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."

Comments

Try Windows 7?

[squiggly12]

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!

Re:Try Windows 7?

[PIBM]

What's stopping you from trying the beta ? Put up a new harddrive / empty a small partition, turn on your AHCI and install windows 7!

Time to put those 8gb of ram to some use besides in linux :)

Re:Try Windows 7?

[tsa]

Once XP is completely dead, then I guess I'm done with Windows entirely.
 
The fact that you still run XP shows you need Windows. I bet you will be running Win7 in the future.

Re:Try Windows 7?

[infinityxi]

Just something to point out, necessary applications aside, it is fully possible to move to Linux with a minimalistic desktop. On an Ubuntu system (the flagship desktop distribution), one can either install XFCE or just grab Xubuntu and run with that.

With that said, I don't see it entirely as a bad thing that Windows, Max OSX, and modern linux distributions bundle eye candy into their newer offerings. Something that is easier on the eyes, or gives the user a bit of shiny will create an overall positive experience. I mean we all could have gotten along very well with our current GUI looking like Windows 3.1 in term of style but part of the user experience is how sleek and nice an interface is. It's why some people buy Macs, others install Compiz, and many XP users will go to Windows 7 even if all their previous applications work perfectly well in XP.

Re:Try Windows 7?

[FreonTrip]

I'm not so certain of the validity of that statement any longer. A very large number of non-display x64 drivers certified for Vista and Windows 7 now happily run on XP x64 too, and video card drivers for the platform aren't a problem unless you're using something either very old or esoteric at this juncture. I say this as someone who decided to use all four gigs of his RAM back in February and hasn't run into a single deal-breaking issue with his install since then. :)

Re:Try Windows 7?

[lukas84]

You're wrong. The Custom option can preserve your hard disks content, and you can transfer all your user settings using USMT (Corporate) or Windows Easy Transfer (Home User).

Re:Try Windows 7?

[SanityInAnarchy]

It is important to add the 3d effects to the UI, no matter what anybody says.

I say, sorry, no, it's not.

Some of the 2D stuff that you get from these hardware-accelerated compositing window managers, like drop shadows and zooming, is actually useful. Most of the 3D stuff is complete eye candy fluff.

Not that I'm complaining -- I do think it's a step in the right direction, though I wonder if it's the right approach. (If I put SVG stuff on my KDE4 desktop -- even as a wallpaper -- and zoom in, what happens?) But at the same time, you shouldn't need a 3D desktop to use a word processor.

But it's funny how my wife's old Macbook with the ancient GMA 950 chip runs OS-X liquid smooth.

Try Compiz on just about any card. It's the main reason I'm not down on this stuff in general -- because it can be done right. But again, requiring it, or overplaying its importance, is a mistake. At the end of the day, the GUI, the mouse, the web browser and web apps, are all innovations that burn more CPU than they ought to, but pay off immensely. 3D effects in a 2D UI, so far, give you about two minutes of "Ooh, Shiny", and then it's back to work, with very little difference.

Re:Try Windows 7?

[mgblst]

All the studies I have seen show W7 as being the same speed, or slightly faster than Vista, on the same hardware, even for gaming. There is no speed increase with W7, more likely you are using a newer computer.

I won't be moving to W7, I have no reason to waste time learning a new OS. Microsoft enjoy moving everything around, for no reason, like changing the control panel. Such a huge pain in the ass trying to do the simplest of stuff, because Microsoft love tinkering with stuff.

You don't get this on Mac OS.

Re:Try Windows 7?

[mjwx]

Most noticeably, it has a user interface which doesn't look like it was designed in the mid 1990s.

The UI is a huge leap backwards.

It looks and 'feels' a hell of a lot better,

Looks and 'feels' aren't going to increase productivity. The complete lack of text on the task bar means I have to learn what each icon represents and then have to mouse over it or open the item to figure out what it actually is. In XP or Vista I can just look at the task bar and figure out which server's I've RDP's and SSH'd into, what page my browser is on, any IM's demanding my attention and who they are from. I'm going to lose a crap load of productivity from this alone and probably some hair as well. There are good reasons we favour text based language over a pictogram or hieroglyphic language, complex text is far easier to read.

That stupid "network and sharing centre" is still there, still trying to tell me that it knows what to do with my network. Why do I have to assign a "location" popup to every different DHCP address I get, the OS should handle this invisibly.

Maybe this doesn't matter to you, but it does to me and I would suggest to most computer users.

Customisability is a two edged sword, with customisability comes more chances for something critical to fail. I'm not saying that extenisve customisability is a bad thing but most users will only change their screensaver and background. Some will pick a different pre-selected colour "theme" but most will leave it as default. Most users do not care about customisability beyond major superficial points like the background.

Games seem to work just as well as they do in XP

Game performance is nowhere near the level of XP and the old games which didn't work in Vista still don't work in 7. I'm not completely cynical however, I know 7 is still immature and many of the drivers will have issues. It will take time for the drivers (esp graphics drivers) to mature.

It starts up and shuts down a lot more quickly than XP.

The RC does not start nearly as quickly as a fresh install of XP. As a gamer I reinstall XP every 3-6 months. Vista slowed down at the same rate as XP if not faster and I expect 7 to be the same.

Windows 7 is what Vista should have been released as. It's nowhere near as good as XP and tends to nanny the users a bit too much. It is better then vista which managed to refine annoying pop-ups and disruptions to a weaponised level but basic OS functions in Windows 7 are still several order of magnitudes more disruptive then in XP. Many OS tasks which should be invisible to the user are quite obvious and very annoying. I think MS spent too much time on the "look and feel" and not enough time on getting the codebase to run quickly and reducing Vista's extreme level of annoyance to the user.

Re:Try Windows 7?

[smchris]

Clinging to the least necessary Windows as an annoying middleware to Adobe web tools running in a qemu VM after 8 years with a linux desktop. When I say least, I mean XP stripped down to barest classic view, barest servers and optimized for acceptable performance. If Adobe came out with linux versions of everything, a whole class of tech people wouldn't need Windows.

Re:Try Windows 7?

[fortyonejb]

Come on please. Learn a new OS? Win7 takes no time to "learn", it's flat out easy to use, and anything that takes a minute to adjust to will save you hours down the road. Vista was crap, just terrible. I'd like to see these "studies" you mention, because for example: http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/01/03/windows-7-beta-1-vs-windows-vista-vs-windows-xp seems to disagree with your posturing. But, you do end it by flying the colors of your flag, yes, you are a mac fan, you are blind to all the changes since OS9. Apple tinkers more than anyone, sorry but your strawman is burning.

The real test is not users

[quarterbuck]

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.

Re:The real test is not users

[Opportunist]

Nope. Sorry, but nope. SysAdmins are the ones who have to suffer from changes, they're not the ones that make or even decide them. There are 3 deciding factors when it comes to a system switch:

1) Requirements of a top important application
2) Golf partners of decision makers
3) Investment cycles

Only the first reason is one that is based on technical issues, and even in those the average Admin (and sometimes even CTO) has little if any say in. Essentially, if MS wants to "force" enterprise customers to update, they need to nudge the makers of important enterprise applications (Autodesk, SAP...) to require newer systems.

I'm committed to Windows 7.

[olsmeister]

Why? Because XP came pre-installed on my last computer, and Windows 7 will come pre-installed on my next one.

Windows Vista is a good product

[onionman]

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.

Re:Windows Vista is a good product

[Drakino]

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.

Nope. And thats part of the problem. Vista started life as the Server 2003 SP1 code after the restart on Longhorn. UAC and such was just bolted on, .Net was kicked to the curb inside the OS, and the OS was rushed out the door from code restart to ship in 18 months. This quick cycle left driver vendors hanging, leading to compatibility issues day one. It also lead to some horrendous bugs, like Direct X apps using up twice as much memory as they should and so on.

A proper new secure OS from Microsoft would have to pull the same trick Apple did. Throw the old OS in a box, allow it to run in the new OS, and kick all old APIs to the curb. A good start would be the Singularity OS Microsoft has in it's research labs.

Do the users/sysadmins want to change?

[tecker]

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.

Re:DRM?

[marklar1]

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...

Re:Resigned to it

[Brian Gordon]

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.

I'm (sorta) one of them

[CajunArson]

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!

Re:I'm (sorta) one of them

[Cabriel]

I would disagree with that. A guy I work with is a Linux Fan. He's technically advanced. He's using Ubuntu. He can't figure out how to give me read access to a given folder on his computer. With Windows, i can do it with my eyes closed.

Yeah yeah. I hear what you're saying. Unfair comparison. Well, his parents can use XP and Vista just fine. They can use MacOS more or less easily, but they keep using him for tech support for it. He convinced them to use Ubuntu. He gets tech support calls every day from them. Which is supposed to be easier, again?

Re:Most of us XP users don't have a choice

[compro01]

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.

Re:DRM?

[cyn1c77]

, so freakin' load it up and see for yourself...what do you have to loose [sic]...?

Time,

and "time is money, friend!"

Re:Windows 7

[D Ninja]

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.)

Same shit, different decade

[Peter Cooper]

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.

Re:DRM?

[PitaBred]

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.

Anyone with Windows 7 experience confirm these?

[JustNiz]

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.

Same Old same old

[hyades1]

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).

Re:DRM?

[TrancePhreak]

I own the media, but I can't rip it to my hard drive

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?