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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.
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Free upgrade to Ubuntu from any version of windows.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
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.
"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.
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:
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!
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
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