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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.'"
seriously, the UI and the taskbar usability is awful, if i open 3 apps i dont know if the app is open or its just a quicklaunch icon ? there is no visual difference between the two
You must not have spent much time with it, because it definitely does indicate whether an app is running or if it's just sitting in the taskbar. Running apps have an embossed "buttonish" look to them. The app with the focus has whitish tint to it. But if you were going out of your way to find a reason to dislike it rather than use it, I can see how you'd come to your conclusion. Also, how often do you change your screen resolution? Once I set my displays, I just about never go back in and change them. And this is doubly true of my work computers.
I'm fairly sure that grandparent is referring to Microsoft executive Mike Nash's displeased email about "Vista capable":
"I know that I chose my laptop (a SONY TX770P) because it had the Vista logo and was pretty disappointed that it not only wouldn't run Glass, but more importantly wouldn't run Movie Maker," Nash wrote. "I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine."
Seriously. Hell, even 1Ghz, 512MB of RAM and a 40GB HD would be OVERKILL for just about any average office task I could think of.
2 seconds on Google found others installed win7 just fine on Thinkpad T43's (same as TFA), they only had the old vista biometric coprocessors drivers crash, it works fine without them. the fact that most old vista drivers work fine in win7 (with no additional win7 features of course) is a plus point for most, but the fact that this one fails, so what, it's not designed for win7, and as security hardware designed to tightly integrate into the OS, I really wouldn't expect it too.
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=73121
Upek do have win7 beta drivers that work just fine on the thinkpad x61 range, other biometric vendors will catch up eventually if they have not already.
WRONG...
The *MICROSOFT RECOMMENDED* Upgrade path from XP to Win 7 is to do a COMPLETELY FRESH INSTALL[1]
[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-xp-7-upgrade-vista,6965.html
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
...and don't forget making absolutely, positively sure that the user does NOT have ultimate control of his/her system. MS definitely keeps trying true upgrades on that front.
The thing about sandboxes like vmware is the OS running inside doesn't know or care what the real hardware of the machine is. That means as long as vmware supports XP (IIRC vmware still supports dos and 9x so I would expect them to continue supporting XP for a very long time) you can continue to run XP in your VM.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
oh? 99.99% or you don't install it?
I keep XP in a sandbox on my Mac and there it will stay
On your mac you say?
I'm curious, what did you do in 2001 when OSX was released? Did Apple give you 99.99% backwards compatibility? Hell no, not even close. Classic was decent, but people had to give up a LOT of stuff.
And what did you do in 2005 when Apple up and switched to intel? Did Apple give you 99.99% backwards compatibility to all your PPC and 68k stuff? Sure there was rosetta, and like classic, it was decent, but its not 99.99%. Not even close.
Criticising Vista and saying you'll only upgrade if the upgrade is 99.99% backwards compatible and then saying you use a Mac undermines everything you've said. Vista is WAY more backwards compatible than Apple even tries for.
Hell just from OS X 10.5 from 10.4:
Absoft Pro Fortran compiler - needs up update v10, previous versions - not compatible
Adept Music Notation 5.2.5 - not compatible
Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional - 8 - needs compatibility update, previous versions not compatible
Adobe Premier Pro CS3 - needs compatibility update (previous versions not compatible
Adobe After effects CS3, compatible updates required (previous versions not compatible
AdobePhotoshop Elements 4 and under not compatible
Adobe CS2 - not supported, not compatible
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom - 1.2 and earlier are not compatible
Adobe Premier Pro - 3.1 and earlier are not compatible
Alien Skin Eye Candy 5, Xenofex 1, not compatible
Alsoft - Disk Warrior 4 - "Alsoft recommends DW4 not be run from OSX10.5"
AOL - Version 10.3.7 and under not compatible
Apple Backup 3.1 and earlier not compatible
Apple Final Cut Pro 4.5 and earlier are not compatible
Apple iDVD 1,2,3,4,5,7.0 not compatible
Apple iPhoto 2 not compatible
AppleJack 1.4.3 not compatible
I could go on...and on...I didn't make it out of the 'A's...
Yeah for a lot of software if you had the latest version, they released a free update to make it leopard compatible. But if you were a version behind... better be prepared to shell out. Leopard wasn't anywhere near 99.99% backwards compatible... even with 10.4, never mind 10.2 era software, and of course OS9 is RIGHT OUT.
Meanwhile Vista/Win7 will still run a lot of DOS6 apps? Not all of them. Probably not anywhere near 99% of them, but an awful LOT of them. I still have a few programs and command line utilities I wrote in C++ for DOS in the early 90s, and they all run on Vista x64, not to mention the ancient Motorola radio programming tool that programs old Motorola 2-way trunk unit; it still works too.
I agree Microsoft screwed up the Vista launch, and backwards compatibility was less than ideal. But it blows away what you get from Apple. The only difference is that with Apple, I think people -expect- no backwards compatibility, so they don't blink when they have to buy the latest version of all their software, buy a new printer, toss their old MP3 player*, etc.
(* My old Samsung Yepp only came with OS9 and Windows software. I can still use it with Vista. I haven't been able to sync it to a Mac in nearly a decade (it didn't work in classic). I handed it down to my kids years ago; and it finlly got retired when I bought my youngest a new Sansa this christmas.)
I used to do word processing on a 386! And it was fast!
No it wasn't. Nostalgia kills rationality.
Tell you what, get our your 386 and try typing up a few pages-worth of document. Time yourself. Then time yourself doing the same on whatever modern desktop you use. If you seriously find the 386 is faster, I'll eat my hat.
I'm not a huge word processing guy, but I can guarantee that a typical spreadsheet app on a 386 is TONS slower than a modern one. You used to have to wait for values to refresh, it wasn't instantaneous like it is now.
Comment of the year
My father asked me the same question once too.. why are PCs so slow and why is software so bloated?
I used a simple example of a text input field. You know, a text box, like the one you used to enter your Slashdot comment. Back in the 386 days, this was implemented using fixed point ASCII text, usually in text mode, and ran fast with a memory usage of a few kilobytes. These days, the total code & libraries required to implement a 'simple' text box might be over several dozen megabytes and would have taken many man-years of effort to develop. The code won't even LOAD on a 386 because it wouldn't fit into memory, let alone run at an acceptable pace.
But I hear you ask... why so complicated? It's just a text box! It doesn't need to do anything other than poll for keyboard input and display some characters.
Well... not quite. In a modern OS or application, even really trivial things like text input fields are fantastically complicated, and hence big and slow.
For example, a modern application would use a text box widget that can do most, or all, of the following:
- Undo and redo.
- Cut & paste, with automatic conversion of multiple formats.
- Mouse and keyboard based selection, highlighting, with automatic entire word selection.
- Alternate keyboard input (such as multiple keystrokes for a single asian character).
- Right-to-left and left-to-right text, including MIXING of the two, with proper handling of caret movement and selection highlights.
- Scrolling, horizontally, vertically, or both.
- text alignment, updated on the fly while typing
- support for all 40,000+ characters in the unicode character set, including various automatic conversions, font substitutions, and related processing. The lookup tables for Unicode and a basic font is several megabytes by itself.
- Combined characters. You know, like in tamil or arabic, where characters look different depending on adjacent characters or position in a word.
Newer controls ( as in WPF, for example ) can even do things like use your GPU to accelerate sub-pixel precision font rendering, kerning computations, and do full justification in real time as you type.
Take a look at "Typography in WPF" for an idea: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms742190.aspx
In the good old 386 days, almost none of that worked. You couldn't mix languages. You couldn't mix left-to-right and right-to-left. You couldn't use a mouse. You couldn't mix fonts on the screen, let alone within a control. Cut and paste was often unavailable, or limited in capability. Editing typographically complex languages was either impossible, or not WYSIWYG.
Examples like that abound. The inter-process memory protection that makes modern PCs relatively stable has a price. Virtual memory comes with its own overhead. Abstract driver models that let you "plug and play" aren't free either (remember IRQs? DIP switches?).
Get used to it, or go buy a 386 and try browsing the web with it.
I would still have to boot into windows to update my Iphone, and use Itunes. I have gone completely legit in the music, movie and software areas and I like being able to download DRM free music whenever I feel like it. Bottom line, you can't do that with Linux.
For what it's worth, I've been buying DRM free music from Amazon using Ubuntu for a while now. They even offer a handy downloader for Linux.
You could say the same thing about old Windows applications
No, you misunderstand. The iMac would be running OSX, not OS9. It's Intel chips that are not compatible, not OSX.
If all you want is an email machine, a web browser, and/or a text editor. Why not just stick Linux on there with a custom GUI to make it look like windows? Most of the employees probably wouldn't know the difference, and you could run it effectively on nearly any old box you have kicking around.
No, I do understand. I've been using Macs my whole life. Apple moved from 68k to PPC without *nearly* the application breakage they've had moving from PPC to x86. The difference isn't the CPUs involved, the difference is that Apple simply does not care. Not even as much as they did a decade ago when they moved from 68k to PPC.
68k chips are a lot more different from PPC chips than PPC chips are from Intel chips. What technical reason is there that the Classic environment can't run in an PPC emulation layer? None. (Other than the fact that the Classic environment barely ever ran in the first place; it was a terrible hack that any other software vendor would have been too embarrassed to release.)
Of course you got modded up with your "correction" by pro-Apple moderators.
Comment of the year
I'm sure he understands just fine. It's the machine that's old. The point was perfectly valid.
BTW, it's not Intel chips that are the problem. Intel runs PPC apps through Rosetta just fine. It was Apple's decision to not support those apps on Intel that's the issue.
Incorrect. The Asus EEE 701 (with the infamous vid chip that caused the Vista Ready / Capable debacle) with 512MB RAM can run compiz with all glitz turned on (tested with Ubuntu Hardy) It has a downclocked Celery-M for a CPU.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Actually, most large hardware vendors will, on request, ship out a sample machine to the IT Dept at the target company. They ask the IT Dept to install the default image they want. The IT Dept would obviously wipe the drive, reinstall with a fresh copy of their own Volume License copy of Windows (XP/Vista/7) with all relevant initial software, testing, etc. I'm sure if you were a large enough company and wanted 20 different initial configurations, the vendor would accommodate you. Another option would be to just install the Ghost system partition, and send to vendor... your machines would come with Ghost then, and you could deploy whatever image you wanted to them.
Then, after the sample machine is imaged and qualified for production usage, ship it back... then the hardware vendor clones that to all subsequent systems that are sent out. Personally, I've dealt with HP and Dell and they both have done that for large scale rollouts (you don't want to sit and clone 500 desktops and 400 laptops, its much easier to have the factory clone your image onto them.)
There's also a signed contract agreement that the vendor does not touch or alter your image in any fashion or include any additional partitions or software on the computers.
Use SMS from there to deploy applications to the desktop, and there you have your custom machine.
I personally as an admin would NEVER allow a machine containing a factory default image onto my production network. Regardless of the miscellaneous CRAP applications that are bundled, you never know if the person who created the image had any malicious intentions... and would you willingly let that propagate across 100, 1000, or 10,000 computers in your network? Is there some trojan that you just deployed? We've heard too many stories here about just that exact thing happening to systems sold at Walmart, Best Buy, Circuit City, et al. I'd rather wipe and reload, than let a factory default image that I haven't seen or reviewed ahead of time be deployed in a production network.
And BTW, who in his right mind loads a major OS, then an upgrade, and another upgrade, and expects it to work 100 percent? Will the same machine work under a clean install of the final OS?
Editing typographically complex languages was either impossible, or not WYSIWYG.
You make excellent points, but the above makes me thing back to how wonderfully simple and intuitive entering foreign characters was in Wordperfect for DOS.
"e" with a grave accent (and it may not have been the alt key) alt-e-/
An "a" with two dots over it: alt-a-:
A "c" with cedilla: alt-c-,
etc
I really wish openoffice could do that.
I seem to recall that Microsoft was saying just recently that this Beta would be the only Beta and then (possibly) one release candidate, and then release, because this one was so rock solid. If they hold true to that, then comments about the stability and upgradability of the beta are in fact pretty relevant. If they've backed off of that position and I missed it, I apologize in advance.
Most of what you mentioned is optional in most systems or is even disabled by default. The remainder are pieces of functionality that only run when you take an initiating action, so yeah, it shouldn't slow down just having a text box showing.
Besides, most code is as you mention library code that loads once. Unless you want to try convincing us that copy & paste really needs 2GB of memory. I mean shit, come on man, we all know nobody optimizes their damned code anymore. Windows is a living example. That's why stuff gets slower as our computers get faster. Lazy coding. Or as companies probably call it, "economic coding".
"UAC basically changed Windows so that you weren't expected to run as an administrator by default"
Not really. Users still effectively run as Administrator, it's just that now UAC pops up with (on average) 17 "are you sure you want to do that?" messages every time the user clicks on something.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Then there's the fourth group: those who think MS should create an all-new Windows without the legacy crap with an emulator inside for backwards compatibility.
There's no need for an emulator...you can use an actual VM. Having just installed VMware Workstation 6.5, I think that its "Unity mode" (also available in VMware Fusion) that is the way to do it.
Since you can even run Linux as a guest on Windows and use Unity to show the Linux desktop windows seamlessly as part of your Windows desktop, I think that pretty much anything would be possible if you built this sort of functionality into the base OS.
Heck, Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X happened in what, 2001? OK that was a major breaker for software and hardware alike, but we haven't had to suffer it in 8 years and there's no threat looming in the future.
And on that note, although the MacOS to OS X transition completely wrecked ABI compatibility, the engineers still saw fit to provide a MacOS compat layer to support legacy applications on PowerPC Macs all the way up until 10.5 was released in 2007 - 6 years after the initial release of OS X.
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