I’m not alone, check out the Excessive Packaging category on Sustainable Is Good. Fortunately, Amazon is starting a Frustration-Free Packaging initiative which aims to “determine the “right-sized” box for any given item to be shipped to a customer, based on that item’s dimensions and weight.” You can also leave packaging feedback, something I’ve just done.

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade

Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Upgrade

As fas as I can tell, the only difference between Home Premium and Professional is that you don’t get their virtualization for XP software support (which is probably like VMWare Fusion on the Mac), no automatic backup features, and it’s missing some enterprise Active Directory thing called “Domain Join” that I doubt I’d ever use. So I’m not paying any $ for that.

One advantage I’ll get out of this is the ability to (a) run DX10 for the latest games, and (b) 64bit support, so finally I can run all 4 GB of RAM properly without PAE and any other proprietary crap. Right now my 4GB only shows up as about 3.4 anyway. Also, SSD support is much better in Windows 7, from what I’ve read. So my Intel X25-M will continue to serve me well!

Update: If you missed this, but you are a student or know a student, you can get a super cheap deal ($10 cheaper!) by visiting the Windows 7 Student Discount Page. It’s $30 for Windows 7 Pro, and another $13 to get a physical DVD.

• Delivery is inconsistent. Some days it comes, some days it doesn’t. I’d say a good 40% of the time it doesn’t come at all.
• Delivery is often late. If I get, there’s a 20% chance it’s when I’m coming home from work, not when I leave.
• Delivery “on hold” didn’t work. I put the subscription on hold for two weeks while I was in Shanghai, so what did I come home to? A huge stack of Wallstreet Journal magazines, and two emails notifying me of the hold period start and end effective dates. Clearly, not very effective.

If you want to read the WSJ (and it’s a great magazine to read), I strongly suggest you pick up the Wallstreet Journal Kindle Edition and get it wirelessly without any of the physical delivery issues.

Other advantages of the Kindle DX over the Kindle 2 include 3.3Gb of Storage for 3,500 books, rotation settings for orienting it in different reading positions, and most usefully, native PDF support. That last one is the only thing I really care about–although I’ve heard that the larger screen size will make refreshes slower. And, what about international support, faster refreshes, or color e-ink?

Still, for Amazon, for every 100 hard copies sold, an additional 35 Kindle editions are being sold, which is incredible growth. For more opinions, try searching Twitter for “Kindle DX”!