By Win7News.net
By Deb Shinder, Editor Win7News.net
I have a number of friends who refuse to upgrade to Windows 7, and they have all sorts of different reasons. For some, it’s simply a matter of money: they simply can’t afford to buy a new computer and the old one isn’t quite powerful enough to run Windows 7 well. For others, it’s purely pragmatic: Windows XP everything they want to do, so they don’t see any compelling reason to make a change. For some, change itself is the reason; they’re set in their ways and don’t want to have to learn something new. All of those are perfectly logical reasons to stick with what you have.
Then there are those folks who tell me they’ll never use Windows 7 because of the horrible, heinous DRM that’s hidden in its nooks and crannies. This technology is lurking in the woodworks, ready to pounce out and take away all their freedom and liberty, violate their constitutional rights and remove all their control over their computers. They seem to get this idea from bloggers like the one who wrote this complaint about Windows 7 DRM back when the OS was still in beta testing:
http://www.win7news.net/110728-Draconian-DRM
Peter Bright wrote a pretty thorough response to that post over on Arstechnica, explaining that the real cause of the problems was almost certainly with the PhotoShop crack that he tried to apply, rather than some draconian DRM enforcement action on the part of Windows 7, that the firewall was opened by Photoshop rather than Windows 7, and that the reason the complainant couldn’t record audio directly was due to the sound card drivers. You can read his entire rebuttal here:
http://www.win7news.net/110728-The-Humanity
Bright also does a good job of explaining the DRM features that were new to Vista and Windows 7, such as PVP and PUMA (Protected Video Path and Protected User Mode Audio), and why most computer users will never know they’re there. Yet my anti-Win7 friends (most of whom, by the way, have never actually used Windows 7) continue to solemnly declare that if they upgraded, they would no longer be able to play the music they ripped from their own, bought-and-paid-for CDs, and that’s just not acceptable. Well, no, that wouldn’t be acceptable to me, either. But luckily, it’s not true. In fact, not only can you rip your CDs, you don’t even have to install third party software to do it. Windows Media Player makes it easy, with a “Rip CD” button right there on its taskbar. And the Microsoft web site will guide you through the process, step by step:
http://www.win7news.net/110728-Rip-Music
Meanwhile, the more often the horror stories about Windows 7 DRM are told, the more distorted they become. Over on the Ubuntu forum, a poster wrote that “it also disables any software that might be ‘pirated’ or illegal.”
http://www.win7news.net/110728-Scary-Windows-7-DRM
Article Continued Here
This excerpt is shared with permission from Win7News.net.
