Slashdot Mirror
Michael Dell Says Windows 7 Will Make You Love PCs
ruphus13 writes "In a recent talk at the Churchill Club, Michael Dell addressed several topics, including the fact that Windows 7 is poised to take advantage of the upgrade cycle. Dell has always been a strong MS OEM ally and it is now hoping to cash in again from the impending upgrades. From the post: 'Dell made plain several times that he sees the installed base of technology as very old, and sees a coming "refresh cycle" for which he has high hopes. "The latest generation of chips from Intel is strong, particularly Nehalem," he said, adding, "and Windows 7 is on its way." (The operating system arrives Oct. 22nd, although Microsoft's large-volume licensees are already getting it.) He pointed out that many business are running Windows XP, which is eight years old. "I've been using Windows 7 for a long time now," he said, "and if you get the latest processor technology and Office 2010 with it, you will love your PC again. It's a dramatic improvement."'"
It seems if you run a Vostro (like me) Windows 7 might not be your friend if you want your touchpad and video card to work.
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprohardware/thread/cf9bc301-e3c2-4c5b-b9cd-9eab8582f45f
Or maybe they will fix it in the next week, but I doubt it.
Revenue Q2 2008: $14,147m
Revenue Q2 2009: $10,623m
Profit YTD 2008: $1,400m
Profit YTD 2009: $762m
Yeah... If I was Michael Dell, I'd be working to sell the idea that Windows 7 is going to make you love a PC too. Especially if you bought a lot of other expensive shit.
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional $139.99
Cheapest Nehalem Processor: $199.99
Latest Office 20xx: $119.99
Total : $459.97
But you know, that (almost) nobody is buying this stuff at full boxed retail price. The OEM license for Dell will be around $50-70 for customers, the hardware is bought in big unit counts too, and gets appropriate discount, so the PC's will go somewhere between $600 - 1200 depending on some other factors like graphics, RAM and HDD models/capacities and branding.
Not many people MS Office boxed version. Most private people will pirate it (and Microsoft is actually more happy about it then if they would use alternatives like OOo). Many will also go legal and use OOo or get a copy from the company they are working for.
Businesses will go volume license, and the package of software / seat will also circle around $200 - $400.
That said, I'll still continue to use Ubuntu + OOo + other open source software. I also build my PC's myself, so I get the best fitting solution and opt out of the MS tax (and be it just because of the principle, though the financial aspect is also counting). Considering the current economic downturn (and the fallout that is following as we speak), more businesses are and will also go a more open source way, though not the majority and many only partially (i.e. Windows 7 + OOo).
One thing is true though, the Win 7 (re-branded Vista) will increase sales of PC's for a little time, especially since Christmas is approaching.
There are a few things that have improved, most of which were avalible in Vista too:
Much better use of multicore CPUs
GPU acceleration of the GUI
self healing system files(in some instances)
OS aware of SMART HD readings and able to prompt user
DLL seperation
vastly better RDP
vastly improved central managment and deployment features for businesses
Easy 64 bit usage with drivers
Faster installs
Better power managment and usage of hardware suspend
better usage of memory (cacheing for very noticible speed gains)
Media center!
transparent Bitlocker hard drive encryption (in pro and ultimate) with TPM
program execution isolation that redirects reg and file system calls to safe locations
epiclly better wireless support
support for propper GUI scaleing on high DPI LCDs
Integrated Touch support and Speech Recognition(not fantastic but alright)
Automatic driver retrival for most hardware right of Windows update without searching
Fast search and indexing
Document libraries for easy organisation
Faster boot times and UI responce on semi-decent hardware (compared to XP)
Better moniter support for HD TVs and multi moniters/GPUs (by default)
Child restricted accounts to limit games and allow usage limits for children.
Just to name a few, it has been a long time since XP and things have progressed.
On the cons side I still don't like the superbar much, you can change it to be simmilar to the Vista one quite easily though. They have also removed the email client probably due to the EUs meddeling but live mail is still avalible.
While I agree Windows 7 is a leap forward from XP, I think Intel are going to struggle to get people to see Nehalem as the same category for upgrades. The Nehalem processors (and the associated required DDR3 RAM) are significantly more expensive than the Core2Duo processors, without providing any noticeable benefit for the vast majority of users. Unless you are a gamer or into heavy video/photo editing, the current Core2Duo generation is more than sufficient to outperform your needs. Ironically Windows 7, by running better than Vista on lower system requirements, will actually hurt Nehalem sales, by breaking the "software bloat"-"hardware upgrade" cycle
Why buy Office 2008 when it's crippled and buggy on the Mac? Might as well spend $60 for iWork '09. For occasional use, it seems that Open Office 3 runs many of the macros, but any more usage than that and you'll start having problems and using your work.
As someone who's used the beta / RC of Win 7 64-bit since it came out, it has plenty of useful things.
The easisest to see, and one of the nicest changes, is the new taskbar. The quick launch toolbar has been merged with the taskbar (sort of like the dock in OS X). All open tabs go under the icon for the program running and if you mouse over the icon you see a preview of every open window (and in the case of IE, each open tab as well) which you can then click to select or close. It makes things cleaner and it makes it faster when searching for an open window. Also the "show desktop" is now a part of the taskbar (on the far right edge) so it's nice and clean.
Windows Update does an amazing job of finding the right drivers for your system and with one click you can download them all and after one reboot, you're good to go. Much nicer than downloading individual drivers and installing them when you do a clean install, especially for hard to find drivers like the video card on a laptop.
Probably the best part is that it's a 64-bit OS where basically everything 32-bit works 100%, so you don't have to worry about legacy software not running after switching to 64-bit for more RAM (especially important for gamers since you can buy a new video card with 2 GB of RAM on it).
It's also incredibly responsive - much faster than XP when it comes to opening programs.
Another feature that will become much more important as time goes on is that it does a great job of load balancing with multi-core processors, especially when it comes to quad-core processors.
I use Windows (for gaming), OS X, and Linux regularly. I promote Linux use all the time (which gets me lots of flack from my fellow IT guys at work who've never tried Linux) and am about to purchase a new Macbook Pro, but Win 7 is the first OS from Microsoft that I intend to pay money for.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Microsoft did not want to finish the work, apparently, and provide a way to convert automatically from Windows XP to Windows 7.
Um... You can transfer your profile, and programs can be reinstalled using the same MSI's.
If you're in a managed network (and business users should be), you throw a Windows 7 machine into an Active Directory OU, and all of your policies, including Software Installation ones, apply to the machine and it behaves just like the XP ones in the same Unit.
Business users don't "Upgrade" operating systems in the classical sense anyway. When it's time for an OS upgrade, the disk gets nuked and re-imaged. There's nothing at all about Windows 7 that changes the validity of that procedure.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Windows has had x86-64 versions for over four years now. Just because manufacturers are starting to catch up doesn't mean that Microsoft is behind the curve here (at least on the OS side).
Oh, and those signed drivers people keep complaining about? Microsoft is using this as a bludgeon to get manufacturers to write 64-bit drivers by refusing to sign drivers unless they have both versions.
P.S. Fun Fact: Windows NT 4.0 had an Alpha version.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Some of the amenities are nice - the Explorer changes (mostly done in Vista) are very helpful, but at the same time the Explorer interface now takes up much more room than it needs to. The only thing I actively like about 7 is the new taskbar -- but even that has its frustrations, primarily that it's not friendly for running applications that are configured based on command line options. An example is java -- while it recognizes java apps that you "pin" as JRE-based, it loses any additional information/parameters when you attempt to launch a jar file from the pinned menu. Another is putty, which lets you specify a parameter controlling startup profile, but this is not available to pinned instances.
All in all - it is definitely better than Vista. Whether it's better than the XP-based configuration that Dell is talking about... I think that's very much up for debate.
That was Vista's worst crime as far as I'm concerned. Listing system requirements when in reality what was needed was the "Certified for Windows Vista" sticker instead of the infamous "Vista Capable" sticker. But, you couldn't just tell people to look for the sticker, because they're just going to look for a sticker that says "Vista". And you really couldn't tell people to go by the system requirements for an upgrade either (I did and the system is a dog). Point blank, there is absolutely no reason to put Vista on "Vista Capable" hardware.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Apparently: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Mark-Russinovich-Inside-Windows-7/
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I know you're just trolling, but I'll bite.
"- Multimonitor support is terrible"
No it isn't. I hook my Macbook up to projectors periodically to give presentations, and it mirrors when I want to and extends the desktop when I want to. Keynote has this cool "presenter mode" where it shows the slides on the secondary display and things like time elapsed and a timer and the next and previous slides on the primary.
I don't run a flight simulator or Cowboys stadium out of my house, so I don't really have a need to hook up more than two displays at once. I did manage a workstation for a pro once who had three 23" ACDs (in the day this was a $6000 setup) and that was always plug-and-play as well even though it needed two graphics cards.
"- 64-bit? With drivers? You're kidding, right?"
I don't know what that means. I don't have to install drivers, except for things like printers. I've never had a problem with 64-bit mode in Snow Leopard; even though I have an older printer with some pretty ancient Panther-era drivers it prints just fine.
"- Games? Child restricted accounts? Nope."
I'm kind of boring, all I play is Warcraft and Civ 4. Restricted accounts have been around since System 7, and although they just refined all the user restrictions in Snow Leopard that kind of functionality has been around for ages.
"- Program Execution isolation"
If you mean NX, it's been transparently integrated since 10.4, and seriously improved in 10.5. If you mean some Windows feature that keeps your 16-bit crapware from blowing up the rest of the OS, Mac OS X doesn't really need that.
"- Transparent Bitlocker"
It's called FileVault, and Apple had it in 2003, years before Vista. Argue the merits of full-disk encryption all you like, I think it's stupid unless you work for a bank, hospital, or government, and then you'd better be using OpenBSD and fancy encryption hardware instead. For non-spook intrusion it's just as effective and much faster.
"- Central management and deployment for businesses"
Dude, Apple Remote Desktop, and it's much cheaper than anything nearly as powerful on Windows. Clearly you never worked in an Apple production environment.
Me? I managed large labs of Windows PCs and Macs in an academic research environment for three and a half years. I've seen the good, bad, and ugly on both platforms. I know what's realistic and what isn't on both sides. Most critically I know when idiot trolls like you are full of crap.
Did you not buy from their business store, because one of Dell's corporate support centers is located 3 hours from where I'm sitting (in Oregon). Their corporate support is top notch. If you bought cheap consumer PC's for a business, and didn't pay for better support, then you got what you had coming. And if your boss doesn't understand the value of paying for support, he's a moron and you should find someone more intelligent to work for.
I can't complain about their consumer support too much. The keyboard on my boss's personal laptop died and they sent someone from two hours away (closest certified Dell tech apparently) to come to our office and replace it.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.