Slashdot Mirror
The Hard Upgrade Path From XP To Vista To Win 7
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft executives have been telling the tech industry that if hardware supports Windows Vista, it will support Windows 7, but it now looks like that may not entirely be the case. According to CRN: 'But after a series of tests on older and newer hardware, a number of noteworthy issues emerged: Microsoft's statement that if hardware works with Windows Vista it will work with Windows 7 appears to be, at best, misleading; hardware that is older, but not near the end of most business life cycles, could be impossible to upgrade; and the addition of an extra step in the upgrade process does add complexity and more time not needed in previous upgrade cycles.' And here is CRN's overview of the difficulties Microsoft faces in asking enterprise users to walk this upgrade path: 'Across the XP-Vista-Windows 7 landscape, Microsoft has fostered an ecosystem that now holds out the prospect of a mind-numbing number of incompatible drivers, unsupported devices, unsupported applications, unsupported data, patches, updates, upgrades, 'known issues' and unknown issues. Sound familiar? That's what people used to say about Linux.'"
Honestly, I think that when an OS manufacturer forgets that current users don't run OS's, they run applications and they use hardware attached to the computer (scanners, cameras, drum machines, etc.).. they've fallen off the rails. I would *never* consider upgrading to Vista or Win7. I keep XP in a sandbox on my Mac and there it will stay, unable to talk to MS (no network connection provided in the sandbox), able to be restored from an image in seconds, and basically 100% functional with all my goodies.
I really can't imagine what they're thinking. If it isn't 99.99% compatible, it isn't getting on my machine. Whatever machine that might be.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Linux is 100% compatible with all devices as long as you're willing to program the drivers yourself or spend an equal amount of time getting already written drivers to work with it.
mmmm...forbidden donut
who's even using Windows on slashdot? only people that are affected by this are pc techs who need to "upgrade" user machines. when i was in user support, i don't remember ever upgrading an OS on them unless we were completely reimaging them. so this shouldn't matter to anyone.