Slashdot Mirror
Windows 7 Trumps Vista By Reaching 20% Share
CWmike writes "Windows 7 cracked the 20% share mark last month, a milestone the problem-plagued Vista never reached, Web measurement vendor Net Application said over the weekend. Gregg Keizer reports that Windows 7's online usage share reached 20.9% in December, up 1.2 percentage points from the month before. Windows Vista, meanwhile, fell by half a point to 12.1%, its lowest share since July 2008. Vista peaked at 18.8% in October 2009, the same month that Microsoft launched Windows 7. The other standout finding: XP is projected to still account for 13% when it's retired in 2014."
An anonymous reader adds news that Google's Chrome browser is nearing 10% market share.
20% of the computers currently in use were shipped with Windows 7.
Windows 7 won't do an upgrade on an XP system, period. You have to do a clean install.
If you really, really want to upgrade from XP to 7 you need to upgrade from XP to Vista, then Vista to 7.
It doesn't work all that well on low-end hardware or virtual machines
It's been demonstrated to match XP performance on even quite low-end gear by several third-party tests. My experience is that's it's faster, particularly the 64-bit builds, which increase the file cache size from ~400MB max to "all of physical memory", which is a big improvement.
Every time you deploy an image you have to manually re-register the thing with Microsoft so it doesn't disable itself
You're Doing It Wrong. If you're supporting Windows 7 for businesses, you should be using KMS or MAK, and using the volume licensed Enterprise editions, not Windows 7 Home or whatever.
Still no decent backup system
It's the best ever - it has both file-level and image-based backups, it can take live snapshots of disks for both types, back up open files, it has a built-in scheduler, and a bunch of other features.
The VHD disk images created by Windows 7 can be mounted as virtual disks using a GUI or the command-line, can be used to boot from directly without having to be restored first, can be trivially converted into a virtual machine disk, and the install CD has a built-in restore wizard.
I haven't seen comparable features in any other operating system except OSX.
More importantly, if you're backing up desktops, You're Doing It Wrong. Laptops should use offline folders to sync with the master copy of the user data on a server, and shouldn't need backing up. Desktops should use folder redirection and/or roaming profiles. Back up your servers, not your desktops.
You can even do it the "Linux way" if you want to: I've seen sample scripts floating about that take a VSS snapshot of a disk, mount it as a folder or drive letter, and use rsync to incrementally update a backup, then release the snapshot automatically. I've done this myself for Windows Server 2003, about 6 years ago, it's nothing new.
XP Mode is buggy and compatibility in general is bad (especially in the 64-bit versions)
You shouldn't even need XP-mode most of the time, particularly on 32-bit editions of Windows 7. I've found that even the 64-bit editions will run just about anything if you simply set the "compatibility flags" on the main program executables. Just how bad are these applications that you have to support? Shouldn't you be blaming the app vendors instead of Microsoft?
Still no EXT3/EXT4 (or any Unix-type), Large FAT or GPT support
Are you kidding me? First, Windows has had GPT disk and boot support since Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, it has xFAT, NTFS on removable drives, and there's third-party EXT3 plugins.
If you think EXT3 on Windows is an important feature, again, You're Doing It Wrong. NTFS is a superior filesystem for Windows in practically every way. If you want to share data between Windows and Linux, use NTFS drivers on Linux, or a server with SAMBA.
Limit of 2 physical processors? Really? It's easy to get 4 processors in a box these days with 8 cores each especially in the academic world
That sucks, but 2 sockets is 12-16 cores these days. If you need more computing power than that, than you can afford a Windows Server 2008 R2 license, which gives you almost all the Windows 7 features, and more processor socket licenses. It's a commercial operating system, and it costs money.
Full Disk Encryption requires TPM chips which are missing in just about any system these days so you still have to go into a 3rd party solution.
The TPM requirement can be turned off using a group policy setting, but then it's not transparent to users, they have to enter a pass-phrase on every boot. External disk encryption doesn't require a TPM chip by default, I use that feature on my rather old laptop that doesn't have a TPM chip.
You still have to downlo