Reviewing www.Windows7Update.com

We did not update our Genuine Help For Windows 7 series for quite some time. Time has come for us to resume it. In this episode I will review one of the first Windows 7 sites on the internet. The address is www.Windows7Update.com and it promises to offer everything you need about Windows 7: tutorials, tips & tricks, wallpapers, training, news, etc. Let's see how well this site delivers on its promise.

Ease of use - Poor

When you first visit this website you get the impression of bloat and chaos. You also get stressed very quickly because almost everything on the site screams for your attention. First, your site window gets grayed out and you are asked to sign up for a newsletter. You are told it's free and you might win something.

Once you close that, you will see lots of content & menu items being highlighted as new, with red letters, screaming for your attention. Then you are encouraged at every step to buy something: training, windows 7, hardware, solutions for sexy stomachs. You feel like you entered a shop, not a site with tutorials and news. There are eight blocks of ads on the frontpage and nine blocks when you actually dare to open a page with content. Wherever you are in the site, you must have an ad blocker enabled. Otherwise you will have to search for the content between the ads and you will get tired of it very quickly.

If you want to use the two menus, you will get confused again. The top menu and the left side menu don't seem to match/correlate very well. For example, you get an Updates button on the top but none of the left. The News button on the top is named Windows 7 News on the left. Why? I have no clue. What I also don't get is why the left side menu items must have Windows 7 in their name. I'm on windows7updates.com, the title of the site says Windows 7, it's pretty clear this site is about Windows 7. Why place Windows 7 in the name of so many content categories?

You get the same trend if you go to the subcategories level. For example, under Windows 7 Resources you get sub-categories like: Windows 7 Codecs, Windows 7 Books, Windows 7 Training, Windows 7... everything. It's really tiring to read such a list. Lucky for us, there is a search box. You can use it and see much more quickly if the site contains what you want to know, download, etc.

Ease of understanding - Poor

Regarding the content itself and how easy it is to understand it, things are not much better. First of all, it's hard to evaluate this aspect as the site doesn't really have too much content of its own.

If you do get the chance to actually find some content made by the authors of the site, you will be pretty disappointed. Let's take as an example, the tips and tricks section: you get a long list of tips you can read, each with a title. You get things like 'Burn Images' and a very brief description of what to do in order to burn an image. Problem is that, the whole procedure is explained with one line of text: All you have to do is double-click the ISO image and burn it on the CD or DVD that’s inserted in the drive. No explanation about what an ISO image is, no screenshots, no mention about the available options, etc. While many other sites take the time to explain things thoroughly in a complete tutorial, the folks from Windows 7 Update don't bother to write more than a line. All the tips on this site are written in a very similar fashion. You get no true explanations, no screenshots, no description of more complex terms. Basically, if you understand all the concepts written there, you will most likely know the ''tips" shown on the site. Then, what's the value? Hard to say.

If you are a beginner, you will have a very hard time: you will encounter complex terms such as Multi-threaded File Copy, Application Control Policies, etc which are not explained, plus lots of superficial tutorials. Chances are that most stuff created by the owners of the site will not really help you in any way.

Completeness of tutorials - Poor

The little content it has (created by the owners of the site), it's extremely thin. All you get is a few lines of text, maybe a screenshot once every 10 tutorials and a chronic lack of explanations. The authors of the tutorials assume that everyone understands what they are talking about and they provide only superficial guidance.

Let's take for example a tip on Screen Calibration (complete text):

Fortunately, Windows 7 comes with a display calibration wizard that lets you set up the screen brightness properly, so you won’t have any problems viewing photos or text. The problem was that on one PC a photo could look sharp and bright and on another it looks awful. Now the problem can be fixed by pressing the Win key and then typing “DCCW”.

If you press the Win key and then type "DCCW" you are far from solving the problem. You need to click on the result displayed by Windows 7 in the Start Menu and then follow a pretty long wizard with a series of calibration steps. Which are those steps? What to do at each step? The author never bothers to say.

Unfortunately most tips and tutorials on Windows 7 Update are very similar.

Original articles - Poor

One thing you will quickly notice is the fact that this site has very little content of its own. For example, the News section seems like a script which automatically loads news from the Google News service which have the Windows 7 tag.

Then, the Wallpapers section is a scam. You cannot download anything, you just see some low-res thumbnails. One good example is this so called Windows 7 regional wallpaper pack-Taiwan.

The tips section provides some '.pdf' files with tips made by Microsoft for their Windows Partner Solutions. Not sure if the owners of the site infringed some copyright or not. Also, they do not give any credit to Microsoft.

Another bad example is the Windows 7 Versions page which is a copy and paste of the information published by professionals such as Ed Bott and Paul Thurrott. The copy & pasting done includes huge chunks of information and even links from the original tables which forward you to the true source. By doing this, they infringe the copyright of both experts and the sites where they publish their work.

Next you have the tutorials available on the site. If you click on any of the titles, you will be redirected to the Windows Seven Forums site which is a respectable destination with lots of original tutorials. I've scrolled through many pages from their tutorials section and I found none which was actually created by the owners of the site. Not only this, but the true authors are never given the appropriate credit.

The bad examples don't end here. Another one is the Windows 7: Complete Guide. The guide is created by Microsoft and the site lets you download it in form of a '.zip' file. When you open the archive you will see the guide created by Microsoft and a link towards another site called The Windows Club, which has distributed the guide before Windows 7 Update chose to do the same. They just downloaded the archive offered by the The Windows Club and posted it on their site. While they did not infringe any copyright this time, this is still morally wrong.

Windows7Update.com - Non-Genuine Help for Windows 7

As you can see from this long list of bad examples, these guys are both lazy and shameless. They just take good work made by others and publish it as their own, without giving any proper credit to the true authors. They do this even if they are very likely to infringe the copyright of senior experts and companies.

Unfortunately it was a very easy decision to give to www.windows7update.com the red badge of 'Non-Genuine Help for Windows 7'. These guys are just interested in selling everything they think of, no matter the methods. Sites such as this one do nothing else than generating bad karma in the blogging community and providing questionable 'help' to Windows 7 users. My recommendation to all our readers is to stay away from www.Windows7Update.com. There are many other sites worth visiting.

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