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XP Users Are Willing To Give Windows 7 a Chance
Harry writes "PC World and Technologizer conducted a survey of 5,000 people who use Windows XP as their primary operating system. Many have no plans to leave it, and 80% will be unhappy when Microsoft completely discontinues it. And attitudes towards Vista remain extremely negative. But a majority of those who know something about Windows 7 have a positive reaction. More important, 70 percent of respondents who have used Windows 7 say they like it, which is a sign that Windows 7 stands a chance of being what Vista never was: an upgrade good enough to convince most XP users to switch."
I would, but with some of the problems I had with Vistax64 (could have been hardware issues), I might wait until SP1 at least. Hell, it took me that long to migrate from Windows 2000. I waited until frakking SP1 was out!
The real test of Windows 7 won't be users, it would be enterprise customers. There are still a lot of large Windows setups which have not upgraded from XP (Investment Banks and their "excel sheet departments" for ex.). The decision to switch would in that case be taken by Sysadmins and the like.
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
Why? Because XP came pre-installed on my last computer, and Windows 7 will come pre-installed on my next one.
I have Macs on my desktops, and I run Linux for my number crunching machines. So, I'm no Microsoft fanboy. However, it seems to me that Microsoft actually tried to do the right thing with Vista... namely they built a reasonably secure operating system from the ground up and decided to actually enforce the programming paradigms. The problem isn't with Vista, it's with the antiquated applications that still need tons of shims to work. For example, I recently installed Quicken on my father in law's XP machine and discovered that it wouldn't work unless running as an admin account, which is simply absurd! So, I worry that Windows 7 is just a light weight version of Vista with most of the security rolled back so that insecure applications will be able to continue running and users won't complain about their favorite applications breaking.
The thing with the businesses is CHANGE. See they have this software they know works with XP, Sysadmins who know XP front and back, users who are used to XP, zero in the buy-new-machines fund, and are looking to save money anywhere they can. To justify buying a new version of Windows might be hard since, despite its age, XP works.
Our university department is cash strapped right now and despite heavy discounts we will NOT be moving to 7 unless it comes installed on a computer. We might if we are lucky get it in the 2011 FY budget. Unlikely though. Our users are so used to the look and feel that they likely would balk at the 7 upgraded look, and ask us to put back in the "classic" look. Yes the Windows 2000 look. Not that new XP Luna stuff. 2000. Thats why we are not switching to 7 anytime soon. The users could care less and our administrators wont give us the money.
Plus, were a little lazy and dont want to reinstall all of those comptuers.
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
The RC Release Candidate is downloadable for another 2 days (until the 20th, I believe)...so just try it.
The DRM seems like it always has...if you own the media, or it is DRM free, then you shouldn't have a problem. The amount of annoying dialogs for permissions is wayyy less than Vista. It is smooth, fast, better laid, and I've not had a single crash or let down over the last few weeks of trying it out. The layout is much cleaner, OS X users will immediately "get" the dock (whether you like it or not is another issue)...
My main curiousity was the Media Center (got a deal on a PC from a friend that is dedicated to that purpose, leaving me to do my "work" on an old PowerMac) and it is amazingly good vs. Vista's complete F%^%*!? dissapointment.
I was adamant that MS owed Vista MC users some love, and felt shafted to need an OS to finally get a WMC that works, but this is soooo much better all the way around...and @ the pre-ordered $49 goes a long, long way to fixing the hurt.
The RC will work well into 2010, so freakin' load it up and see for yourself...what do you have to loose...?
For the record, my main machines have been macs since 84, occasional Win and Nix experiences. I'm overdue for a new desktop, hate Apple's choice of iMac with fixed graphics and screen, or a $2000 Pro Mac sucks... This could really be the jump ship point for me to be a reverse switcher...
Vista got bad press and users think they're being smart by eschewing the upgrade. "Vista, I heard bad things. XP is fine." But this is the same crowd that bought an ipod because all their friends had one. They would upgrade just for the newest thing, if it weren't suddenly hip and edgy and retro to claim to be an XP purist. So when they hear Windows 7, they automatically kick into MUST UPGRADE mode and, lacking any bad press, don't have any reason to adopt the negative position.
If Vista was so awful, Windows 7 isn't all that different. Vista was fine (when heavily reconfigured); Microsoft just needs to shed the bad reputation of the Vista name to get the dumb users back.
Remember the Mohave ads? Microsoft showed people a "new" OS and supposedly they liked it (although they could only really see it under very controlled conditions that would not show the faults, like driver incompatability). And then it was revealed that the OS was really Vista, which no one liked.
Now jump forward to the present. MS finally has a service pack that will fix many of the problems in Vista (although not all, and it still has very Vista characteristic performance benchmarks). Someone at M$ wants to release the service pack, but someone higher up who understands the M$ way of doing things better says "If we give people this service pack, even though it fixes many things, it will still have the stink of the Vista name on it. Lets do this: change the GUI around just enough that we can claim it's a new OS. Then rather than give people a new service pack for Vista, we can charge them for a whole new Operating System. Call it something other than Mohave and no one will get wise."
An so, with much hype, they release Windows 7. Everyone who bought Vista and was entitled to a workable OS gets screwed. M$ charges anyone who wants their Vista fixed for a supposedly different OS, even though Vista was so broken that even M$ executives called it a disaster. Profit.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I've been a 99% Linux user since 2000, including 3 years of law school where I really only used Windows during exams because of Exam4 requirements. However, I'm starting a job at a (small) law firm and my laptop has Win 7 all loaded up and running. My prognosis so far: I can live with 7, especially because it runs Firefox and Cygwin runs Bash and basic UNIX utilities OK as well. I can even use VIM.
Is it particularly fast? No, but it is not insanely slow. My laptop is recent but not super-high end, 2.2Ghz Core2 with 4GB of RAM is the good part, the Intel graphics are the bad part. Frankly, the Aero effects on Windows 7 work just as well as the compositing effects from KDE 4.3, meaning that they do work, but not blazingly fast like on my desktop with the Nvidia card. As for memory usage... despite claims to the contrary, Linux using a modern, fully featured desktop uses a little bit less RAM, but not significantly less. I'm not even close to filling up my 4GB even with office, firefox, and miscellaneous junk running, so no biggies there.
I'm not a fan of Windows, I think that Windows 7 is somewhat boring for a "huge" release, but it does get the job done. My new job is concerned with me being able to write office documents and access Exchange + a small windows network, which Win7 makes stupidly simple. Do I miss virtual desktops? Sure. Am I annoyed that Windows still doesn't have very good window management and that I can't get rid of the annoying borders on my windows that the Bespin KDE theme lets me annihilate? You bet. At the same time, Windows does make certain configuration tasks easier (especially graphics & wireless even though I can and do use graphical utilities under Linux).
I'm not saying that I couldn't do this just as well in Linux, but I am saying that I don't have the time to get my system tweaked to the rest of the office... at least immediately. This is a small law firm with technically proficient lawyers, and being the most junior associate I won't be shocked if I get some IT related tasks from time to time, but my day job is to be able to use nice boring office software, which Windows 7 allows for in a reasonably secure way.
As for the XP part of this... I had an old XP license that I did purchase fair & square (for $10 from my University back in the day). It could have gotten the job done for a while, but Win7 really does have better security and like it or not it is the path forward. One major feature that Win7 has over XP is the find option in the start menu. Since MS keeps screwing with the Control Panel and everything else, I almost never bother to hunt through menus. Instead I just type in what I want to do in the search bar and it does a very good job of finding what I want. In fact, it's likely faster that me clicking menus even if I did know where stuff was. I'm not sure if XP even had this feature but Win7 makes it very easy to use by default and I've saved quite a bit of time with it... so there ya go, one actual reason to upgrade!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
since Microsoft will soon stop XP support and updates, and refuse to patch any more security exploits.
"Soon" is not until 2014.
Most Windows XP installs don't make use of dual core or higher systems as one has to by the non uniprocessor version of XP to use more than one core or processor.
Cores and processors are different things in Microsoft's view. Cores are processors cores, while processors are the physical CPU packages. XP will use dual and quad core processors fine (7 arguably does a better job of distributing load across the processors, but that's beside the point), just you can't use a uniprocessor version of it on a machine with 2+ CPU sockets.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
It is. A lot of old exploits don't work anymore, just as every time. And just like every time before, we'll get new exploits.
Generally though we'll see a lot more social engineering and "you have to install this or something horrible happens", as well as a shift more towards third party applications, as we've seen already. The security hole in MS systems these days isn't Windows anymore. It's mostly plugins for Browsers, at least for now. The new Windows is Flash and PDF reader. At least 'til Adobe gets its act together.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
, so freakin' load it up and see for yourself...what do you have to loose [sic]...?
Time,
and "time is money, friend!"
I may get modded troll for this, but open source != quality code. In theory, it is more likely that that is the case, but I have seen some open source code that made me die a little on the inside. Microsoft's developers are generally smart people who know their job. Many of the issues that ships with the operating system results from very poor (and too much, IMO) management. (For the record, I am not a Microsoft employee...I just like following various companies, of which Microsoft is one.)
Why not? It's been available since the RC. You do need hardware virtualization support, but that's easy to check (I dislike GRC because of his irrational fearmongering of UPnP, but this tool is the quickest way to check if you have virtualization available on your CPU). It's based on the mature VirtualPC product and running full XP, so if an app worked in XP it should work fine in virtualization.
First, read about why Windows 7 is 6.1. Cliff notes: app compatibility, because too many apps are stupid and don't handle major version bumps properly (witness all of the apps from Windows XP that wouldn't install on Vista simply because it was 5.1 to 6.0 and the installer assumed major version would always be 5 and so just checked minor version, resulting in 0 less than 1 == not supported). Win7 is certainly an enhancement on top of Vista, but then Vista was an enhancement on top of XP (really on top of the Server 2003 codebase, but that came from XP), and XP was an advancement on top of 2000, and so on. Some things haven't changed, like the new WDDM driver model that Vista introduced (though Win7 did bump to WDDM 1.1, which allows for easier/better drivers, especially in the realm of gpus). Other things have changed dramatically, though you wont really notice such as the DWM now being much more efficient, especially if coupled with a WDDM 1.1 driver (nVidia, ATI, and Intel already have such drivers available). In Vista, DWM memory usage would grow linearly with the number of windows open. In Windows 7 with a WDDM 1.1 driver, memory usage is now constant regardless of the number of windows (and with a 1.0 driver, it's still ~50% more efficient than Vista). Another example, Win7 is much nicer to SSD storage. But you should look at the list of new features yourself.
1GB is fine. I've used Win7 on netbooks with that little RAM and they were just as snappy (if not snappier) than when running XP. Of course I also like to upgrade netbooks to 2GB, and when you can do so for $20 why wouldn't you? You don't need a new video card, especially if you already have a DX9-capable card (DX9+ required for Aero, will be snappier with a 10.1 card but Aero will still work well). Win7 fits quite well into 16GB on netbooks with plenty of room to spare for your own content, and you can even hack it (though it's not recommended or supported) to get down into 8GB. Win7/Vista definitely have more startup services, but that's also a bit of a red herring as there are new things like the Aero Destop Window Manager and the new Audio server that show up as services now.
XP Pro supported 2 processors, so for most people that would be fine (assuming most people have single or dual-core CPUs, not quad-core). What's more important than that is 64-bit really shines in Win7 (it worked well in Vista as well, but it's even better in 7; for XP
We get the same story every time. People don't want to upgrade from [2 versions ago] to [next version] and [last version] sucked.. but it always happens.
A lot of people wanted to stick with 98, thought Me sucked, and didn't want to upgrade to XP until they absolutely needed to. Same shit, different decade.
Except that Windows 7 is really version 6.1
If you start a DOS prompt under windows 7 you are presented with the following
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7100]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
And just to prove it the ver command says it too
C:\>ver
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7100]
Correct. The commercial software industry has always treated version numbers as a marketing element.
It doesn't need to make sense, it just needs to look good on the box.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I own the media, but I can't rip it to my hard drive, so I'm forced to bring optical discs with me if I want to watch videos on my laptop. Windows 7 fails at multimedia. I can't imagine the media center features will let you actually do what you want with your media, which relegates Windows 7 to a game loader on my box.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I haven't tried windows 7 yet. Before I even consider buying it (just to get away from Vista) can anyone tell me if Microsoft have continued the ongoing trend of assuming the users IQ and knowledge of computers is seriously diminishing with every new windows version?
Vista hides much useful information that XP shows, and has introduced even more pointless, time wasting and just annoying "are you sure" dialog boxes even with UAC turned off. Can anyone confirm if the following stupidities have been fixed in Windows 7 or is the trend still downward?:
XP's copy progrss dialog clearly states the filename and full path. Vista's doesn't even mention the name of the file you're copying any more and it only tells you a small part of the path of the source. It leaves you guessing which copy operation it relates to which is mindnumbingly clueless whenever you're doing multiple concurrent file copies.
If you move a folder containing files to a different place that already has a folder with the same name, XP merges them fairly quietly and properly. Even with UAC turned off, Vista introduces extra supremely annoying and unavoidable dialogs to confirm each file in turn (yeah I know theres a "do this for all" checkbox but its still annoying). This extra dialog is not disableable and is really a pointless intrusion if you have any knowledge of what a move operation should do. Worse, even after a successful move, the source folder is left behind. I'd love to meet the marketing moron who thought of these new semantics just so I can kick him in the nuts.
If there's even one file in a folder that Vista thinks might be a media file, Vista forces a media-style display on the contents of the whole folder. This results in all the useful info you need (such as file attributes and modified dates) getting hidden and replaced by a retarded popularity rating you will probably never use. It does this every time you create a new folder and you can't turn off this unwanted 'helpful' (snort) functionality.
Vista's DRM means it can't play MY media to ME. XP can play it without problem.
Vista still frequently forgets the last view settings you set ("sort by" choice etc) even if you set "remember each windows settings" and even do "apply to all folders". This is a problem Windows has had even way back to Windows 95 as I recall.
Feedback about how Windows 7 works in these respects would be much appreciated. I'm not giving Microsoft even more of my money just to find out its no better (or even worse) than Vista for the stuff I do most.
Man, I'd really hate to work in your department.
You make your employees run Linux for their desktop? Leave Linux where its meant to be: for running specialized software on a stripped down OS
Let me try to invite your employees to an outlook meeting or send them a powerpoint to edit or any of the 90 other applications needed on a daily basis that they need to run. Oh, and please don't tell me that they can use that joke of an office sweet, OpenOffice, lol.
I don't work for MS, and I am a developer for a commercial OSS company. No one, and I repeat no one, uses Linux at our office because it's more trouble than it's worth. Everyone wanted to kill the SA's when they made us switch from Exchange to Gmail's crap server (which is much better now that they added Outlook support). However, our software that we distribute on VM's and appliances is all running on a stripped down version of Linux, but it makes sense because we hide that from the users.
Vista is alright. I bet 99% of the negative publicity stems from the fact that the vendors ship it with 64-bit Vista installed, on which, no drivers / software worked right away. 32-bit Vista had no problems for me once I reformatted. If they would just fix the issues with the slow file copy, moving, and deleting it'd be much better!
Microsoft's developers are generally smart people who know their job.
This is something that's often puzzled me: the Microsoft developers I've come across seem to be smart and perfectly capable of producing a high-quality product. Yet the company perpetually churns out steaming donkey shit.
I'd recommend installing Linux Mint, and seeing if that works better for you.
It's literally pick your poison with OS's though. They ALL suck, just use the one you think sucks the least.
The fact remains that most businesses won't change from XP, which runs on primitive machines, to Win7 (alias VistaLite) which still, for the most part, requires hardware upgrades. You could run a serious office with AppleWorks on a 2E, for shitsakes, and that (mercifully) went to its reward 20 years ago. Primitive spread sheet, word processor and data base...and Mail Merge. For the most part, subsequent improvements have been more devoted to eye candy (sorry...I know I'm oversimplifying a bit). The computing power of an average desk-top computer today is more than sufficient to run just about every small company in the world. Why would a guy running a body shop with a P2 give a crap about upgrading? The machine does everything he wants, and rudimentary security will stop all the nasty things from reaching his rarely-online machine.
And if you honestly believe that The Boss gives a flying fuck about whether his staff have pretty transparent windows to look at while they're figuring out how much to charge for the bumper repair, you're smoking something I'd kill to get hold of.
The average home computer has been kicking the ass of the average work computer for at least 10 years, and that situation isn't going to change any time soon. Win7 may be better than Vista. It's still going to be irrelevant until they start giving it away along with a free multi-threading P4 (which these days is worth just about as much as a bag of chips).
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
People who keep asking this are ill informed. DRM exists in whatever it is protecting not in the OS (besides a decoder).
Bollocks. Microsoft have been trying to get DRM into hardware (e.g. encrypted framebuffers for graphics chips) and the low level of the operating system for years... the only reason we don't have it is because it's a retarded idea that would trash the market share of any hardware company who implemented it.
Windows has never gotten in your way of doing anything. If we can conclude something, it's that you have failed at multimedia.
Learn to google? Doom9.net?
-]Phreak Out[-
On XP I can play my Blu-Ray movies (legally purchased) in PowerDVD (legally purchased) on my LCD monitor connected via DVI (legally purchased).
On Vista and Win7, I can't. Instead, I get a message about "upgrading" to a display with HDCP.
Sure, I can buy a HACK like Slysoft's AnyDVD HD to work around it, but why the hell should I have to?!
To the people who blame the content instead of the OS: note here that ONLY the OS has changed. It worked in XP, it doesn't in Win7 or Vista.
Bottom line: It's still TEH EVILZ0RZZZZ, and anyone who says there's less DRM in Win7 or Vista is either ignorant, deluded or lying (astroturfing).
Maybe all these Vista's "famous" problems was about bad or incompatible hardware and/or drivers. I have Vista on our other laptop, which is mainly in my wife's use, and we've had zero problems with it. I used to have a desktop PC with Vista and it worked like charm also. My coworker on the other hand has had some major problems with Vista. His desktop had some old hardware on it when my desktop had the latest state-of-the-art stuff inside.
But what's ironic about MS wanting to compete on netbooks? I thought that's the idea of the whole free market economy. And I've always thought that one of the major points about open software is about choices. Would you like to reduce users choices to The One True OS For Everyone, Linux?
You don't know what you don't know.
Special upgrade package just for disgruntled Vista Users
Windows 7: Fool Me Twice Edition(tm)