Windows 7 Pre-Orders Top Vista's In Just 8 Hours

Barence writes "In order to ensure Windows 7 got off to a better start than Vista in the UK, Microsoft slashed the cost of Home and Home Professional by a third on promotional copies which were sold on a 'first come, first served basis while stocks last.' The promotion ensured Windows 7 shot to the top of Amazon's charts when it was released yesterday, with the online retailer claiming that 'sales in the first eight hours outstripped those of Windows Vista's entire 17-week pre-order period.' The price of pre-ordering Windows 7 has now shot up to £80, after the £50 copies sold out within a day."

Comments

Re:Can't say I'm surprised....

[HerculesMO]

Because Slashdot has an inherent Microsoft bias, and since I work with *nix systems on a relative level that I do with Windows systems, I find much of the FUD here to be ridiculous and that of uneducated users of the Windows platform.

Read some other comments of mine, I've talked about the Click n Run technology Linux was supposed to debut that I thought was great, and other things as well -- just in recent history I suppose they've been more MS centric but then again, Windows 7 finally got me excited about Microsoft OSes again. Server 2008 did also.

Re:Great startegy

[CAIMLAS]

A lot of the hype isn't hype; due partially to how horribly bad Windows Vista is and partially due to the 'free RC' MS has provided, a lot of people (both geeks and non-geeks) have installed Windows 7.

Back when XP was in pre-release I had a friend who had a copy. This must've been around 2001 or so; I'm not really sure of the specifics. I saw it running on his machine; he liked it, he said. To me, it didn't look all that much different than 2k, and it was noteably slower on his machine. I (and many other geeks) said "pass" until around the first service pack (and when hardware was able to make up for the bloat in the software).

W7 is entirely different. It's been a solid product since the pre-7000 releases (partially due to MS taking a lot of the visual glitches out of startup/the interface, giving a heightened appearance of 'smoothness'). Many have found that, aside from a handful of applications not working, the OS is drastically, drastically better than Vista. On my ancient Thinkpad X30 (1.2GHz P3M, 512M, 20G disk), it performs quite well. Aside from a fairly lengthy boot, it's more responsive and feels less glitchy than XP ever did on the machine. It's also significantly faster/responsive than *gasp* Ubuntu 9.04 or 8.10 on the same hardware. (I should note that I had Linux installed on the laptop exclusively since I got it, starting with Mandrake 10, IIRC.)

I, as well as several other Linux geeks I know, have Windows 7 machines set up as their "gaming machine". I've got a Windows-fanatic friend who's been using W7 exclusively since 7000 or so. Can you imagine that happening with Vista, XP, or 2K? No, those products were, relatively, shit.

So yes, there are a lot of people using W7 with satisfaction, even people who were like you: skeptical of the pre-release bullshit.