree. Office 2007 looks identical to 2010 speaking as someone who only uses word and the more basic/intermediate aspects of excel.
Oh, r.e. 64bit or 32bit. 64bit only becomes advantageous once you go over about 3.3GB of RAM. If you one day think you might upgrade then go for 64bit. In theory 32bit should be more reliable as most of the world is programmed with 32bit in mind. However proffesional programs such as Solidworks are starting to switch to 64bit only. 64bit used to have a "nothing works" stigma about it but things seemed to have changed massively since the days of XP 64 and Vista 64. 32bit will be fine if you MUST be old fashioned or don't need 64bit :rasp: