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

[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

[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

[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

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.

TL;DR version

[WinstonWolfIT]

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