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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.
This same story is trotted out months after every version of Windows ships. Hardly anyone ever upgrades a PC to the next major version of Windows. Instead, the upgrade happens automatically when people ditch their PC's and buy a new one.
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.
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
There are many reasons why people stick with XP.
One is that they have a perfectly good machine that's overkill for what they use it for, but that doesn't meet the requirements for Windows 7.
Another is that they have so many programs installed that it's a major task to upgrade. Especially these days when many programs are bought online and uses DRM -- you may not even be allowed to reinstall under a new OS without re-purchasing.
There's probably a few disillusioned Vista users who (IMO rightly) don't believe the street hype and won't rush into installing what could have been released as Vista SP2.
Then there are those who don't feel like paying big bucks for the upgrade when it's not needed to run the programs they use.
Then there's a small amount of users who have figured out that XP is faster for their use, if nothing else because it uses less memory.
And let's not forget the large amount of users who wouldn't dare upgrade an OS at all, but use whatever the manufacturer put on their machine. They'll get a new OS when they buy a new machine, and in this economy, that might not be now.
In any case, this is Slashdot and a car analogy is in order. Just because a new model has come out doesn't mean that everybody with older cars will switch. Expecting that is silly.
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.
You're right that computer replacement is slow, but XP got about 38% of the installed base in only three years. Vista was released on Jan 2006, more than 4 1/2 years ago, and still Vista + 7 combined don't best XP's installed base.
This might be an indication of a changing user base, and it may be it's because a lot of businesses and households aren't doing as well these days.
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.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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
Could this be based on the economy too?
I Usually buy a new pc after a good bonus or raise. I think I was running XP last time that happened.
"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
Hell, I still know someone who is still running Windows 3.1. Now, if she were running it on recent hardware, it would probably rock. Instead, it just blows...
Always wait for SP3, for everything! In fact, just wait for version 3 of everything! Its guaranteed to be a success! Just thinking about what iPad 3.0 will be like, all those features, all those bugs squashed, it keeps me up at night. Windows 7? I say give me windows 10, or give me Death! Now if you'll excuse me, my Windows ME is giving me a dirty look, ctrl-alt-del!
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.
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?
PCs now last longer, since the exploding capacitor problem was solved. The result is a dip in sales of new machines and therefore a dip in whatever new junkware comes with new PCs...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
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
I run Linux as my basic operating system but like to keep Windows around for purposes such as tax software that require it. If a machine came with XP pre-installed, I could squash the Windows partition down to about a quarter or less of the hard drive. Starting with Vista, you had to use M$'s partition resizing tool and it would not go to below half the hard drive. I managed to get XP for all my systems.
I don't know what I'll do some time in the future when I might need a new machine. Perhaps FOSS partition resizing will have caught up by then.
Everybody knows the real reason not to switch to Win 7 is because Civilization V runs better with DX9 than with DX10.
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.