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66% of All Windows Users Still Use Windows XP
An anonymous reader writes "Almost one year after the introduction of Windows 7 it appears that the hype surrounding it has faded. The overall market share of Windows has turned into a slight decline again. Windows 7 is gaining share, but cannot keep pace with the loss of Windows XP and Vista. Especially Windows XP users seem to be happy with what they have and appear to be rather resistant to Microsoft's pitches that it is time to upgrade to Windows 7."
Our standard at work is XP, and Office 2007. Right now XP simply handles all our needs. There is nothing offered with w7 that really justfies upgrading.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7
if you're upgrading from XP, you also get these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista
Vista/7 have LOTS of new stuff under the hood. It's not just the eye candy.
And of those 66% of people running XP, what proportion do you think know what a PSU, CPU, or motherboard are? What proportion do you think will just go "shit, my computer broke"?
Hint, the former is likely 1%
Hard drive, maybe. That can be easily replaced. I haven't seen a full system failure (motherboard, power supply, etc.) in years.
Ever heard of laptops? Some hardware failure stats for you.
>>>There are few reasons to upgrade hardware
Precisely. I'm typing this on an old 2002 PC compatible. I'm sure the hard drive motors will eventually fail but for now it works just fine.
I wish I could say the same for my 2002 G4 Mac. Due to Apple's process of refusing to support anything older than 10.5, I was left in the cold. I eventually sold it on ebay for ~$30 because it wouldn't run anything newer than IE5 or Safari 2, both of which failed to render the web properly.
Oh look... here comes the -1 mod patrol.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
It is? I managed to save quite a bit of money (a few hundred) building my own computer rather than buying a pre-built one with nearly the same specs.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I expected the "saving energy" argument, and wasn't disappointed. The problem is that you have to keep the machine for quite a few years in order for the energy savings to outweigh the price of new hardware. But by forcing upgrades this way, you don't keep the machines for that many years, so you don't realise the savings in the long run.
And for the environment, it's loss too, because of the energy costs of making all the components for the new machine, as well as depletion of resources.
And apart from the PIII-S, these machines don't run 24/7 either, but perhaps an hour a week on average.
And the PIII-S has a 28.7W TPD, which is better than anything made today except for laptop CPUs, especially when you take the less power hungry motherboard and RAM into consideration. In fact, the low power usage is one of the reasons why it runs 24/7 as a server, while the P4 is a cold standby.
The vast majority of those features can be summed up in one sentence from the user POV: "They moved stuff around".
To be fair, from a technical standpoint, yeah, they overhauled it pretty good. On the other hand, the typical user isn't going to care - all they know is that it has eye-candy, some nice widgets, and, well... they moved stuff around.
With Windows 95, 98, and 2000, and even XP, users saw substantial changes (and saw them to be useful). With Vista and 7, users aren't going to see a whole lot that has changed 'under-the-hood' in a way that's apparent and useful to them.
In fact, they're going to see some things that are wrong in their eyes - mostly having to do with application compatibility - users still want to use their old stuff. For instance, try and play Quake III on Windows 7... not going to happen very well (depending on hardware). Being told "Use XP Mode" isn't going to help - they'll likely say 'screw it' and just use the real thing... Windows XP.
Now IMHO, props to Microsoft for at least partially cutting the cord and all WRT legacy apps, but the user isn't going to see it that way.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
There is one "special folder" that is meant for user-independent storage of application data. You can get its name with feeding the value CSIDL_COMMON_APPDATA into the proper API call.
See http://www.mvps.org/access/api/api0054.htm for an introduction.
The actual path varies with Windows version and language. On my German Win XP Pro, for instance, it is
C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\All Users\Anwendungsdaten
Also note that every user can create files and directories in there, but per default they are only writable to the user who created them. So it may be necessary to change permissions during installation.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Lots of little things that add up.
Start-menu search, means I don't have to go hunting through the "All Programs" menu when it gets big, or remember in which little folder that little applet was, or hunt through the control panel. If I know what I want, I just type a few letters, and boom, there it is. Same with most recently used documents.
In Windows Explorer, there's a new "favorites" section on the left nav. I can add any folder I use regularly to that, and not only can I now instantly get to very buried folder hierarchies, I now have an always-available drop-target for dragging files to them.
Windows 7 also nags me less. I'm not constantly dismissing or being interrupted by "notifications" that I don't care about.
The new task bar, and in particular "jump lists" are amazing productivity enhancers (I was skeptical at first), and there are a ton of new hot-keys and short-cuts for doing just about everything you'd want to do, from moving windows around to launching apps to switching from laptop screen to projector.
The UI just seems snapper and smoother on the same hardware too. It "feels" more reponsive.
Even things like errors... when you try to copy a file but it's locked by an application, it now tells you which application is locking the file. When you're running tons of things, that can be a major time-saver right there. I'm a developer, and I used to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the heck was holding on to that file... now I don't spend ANY time doing that.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. It's just more refined and polished.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
To search only for contents and not names, you use the filter "Contents:" so you would say contents:xyz and it will not show filenames with XYZ in them.
Why would think this wasn't possible?
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Moral of the stories: Stay Reasonably Current
Sure, sure, that's the *practical* moral, but how about some *dogmatic* morals:
The Athlon is the only thing on that list that would even struggle, and even it would technically run Win7. (It meets the minimum specs, which are always a little overstated.) Seriously, Win7 runs just fine on netbooks with 1.6GHz single-core Atoms and 1GB of RAM. A 1GHz Athlon isn't going to be much slower than that. 2.7GHz and 4GB of RAM is vastly overkill to just run the OS and everyday apps, no "probably" about it; my work laptop/tablet is 1.2 GHz (Core2Duo ULV) with 4GB and runs Win7, Visual Studio, Outlook, several instances of Word, and a bunch of internal tools all at once just fine.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Everyone likes to think that 7 buries stuff deeper, but in reality, almost everything is 2 or 3 clicks away from the desktop.
Especially if you make yourself a GodMode folder.
Make a new folder
Name (or rename) it
GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
You can of course make shortcuts to this folder for use on Desktop, Start menu, etc..
Oh, it will also run from a thumb drive (a copy of the folder, not a shortcut) plugged into another Win7 machine
Most fun Windows control panel ever.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
I run Windows 7 on my my new Revo box 64-bit 2core, 4GB, Nvidia, 500GB Hard Drive. Runs so slow. I spent £300 on it because of lies like yours.
Alrighty. I run Windows 7 on my old Dell Inspiron 1520 with 64 bit dual core, 4GB (aftermarket), Nvidia and 120GB Hard Drive. Bought it in Feb 08 with XP on it. This was during the reign of Vista and this was the only laptop Dell still sold with XP on it.
Got hit by a virus (damn AVG Free did not protect me; even though I scanned the suspect file thoroughly before trying to use it. Switched to Avira, we'll see how that does ;D) and had to re-install. I had already tried Win7 during RC and decided it is marginally better than XP, just not better enough to switch unless you're rolling a new OS anyway.. and now I was. So I switched from 32 bit XP to 64 bit 7.
Now it seems to run every bit as fast as XP did, with Aero turned on. It eats more RAM (900MB used at startup instead of 350MB, overhead appears constant after days of uptime) and this is after applying most of Black Viper's recommended service tweaks to both OSen. I find win+tab is handy when you've got a ton of browser windows open (each with tabs; I generally run one window per distinct project) and want to quickly get to one which is visually distinct.
so tuppe, does my counter-example anecdote mean that you're the liar now? Or perhaps we should yeild the predictive power of all of our personal one-off experiences in favor of actual research?
ZDnet's benchmarks maintain that Windows 7 is faster than XP for standard use, although XP remains more capable for devices with limited memory and outdated graphics.
Maximum PC's benchmarks claim that Win7 simply feels faster than XP on the hardware they tested.
Tom's Hardware's netbook benchmarks show that Windows 7 does not beat XP on the netbook but that it is quite responsive, and would probably surpass XP with better driver support.
TechRadar's benchmark includes many plusses and minuses for Windows 7 with a net plus, but clearly states that it provides "better performance than XP can deliver on today's hardware."
I'm not picking up on any benchmarks that have the same trouble you've had, so unfortunately I have no way to confirm you did not just misconfigure your machine.
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.