Slashdot Mirror
Full Upgrades To Windows 8 Only From Windows 7?
CWmike writes "Microsoft will support full upgrades to Windows 8 only from the three-year old Windows 7, according to a report Thursday by ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley. Citing unnamed sources, Foley said that Microsoft has informed select partners of the upgrade paths to Windows 8. While Microsoft may be revealing upgrade paths to some partners, it has been much more reticent to keep customers informed than three years ago when it rolled out Windows 7. Among the details the company has not disclosed are the on-sale date and the pricing of the two retail editions. By this time in 2009, Microsoft had revealed both: On June 2 that year, it pegged a launch date for Windows 7, and by June 25 had not only posted prices for the operating system but had also kicked off a pre-sale that discounted upgrades by as much as 58%. The increased secrecy from the company was demonstrated best last week, when it unveiled its first-ever tablet, the Surface, but left many questions unanswered, including the price, sales date, and even the hardware's battery life."
I don't see the problem with this. Firstly, I've not purchased a Windows upgrade for 13 years (NT->2K). Secondly, Windows 7 is supported until 2020 so it's not like you have to upgrade it. Corporate customers need not worry as their license agreements give them the new OS for no additional cost.
After MS shipped Vista, MicroCenter used to advertise desktop systems with Vista preloaded and "XP downgrade rights". Expect similar with Windows 8 and "Win 7 downgrade".
No, XP is used in so much environments for just about everything still.
- Scientific tools are still mostly XP-only (or DOS still), Vista/7 is possible sometimes with XP compatibility but it's not guaranteed
- Most corporate programs still run only on XP including IE6
- XP is fine on 10 year old computers without all the bells and whistles, 7 is a lot heavier on the resources and requires a more recent computer to run well even with all the bells and whistles turned off.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Free upgrade to Ubuntu from any version of windows.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
It's not like anyone will want to buy that franken-ui anyways...
It seems to me that MS is shooting itself in the foot. If I were in charge of Microsoft, I would be afraid of OS X and iOS. Once Apple starts leveraging its market share in iPhones and iPads to push people towards OS X, Microsoft is going to feel a lot of pain.
MS is no longer the 800 lb gorilla in the room. The integration of iOS and OS X is going to create an OS that has enough applications to really take off.
So you have to have the previous version to upgrade... what is the problem? Doesn't everyone do this?
Off hand: Adobe, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian all require the immediate previous version to upgrade.
Honestly, I didn't even know you could upgrade Windows from a version older than the previous version.
corporate america is full of old legacy programs that most of the company has forgotten but are essential to the operation of the organization. Somewhere in the sub basement there are a few machines only a few members of the IT department are aware of... they are often the reason it takes "two days to process" certain requests... you could argue they whole thing should be reprogrammed from scratch but you're dealing with proprietary programs that could be very complicated and were built bit by bit in spaghetti code fashion over decades.
It's something of a mess. But the companies work and if everyone does their jobs the system runs.
You see this sort of thing in big international banks. Large retail chain head quarters. Or even medium sized businesses that have been operating a few franchises since the 80s.
Requiring them to upgrade isn't going to work. They're already trying to move these system to VMs. But compatibility for these old programs even in VMs is spotty. It's a serious problem.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Back in the day a computer was $3000 and often a new OS version was actually an improvement over the previous one, so I could see why somebody would do it. But paying $100 (wild guess) to upgrade a $400 computer to an OS that is marginally better, if at all, with the time it would take and ever-present risk of it breaking something, isn't worth it. I wonder how many bother.
Ah, no. Apple typically releases that information on the day of the announcement and actually has copies of the device available at the announcement to play with. Shipping is usually soon after announcement. Example: The MacBook Pro with Retina Display.
Based on Microsoft's track record, there's a significant chance that Surface will be canceled before it ships.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
"XP is fine on 10 year old computers without all the bells and whistles, 7 is a lot heavier on the resources and requires a more recent computer to run well even with all the bells and whistles turned off."
I respectfully disagree. XP SP 3 runs shittier than a stock Windows 7 when the UI dialed down and the background processes tamed. I would not run either without 4 GB of RAM (and by that I mean XP SP3 which recognizes 3.5 and thus is maxed out) and Windows 7 recovers from dumb shit like accidentally browsing a dead network share.
The corporate WORLD is full of old legacy programs. But that's only half of the deal. The other one is how corporations work.
First of all, we're talking about a serious budget position. The licensing fee for a corporation wide system upgrade isn't something your average IT department can rubber stamp. This can easily run the six to eight digit range, and that often requires the ok from some C-level goon. Sadly, to my eternal regret, it is rarely the CISO or even the CIO, i.e. the two Cs that would actually know what they would buy.
More often than not, such a "problem" finds its way to the CEOs desk. Where it sits for a while because CEOs don't make decisions. No, I'm not kidding. They do not make decisions. They wait 'til some "meaningful" (read: economic) paper writes something about the item. If you want something approved from your CEO, don't come with facts or university studies, subscribe to the same economy papers he reads and wait for them to push an article that goes in your favor, then ask him "oh, sir, have you read..." and you're in.
This is, sadly, not a joke.
And until that time, you will not see a CEO make any decisions about upgrading Windows.
Then, when they finally get their butt into gear, integration tests come. That alone can take a year in larger enterprises. Another hint, never ever volunteer to be one of the test subjects. Unless you don't have anything important to do anyway, or if your boss understands that due to IT issues your reports are late. You will lose days. Not hours. Days. Because one of the proprietary tools you use every once in a blue moon won't work and you get to figure out by yourself how to make it run. Which is in turn a huge headache for your security department, but I digress.
In other words and in a nutshell, I know quite a few companies that still run on XP as their main system, who have been running integration tests for Vista and 7 for a while now and are just about to roll it out... unless of course their CEO notices that 8 is around the corner and he halts the program because he wants to leapfrog the "obsolete" versions...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There is usually soooo much bs in the systems, because people with connections can get the system set up to favor them. I do consulting on sales/configuration software. Everything goes fine until the sales assholes get on it and find out the super secret discount that gives them a fat bonus that they used to be able to do on the paper system wasnt put in.
Hey folks, most of the world does not care about 3 year old operating systems. Innovation marches on at an exponential pace. It is not fair to demand that Microsoft jump off that fast track to support the vanishing legacy. If they do, then you can bet their competitors will not.
Should I also upgrade your wall mounted rotary phone to an IPhone 5? Should I upgrade your Model-T to a Tesla Roadster? Geez!
Well, that's interesting only if MIcrosoft promised to ship and reneged. If it hasn't been pegged to ship, then I don't see how you can fault them for secrecy for not making announcements. I don't see why the article sites the "by this time in 2009" as a reason either unless there was some requirement to announce exactly three years after the last one.
First of all, we're talking about a serious budget position. The licensing fee for a corporation wide system upgrade isn't something your average IT department can rubber stamp.
Sounds like a fairly shitty IT department/management. When you roll out a large project thats going to cost a fortune 5 years down the road to upgrade, you don't wait 5 years and ask for 500k. You roll it out, including an additional 100k in yearly operating costs/maintenance, and then have 500k sitting in your pool ready to purchase the upgrade at the 5 year mark. This is basic business planning. If you didn't think of that, you aren't qualified to do any planning for a project that costs that much, and thats the first problem in your post.
If you weren't doing it wrong from the start, you wouldn't be waiting on the CEO to make a decision and the rest of your post becomes a non-starter.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The article is about how much data gets preserved during the upgrade process not about pricing. Since Windows machines should be re-imaged anyway periodically, that is pretty irrelevant. As for the pricing, the relevant issue, yes, XP evidently qualifies for upgrade pricing:
Taking a leaf out of Apples playbook then. I wonder if Apple patented it?
One can only hope they haven't taken a leaf from anything resembling a Playbook...
Newer is not better. I run Win98SE on this $35 used Compaq (running on top of DOS 7.10) and I run XP on another one for my Cakewalk music apps. I boot Puppy Linux 4.3.1 from DOS with LINLD. Chat with Mirc 5.9. Listen to tunes with Winamp 2.80. Do my budget and diet on Excel 4.0. Write stuff on Wordstar 5.5 (DOS) and make it printer-ready in Wordperfect 8 and/or Open Office. I'm happy as a clam, but I ain't making Microsoft any richer.
You could only do a 'true upgrade' from Windows Vista to Windows 7, so how is this any different? I don't think you could upgrade from Windows ME to XP either.
Vista is how old now? It came out in 2006. How many years old will OS X 10.8 allow upgrades from? Snow leopard from 2009.
They aren't saying XP or Vista don't meet the requirements for an upgrade edition, just that you can't do an in place upgrade. Of course you can't, the file structure isn't the same.
This is even better, it means once again you will be able to use the upgrade pricing for clean installs. Good deal!
No plans to upgrade to Windows 8 anyway. But this does remind me that I need to buy a few copies of 7 while it's still available. And then, wait until something good comes out.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Thats right, they dont care about how old the OS is, they want windows and they want what they know how to work. they dont care if its xp vista 7, but they will care that 8 doesnt work like they have known since 1995, and looks like a toy phone.
I think Microsoft is coming close... very close... to a spontaneous shift towards open-source Win32. The butchery of Windows 8 is certainly moving things right along.
When a major corporate donor emerges, Microsoft's final phase has begun.
I agree on the X bit... on the importing old deals into the new system.
You have to do that. It's non-negotiable. And that's the problem. It's a HUGE pain in the ass. And what you're saying is that your company can't offer that feature at a competitive rate. I know that. I've asked around repeatedly.
The only solution is to keep the old system going or reprogram the whole thing from scratch.
It's just what "is."
The only reasonable solution for most of these companies is to VM the old systems so they can maintain them on new hardware. And then to build new UI tie ins so that you can interact with a 20 year old database through an ipad... AND make it look sexy.
I've done that a few times. The whole system is horrifying when you understand how much processing power is being wasted on abstraction. But the cost of the processing power is meaningless compared to the cost reprogramming it.
Again, this is an issue big international banks have given up on. Somewhere in their infrastructure you'll find literally dozens if not thousands of interlinked databases that all use different formats, technologies, scripting languages, OS's, etc. They were all built at different times by different groups for different purposes. And THEN everything was linked together using custom scripts and programs that often only exist in their computers and no where else.
And you could say "oh just rewrite it" but the thing is many of these systems were badly programmed in the first place. They work. But the documentation is often horrific or non-existent. You can talk to the old hands and ask them how it works but they often have no clue. They know how to ADD a feature or change a feature in their systems. But they've been doing that for so many years without a full rebuild that no one actually knows how everything is wired together anymore.
You can pull out one tiny system out of the network that everyone swears is irrelevant it can can completely crash the system and make it totally impossible for it to function until it's replaced. Why? Because everything was designed assuming everything was just "so." And if anything changes nothing works.
Again, I'm not advocating this as a good idea. I'm not the one that designed this or came up with this idea. It just "is." No one really planned it this way. Its something that grows in a company like fungus. And by the time it gets to this stage you can't really do anything to fix it. You just have to survive it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"XP is fine on 10 year old computers without all the bells and whistles, 7 is a lot heavier on the resources and requires a more recent computer to run well even with all the bells and whistles turned off."
I respectfully disagree. XP SP 3 runs shittier than a stock Windows 7 when the UI dialed down and the background processes tamed. I would not run either without 4 GB of RAM (and by that I mean XP SP3 which recognizes 3.5 and thus is maxed out) and Windows 7 recovers from dumb shit like accidentally browsing a dead network share.
He said 10 years old. Of course XP runs better but I doubt many of them are still running as PSUs die, fans lose their bearings and get nosy and die out, capacitators blow, and so on.
Windows 7 runs supperior if you have a SATA drive and at least a phenom II hex core or Icore5 or greater with more than 4 gigs or ram. This is because Microsoft crippled the SATA driver on purpose with Vista/7 so it doesn't support command queing. Worse, the paging/swap algorithm in XP/NT is terrible and very aggressive compared to Win7. Worse the XP kernel is made for 1-2 cpu systems and can't scale well after that. Especially this is true on an iCore7 extreme.
Also modern cpu's have more registers and additional instructions for SSE3 mmx, compression, and other branch prediction optimization techniques that you really do not take advantage of unless you use a modern 64 bit compiler. XP 64-bit does not use all of these because it is from 2004 but at least you get more registers.
In essence the grandparent is right and XP rules because it runs lighter and well for dull office tasks on most equipment purchased circa 2002 - 2008. The flipside is that its retarded to put XP on an ultrabook with an SSD with 8 gigs of ram and an iCore7. THe SSD will be dead in a matter of months due to the lack of TRIM and the insane paging of the XP kernel.
Corporations who just finished their upgrade cycle in 2008/2009 should stay with XP. Anything older you need to go to Windows 7 as your hardware is dying and there is little sense putting it on modern hardware unless you are cheap and lazy. ... take it back I just described every bean counter.
http://saveie6.com/
Turn off Aero Glass as that is the source of the problem friend. I spent about a week hunting down the source of that lag, since with an HD4850 frankly I had more than overkill for Aero but looking deep into the logs it always came down to Aero causing desktop lag. Once i killed Aero for a Vista Black theme frankly it has been insanely fast, and that is with a system that is probably half the speed of yours, an AMD Hexa with 8Gb of RAM, a 5200 RPM OS drive and a 512Mb of RAM GPU and frankly Win 7 screams. hell it even is snappy on my E350 netbook but I again killed Aero.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
IF they are running a 10 year old piece of hardware because of compatibility with ancient crap the chances of this decision to not give them an automatic upgrade path from XP to 7 is going to affect somewhere between Zero and sweet fuck all people. If there compatibility issues are bad enough to still be stuck back their then nothing is changing going forward.
Wow, a nuanced old-version supporter... cool. I wonder how many of us are left here on slashdot. I am not a true supporter anymore: at some point it my systems just stopped sticking around long enough.
Leaving them behind for a relative when moving out, equipment death and robbery have forced me to PURCHASE newer hardware. I'm surprised to see your system survive this long. A truth younger slashdotters need to know is that you cannot easily add new programs to old machines.
Kudos if you have seen your share of errors of missing dotnet, DirectX, Flash 7+, VisualC++ DLLs, Visual basic VBRUNDLL and bad HTML support for hotmail/yahoo. Cheers if you've known the joy of working around some or found alternative browsers and programs. It's sad that the only people using older software are either poor old people or their grandchildren. Middle aged people I know just fork over money for overkill hardware and pirate their way through Windows version upgrades.
That makes it harder on us given they perpetuate adoption of things (remember the first year of docx files?) and proliferation of overkill RAM amounts / bad coders who assume everyone buys a new machine every 3 years.
Spoken like a true novice!. Well done partner!
Have you ever seen a multi-year budget survive, intact, the five-year you period are postulating?
What sort of company you work for? Any company I have worked for, in the last 35 years, will NOT let you bank $100 thou yearly towards some future whatchamacallit... At least you will be reprimended for over-budgeting. At worst, you'll be fired for cooking the books
If the auditors don't get you, then a couple of years into your fantasy, a downturn will occur and, wham!, your budget is cut so that your precious $100 k will be gone and if you did indeed happened to bank away any money, it will be used to cover running expenses.
I just spent a fucking week putting together a Pentium III computer so that a fricking old system could run again. Imagine, get a P-III refurbished with a 20 GB IDE HD, with 256 MB RAM running Win-2K... But the upgrade was only $145 k, no dice in this economy, get it working or else...
Please provide the name of your employer, I do need a job like yours
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
1. You're only sending the information through one extra process. I've run 3d games in VMs before and not had a problem. There is a performance hit but it's not a big deal.
What is important is that the VM have a comprehensive emulation of the environment. Some VM emulators half ass it. That causes problems.
2. As to overhead, this is a question of optimization. If you've done it properly this shouldn't be a huge deal.
3. The hypervisor OS by definition should be emulating specific environmental conditions. That is, you pick a machine and you set out to create an emulation of that specific machine.
If you want to update the hypervisor that's fine. But the updates will apply to NEW emulations and not old ones.
For example when I load up virtual box for VMware workstation it asks me what OS I wish to emulate. Why does it ask that? Because certain environments are more or less compatible with those operating systems.
Updates would add new environments but the old ones should just be configuration files that establish the pentameters.
I do see what you're saying and it would be a problem. however if the VM OS is primarily there to facilitate the loading of as many varied subordinate OSs as possible then why would they drop compatibility?
I just think it would be less of a problem.
4. Again a ten percent bump in power usage assuming the optimization hasn't been a complete farce is reasonable.
As to your argument that everyone should just switch to linux. The programs aren't written for linux. So if we used linux we'd be running a VM in linux anyway. Exactly how does that solve any problem?
The tired of argument of "you should have used linux"... is tedious.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.