I received my free upgrade from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium. Of course the free upgrade was free (as in beer) where I had to pay for the shipping charges, etc. which were more then standard shipping charges (around 17 USD). The other thing was that since I am living/working in Sweden, I got my upgrade in the Swedish language. The stupid thing about packaging for Windows 7 Home Premium (W7HP) was that one cannot change the language of installation. Now that was something which was available in Windows Vista Home Premium (WVHP) edition. No idea why it was removed from Windows 7. Maybe UI language elements were hard coded! I searched the net to find out that Microsoft only allows for language changes in Professional and Ultimate editions. That is not very nice to you Mr. Microsoft. It is stupidity to believe that all users in a particular region would want their OS base language of that particular region. But you may ask me as to why I did not order the English version of W7HP when I was ordering the upgrade? Well because I bought the desktop in Sweden and so it came loaded with a Swedish version of WVHP. Hence it automatically selected the Swedish version of W7HP because of Microsoft’s stupid policy to provide upgrade to Windows 7 in the same language as was in Windows Vista.

I clearly mark this as a packaging stupidity. Why would one want to upgrade to a Professional (upgrade from W7HP to Professional costs 180 Euros) or Ultimate (upgrade from W7HP to Professional costs 280 Euros) versions for changing their base language? And all OS vendors supply multiple base languages even in their minimal editions. The other packaging stupidity was the online user’s manual which was provided with the upgrade. It mentioned that one can initiate a fresh install or upgrade but never ever mentioned that one needed to boot from the upgrade disk to do a fresh install. So if users simply start Vista and start the process, they are not able to do a fresh install on their C drive. But they have an option to do it on another partition. Now WTF would I do a fresh install on another partition and not on the same one as my old Microsoft OS? That is a question someone needs to ask Microsoft.

After the upgrade, things were looking OK. I needed to change my GUI language to English as my Swedish is very bad. I found Windows MUI (Multiple User Interface) Language files but they are not available for W7HP. Instead there is something known as LIP (Language Interface Packs) which are allowed on W7HP. These packs when installed will translate the base language to the pack language. Great, but I didn’t find an LIP for English. Yes, there is one for Great Britain which would work for me but hello, the base language needs to the US English for that LIP to work! DOUGH! So I am still stuck with the Swedish language.

In short, if I needed a legal upgrade from my WVHP to W7HP then I was stuck with Swedish as my base language. And don’t just let me get started on other versions. The best thing I did was to switch to Linux as my main OS. I anyway need Windows to play games only. And once I get my PS3, I would not even need that. Another of your loyal users is leaving you alone.

Indeed Microsoft, I congratulate you on your stupidity. Does not surprise me that your OS share in the market is going down. Microsoft has provided a lot of good things to the world. But since the last couple of years, the level of stupidity has risen a lot. Some of the major goof ups include Windows Mobile and Windows 7 bases. I do swear today that the day I am able to play my games on other OS, I am switching over fully never requiring a dual boot / VM.