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.

Comments

Windows 7

[devxo]

I'm not surprised, Windows 7 is actually rock solid OS. Everything is done perfectly and feels good. Vista itself wasn't bad, but drivers for it weren't ready. It was the necessary to move from XP.

It's hard to think how Microsoft can make the next Windows better from Windows 7.

Re:Windows 7

[grasshoppa]

I'm still having a hard time understanding what technologies exist in 7 that don't in XP AND are something I ( or a business would need ).

The only reason to upgrade from XP is because security updates are due to end soon. And while that's a valid reason, most businesses are going to be asking themselves why they should upgrade if that's the only reason.

Re:Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still having a hard time understanding what technologies exist in 7 that don't in XP AND are something I ( or a business would need ).

I still feel that way about XP and Windows 2000. Welcome to the upgrade treadmill. You got on it by choice, now upgrade.

Re:Windows 7

[Bigjeff5]

Time to read bud, there is a ton of info on it. Since Win 7 is basically Vista+, you have to start with the difference between XP and Vista. This is where the majority of changes occurred.

Read the following to fully understand the difference between 7 and XP, or cherry pick to get a basic idea:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista - stuff the end user will care about
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_new_to_Windows_Vista - stuff that actually makes it better
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_safety_features_new_to_Windows_Vista - stuff your IT guys will care about
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_features_new_to_Windows_Vista - more stuff your IT guys will care about

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7 - stuff the end user will care about, including the features that were removed since Vista

Re:Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

not to mention that XP was TERRIBLE at managing multiple cores/processors and memory

I'm surprised how often this isn't mentioned. To extend, XP also has problems differentiating between an SMT core and an actual real core (important with all these i5s and i7s). Seen XP SP3 think its a good idea to put a double threaded job on "processor 0 and 1" with 2 and 3 empty. Problem is 0 and 1 was the same core, so effectively half the CPU was unused. Windows Vista and 7 don't make the same mistake - and thats part of the reason you on a SMT capable processor often see certain cores facing much higher workloads on average than others.

Re:Windows 7

[damnbunni]

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.

Re:Windows 7

[SpryGuy]

The start/all-programs menu for Win7 is vastly superior to XP, as is Windows Explorer. Have you actually sat down and tried to use them as they're meant to be used? Or have you tried to use them as if you were still using XP?

For example, I almost never use the "All programs" menu any more. No need. Everything I want or need is either on the task bar (pinned there) or on the start menu (pinned there or in the 'recently used' section), or available with just a few keystrokes typed in the search box.

I find I'm far more productive with Win7 than I ever was with XP. Going back to XP just gives me this feeling of XP constantly getting in the way... I feel utterly constrained by its limitations and annoyances. Windows 7 is a definit advance, and is definitely worth the upgrade.

I "upgraded" my XP laptop a while back (after using it at work for a while), and even though it's not a true 'upgrade', it was one of the most painless windows installs I've ever experienced (and I've done a LOT of them). Yeah, I had to reinstall my apps, but the data moved over pretty painlessly. I was up and running in under a day, easily.

I'm not sure what you even mean by the XP start menu working more "cleanly" than Win7's... the exact opposite is the case. The Win7 start menu is just vastly superior. Of course, you have to take the time to actually learn this fact.

Re:Windows 7

[interkin3tic]

I hear you. I'm still running windows ME. It's safer really. Few blackhats bother to check compatibility of their viruses or malware with older operating systems. Some rogue antivirus popped up a message saying "Scanning: You have... Windows ME? Shit, I wouldn't touch that with a 10 foot pole. Uninstalling..."

Re:Windows 7

[Gadget_Guy]

XP's Service Packs were the equivalent of Mac OS's upgrades, but they were free. The most notable upgrade was Service Pack 2, which introduced the firewall, pop-up blocker, Bluetooth support, Windows Security Center, etc. Sure, it is not a patch on the monumental changes introduced with Vista, but when people say that XP did everything that they needed they actually should say that XP SP2 did all they need. If you gave someone a computer with the original version of the OS then they wouldn't be so happy.

Re:Windows 7

[ColdWetDog]

Ive heard arguments like this for things like Sharepoint, and usually what it really means is that "we have a solution, we're just not sure what the problem is yet".

No, that was Lotus Notes.

Re:Windows 7

[icebike]

Honestly, I'm not sure what you're even talking about. I haven't experieenced anything like what you're describing (and can't even really follow what you're talking about)... are you talking about just blind-typing really fast into the start menu search bar and pressing enter without even looking?

Essentially, yes, thats what he's talking about.

Lots of machines have that Windows Menu key now days.
Whack that, (or click the start icon)
Cursor is already in the search box.

At that point, if you know the name of the application, a fast typist, or a keyboard oriented user can launch just about anything faster than a mouse user drilling thru the start-bar.

 

Re:Windows 7

[bertok]

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

Re:Windows 7

[grcumb]

Sorry, but that's really lame, short-sighted reasoning. Many of the features would be useful to average office workers, and the "confusion" is a very short-term thing. It's transient. It's not big enough to justify never upgrading, given all the other benefits (security, stability, easier to use, easier to support, etc, etc).

Unless you're suggesting a switch to Linux, in which case it's the only reason you'll ever need.

Okay, seriously: I can see the point on both sides of this argument. Change is disruptive, and until the change is accompanied by a perceived reward significant enough to offset the short-term discomfort, it's simply human nature to resist it.

Apple got a lot of people moving in their direction by very successfully leveraging the social benefits. (Snide remarks here and elsewhere about metrosexual hipster-wanna-be Apple users are a not-so-tacit criticism of this effect.) Linux got most of the geeks onside because it rewards technical prowess (or, in some cases, the illusion thereof).

But Windows has been relying on its own inertia^Wmomentum for so long that fear of change is a legitimate argument against upgrading. In short, the Windows XP user base is increasingly self-selected for this trait. My prediction: the first 20% for Windows 7 is the easy one.

Re:Windows 7

[beav007]

You will use it the way the gods intended, and you will like it.

Ever had the feeling that computers should be white plastic and brushed aluminium, or that your mouse has a far greater number of buttons than you're comfortable with?

Re:Windows 7

[parlancex]

There is actually a fundamental reason for this rather than just oversight. The ATA BIOS command set gives you a 32-bit sector index to load data off the disk in real mode (2 TB of addressable data). On a conventional BIOS system execution will start in real mode after the BIOS has loaded the boot sector (first sector) of the boot device, which of course is just 512 bytes. Normally this sector would also contain your MBR partition table, but the BIOS doesn't really care. Whatever boot device you point it at it's just going to load the first sector into memory and start executing it in real mode. In order to access data beyond 2 TB you need to:

1. Initialize at least 32-bit protected mode, which itself involves several steps and data structures
2. Complete basic hardware enumeration with the information given to you by the BIOS
3. Load a suitable driver for the disk device class.
4. Now you can load and read the GPT and figure out where the OS is actually located and load THAT, then finally transfer control to it.

Step 1 alone will take generally take the 512 bytes available to you if you do it robustly, so where do you put the code for the other steps? Wherever you put it, it needs to be within the first 2 TB of the disk. Windows COULD support booting from GPT on legacy BIOS systems, however, there would have to be 1 of 2 restrictions: Either your OS partition would need to start in the first 2 TB of the disk, or Windows would require a dummy partition located in the first 2 TB of the disk to use as the second stage boot loader. Although you might see those things as a reasonable compromise, the folks at Microsoft obviously don't and have decided that trying to shoehorn it in with restrictions and gotchas is probably just sillier than using the modern EFI boot system for the modern GPT partition table.

Re:Windows 7

[YoshiDan]

You can get around this with the Win 7 Upgrage version. I installed it on a blank hard drive and it wouldn't let me activate. So I booted from the Win 77 install dvd again and chose upgrade then chose the existing clean installation of Win 7. After that it lets you activate.

Bad news for anyone doing web sites

[cyber-vandal]

With the continuing use of XP we'll still be supporting IE6, 7 and 8 for the forseeable future, given that IE9 won't run on XP.

Here come the "its not better than XP" posts

[gad_zuki!]

Let me count the ways:

1. The UAC - unfortunately users can't be bothered to run as a non-admin and just use runas, so UAC is the next best thing. Running as non-admin is easier than ever.

2. 64-bit support with easy to find 64-bit drivers. If you want MS to sign your drivers you need to provide 64-bit.

3. Protected mode - not as in memory but as in a native sandboxing technology that IE and and Adobe X use. These apps interact with the OS via a broker process. This is also why so many exploit target the add-ons (Flash, pre-X Adobe, Java) and not the browser itself.

4. Bitlocker

5. Large disk support.

6. SSD TRIM support. I have 3 SSD drives and they would be a PITA without TRIM in 7.

7. Better security architecture. A lot of things dont run as non-admin in XP so you needed to run them as admin or system to make them work, which greatly increased your attack surface.

8. Better Windows update agent. I love the option to ether use my WSUS or go to MS to get updates . As well as a decent GUI that shows me that status of the updates, last update, etc.

9. Windows Media Center done right.

10. Powershell support native.

11. A decent taskbar, finally.

12. Performance increase. I've run 7 on 256 megs of RAM on an old P4 and it flies on modern hardware.

13. Youre going to upgrade anyway from XP eventually, might as well get something good.

Re:Here come the "its not better than XP" posts

[timeOday]

The importance of any upgrade is subjective, so YMMV. For me, the recent upgrade from XP to 7 was a hassle with no benefit. The main difference is I spend more time looking for stuff they moved around. I also found Win 7 definitely more RAM hungry, and the USB driver for my Garmin GPS doesn't work under 7.

TL;DR version

[WinstonWolfIT]

20% of the computers currently in use were shipped with Windows 7.

Vendors are Lazy

[headkase]

Vista was actually ok and now it's up to Service Pack 2 it's not that bad. What gave Vista the bad reputation was that at launch drivers were horrible. Vista was the re-architecture step for Windows and vendors by being late to develop well-behaved drivers significantly contributed to it's negative reception. Now, fast forward to today: 7 is Vista+ and vendors are already up to speed with their drivers and it had a 1 year open beta to nail everything down. No hassles, good support.

Vista took the hits that prepared the wider software-ecosystem for 7.

Another thing to think about is that with Windows 7 64-bit is now entering the mainstream. My 7 machine is 64-bit and I have 8GB in the puppy. Of course, my Ubuntu laptop is also 64-bit even though it only has 2GB of RAM.

Re:good riddance to bad rubbish

[DigiShaman]

I say we build a "Box-O-Doom". It will represent everything that is evil and shall be sacrificed in a volcano. It must have the following:

1. Case must be beige with other parts slightly discolored (yellowed) from the others.
2. P4 with RAMBUS.
3. Intel i740 AGP video card.
4. Connor IDE hard drive.
5. 1x CDROM drive that uses a CD caddy.
6. Winmodem.
7. Windows ME.
8. Office 2000 complete with Clippy.
9. MS Bob.
10. Norton System Works.
11. Subscription to AOL.

Bonus: Should have enough dust and cigarette tar, a fleece can be made of the stuff.