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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."
That's probably the same as saying 66% of all Windows users are on older hardware which was already "good enough." They probably won't get Windows 7 until they buy a new computer. I have Win 7 x64 Pro in a VMWare image and it works relatively well in there, but I had to tweak the settings for the container, and if I run it with less than 2GB of memory allocated, it starts to get pissy. Maybe its different when running it on the physical machine, but I'm somewhat skeptical, and if I were running on an older PC, I'd probably skip the software upgrade and wait for a hardware upgrade.
Microsoft sets the price to high and the various version model isn't helping. Who wants to switch if XP is working for you? $119 for the Home Edition or $89 for the Anytime Upgrade to the Home Edition.
I still use xp.
Everything I've seen suggests that Win7 is a better OS - stability, security, etc.
However we have 6 computers in the house. Two are 3.0+ GHz dual+ CPUs with 4 gigs of RAM; those are the only two that I suspect would run it well. The other 4 range from 2.7 GHz 4 gig RAM (my older gaming rig, that probably could run it) down to a 1 GHz Athlon with 1 gig of RAM.
XP runs "well enough" for everything we want/need to do. I'm uninterested in climbing another learning curve so I can admin 2 different OS's in my house. I'm uninterested in buying new hardware just to all run Win7. I'm uninterested in buying 6 licenses of Win7.
So....no Win7 here, although I readily agree it would probably be a better system on the hardware that could run it. Sorry Microsoft.
-Styopa
When MS announced that dx10(and up) would not be upgraded in XP and would only be available in win7 (vista doesn't count), I felt cheated. Something that is basically a driver standard should be included in any xp maintenance release. What MS did was strictly a marketing ploy in my mind and an attempt to get money out of my pocket. Considering that this was when xp was very much the main operating system at the time and the announcement came out before there was any new OS, it just seemed to be a pretty shabby trick especially on gamers. So I'm resisting getting win7 until I absolutely have no choice because something I need to do requires win7. Until then I have a reasonable OS on this comp, linux on my other one and see no need to spend hundreds of dollars for basically what I see as $50 worth of upgrades that apply to me. The rest is just worthless junk that in some cases is more of an impediment than anything else.
MS has long been way behind when it comes to eyecandy... I ran enlightenment on my p100 in the late 90s and it looked prettier than windows ever has, but i soon found out that i actually preferred a simple, lightweight unintrusive window manager. All the fancy graphics just serve to increase confusion and reduce performance.
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There's absolutely no reason for me to upgrade that I see. Windows XP does what I need, and Windows 7 isn't some sort of groundbreaking technology. It hardly adds anything new to the table! Now, if you're just starting out and happen to get Windows 7 on a computer that you buy, that's fine. I'm not saying I hate Windows 7, I'm just saying that there's really no groundbreaking reasons for people to upgrade (and I've seen many people claim that there are). If I do have to upgrade because of compatibility reasons eventually (like for directx), I certainly won't reward Microsoft with my money and obtain Windows 7 through other means.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Hope some people start a project to reduce the technical skills needed to pull this off so that non-technical people can follow this route. The rate at which the hardware is improving, the next generation of iPad or its clones would be able to run a full image of an older XP installation on emulation!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"It's a shame that more people don't just build their own computers and save money, rather than buying a pre-built with pre-installed garbage (software and such, that is). As for Windows 7, there's simply no groundbreaking reason(s) for people to upgrade."
I'm not sure I'd agree with that. My experience has been that between the streamlining and the extra speed (on a dual core 64-bit Athlon with 6 GB of RAM, Win7 is faster than XP is), and the extra security features, Windows 7 is heads-and-shoulders above XP. It IS better.
However, at the same time, Windows XP is a good system that does what it needs to, and generally does it well. And, I can understand why somebody would keep using it rather than upgrade when they don't need to.
Aside from which, building your own system does require a decent amount of knowledge, and time. For a lot of people, buying a pre-built system is the better way to go. Uninstalling the garbage is easier than building the system from scratch.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
Seriously. I already figured that a lot of people still used XP and whats with the "Almost one year after" part. Was it a slow news day?
There are plenty of people still using Windows 98. The Slashdot crowd represents large numbers of people that use their systems for more than word processing and basic Internet functionality ("yeah, I run OSX in a VM under Linux".) All of us here enjoy learning new things, trying out new features and capabilities, and that's because, at the core, we're geeks. Heck, to us, the novelty of some new aspect of our favorite OS is fun.That's not true in the real world, where the bulk of users have systems that are already way faster than they will ever, ever need and to whom familiarity is more important than some arbitrary set of features. They finally figured out how to make their computer do those things that they want it to do, and simply do not care about anything else. Matter of fact, they consider being forced to upgrade as an entirely unreasonable proposition, and will fight it.
Okay, I'll make a car analogy. Those of us who learned to drive, learned it once. We don't have to re-learn it every time a new generation of automobiles comes out, and in fact we'd be torqued into pretzels if we were forced to do so. Yet, for a lot of people who look at computers as just another appliance like their car or their refrigerator, they only want to learn how to use it once. Asking ordinary people to repeat what was, to them, a difficult experience just because they bought a new appliance (e.g., a new personal computer) is going to cause trouble. In the case of Microsoft Windows, I cannot say that they're necessarily wrong in feeling that way, considering how much of Microsoft's business model revolves around changing things just to sell more copies.
I have friends that had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into Windows 2000 because "the icons were all different", and I can't face the thought of trying to get them to go to Window XP, much less Windows 7. Just not worth the effort, for them or me. It's easier to just keep scrounging old parts from my junkbox (which I haven't cleaned out in ten years for just this reason) than to try and convince them to "upgrade". Eventually that won't be possible and they're going to have to go out and buy a new system with whatever OS is the latest and greatest. Now, frankly I don't want to be around when that happens. It's going to be thermonuclear, and I don't want to find myself an incised shadow on the wall.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I don't think it's gonna matter I hate windows 7 I tried using it for 1 week and it really has a horrible user interface I recently downgraded a brand new core i7 to xp Icons are ugly The startmenu in just one level is stupid The flashy effects make the ui worse I can't figure out shit when trying to change network settings I could go on with these forever Seriously u can pry xp out of my cold dead hands. The only way I will upgrade is if they improve the usability.
Not that I would expect any less from this crowd (myself and virtually every one I know included), it seems that every family, sometimes it rolls over to aunts/uncles, grandparents, cousins, too, has an computer person in their family who has almost complete power over what computer they will be using because thy do not know anything about it. Perhaps instead of marketing to the individual with the 'i created windows' shit, they should have aimed towards the family IT guys with something that makes their lives easier. Myself and my cousin told our families that we would not support them if they used windows, so now all of our family members use macs and the only issues I have are helping them figure out how to use MS office. Like previous commenters have said that they did not want to support multiple operating systems, I certain was not going to learn the quirks of 7 just for my family.
CSIDL_COMMON_APPDATA
And on my English copy of Windows XP Home Edition, this resolves to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data. So why does Windows mark this folder hidden so that the end user can't easily back up the files inside to removable media or send them to other people over the Internet?
And then you have to decide:
1. Spend no money and do without sound on the laptop.
2. Spend $x for an external sound card. You will need to carry it with your laptop if you want sound.
3. Spend $y (y >> x) for a new laptop.
And that depends entirely on what you value more. Personally, I'd rather carry the external sound card if I want sound (which is not always) and save $(y-x). After all, instead of buying a new (and expensive) laptop battery (current one lasts ~30minutes) I either look for an outlet or if I want to work where there is no electricity, I take a 12V 7Ah sealed lead-acid battery (or two of them, depending on how long I plan to use the laptop) and a 12V->19V converter.
Just a question, what exactly makes you work faster with win7 than xp? Just wanna know, not start a war.
That, that really grinds my gears!
Yes they are. Only once you figure out how to actually get to that page.
The easiest way is to left click the network icon in the lower right cornder and select "Open Network and sharing center" then click the "Local Area Connection" link and the dialog pops up. That's 3 clicks, which is actually shorter than XP. XP requires at least 4 (right click Network dialog click properties, right click interface, choose properties)
Everyone likes to think that 7 buries stuff deeper, but in reality, almost everything is 2 or 3 clicks away from the desktop.
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