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Windows 7 Still Being Sold On Up To 93% of British PCs
nk497 writes "The vast majority of PCs sold by British PC makers are running Windows 7 — not Windows 8. PC Pro spoke to several PC builders, with some reporting as many as 93% of recently sold machines were on the older OS. One company initially sold its PCs with Windows 8, but feedback from users soon changed that. Customers quickly began to specify systems with Windows 7, those with Windows 8 'took delivery and wanted to change back to Windows 7' – a process the firm described as a 'nightmare.' Another firm found success by installing a 'start menu' tool on Windows 8 machines, and others said the switch would have gone smoother if Microsoft has offered a Windows 8 tutorial or better explained the new OS."
Windows 8 UI is ghastly. With Classic Shell though, you'll never need to load metro again, and then its just a fast Win 7...
Win8 is just horrible win 7 is at least what vista should of been ....
XP is still tolerable but gets it support removed this year
who where what when now?
The new name for Windows 8: Vista Part 2.
is 100% too sensational a number? Up to doesn't mean squat
There's a number of reasons for not switching from Windows 7.
First, it's the operating system most of us always wanted. It gets closer to a perfected version of Windows XP. It does everything we need with the software and the interface paradigms we've known for 20 years.
Second, I don't trust any new product until it has been on the market for 18 months in order to get the bugs out. Developers know why, and the reason isn't developers (generally).
Finally, I distrust trends. They blow through, take your money, and blow out the other door. I trust reliability and paradigms that are time-tested.
As a lack of positive reason, I'm not sure what Windows 8 offers that Windows 7 does not. There are improvements; they look really neat. I'd like to play with them, on some computer I'm not using for work when I have lots of spare time to play around with it.
The computer is a tool for me. I use it to achieve other ends. Thus I'm not that fascinated with the OS and want it to "just work." Windows 7 does that, or an adequate job of it at least, on a wide variety of hardware.
Up to?
So, 0% of British PCs may be sold with Windows 7 on them?
That terminology bugs me.
Heck we all know it was Beta from the gate.
No problem, it was worth a shot to see how far to take a touchscreen UI and it's not far.
Mac fans are disgusted with OS X10.7 and 10.8 too, losing Mac users left and right over it. (Mac sales down 16% verses PC's 9% year over year)
As a life long Mac user, I love Windows 7 now, especially since it's supported until 2020, whereas OS X versions only get support for a few years at best.
Good job there Microsoft, about time. Now onto Win 9...
...Windows 8 is the new Windows Vista, and Windows 7 is the new Windows XP. Windows 7 will be run on the majority of machines untill Microsoft comes out with something better which may be sooner now that they are planning on switching to a 1 year development cycle.
if US manufacturers offered Windows 7. Unfortunately, no Windows 7 downgrade is offered with most PC manufacturers in the US. So, most people (average consumer) are relegated to using 8 as it is, using Start 8 or other similiar apps, or finding someone that knows how to install an OS on a computer.
What happened when Microsoft released Windows XP? How long it took for British PCs to have it by default?
And the outcome will be pow (Vista_type_disaster, 2).
Even an idiot would know that. This was hopefully the last desperate attempt by Microsoft to "leverage" their desktop monopoly to gain some mobile market share.
Don't get me started on why it's called Windows when I see all window-less full-screen apps from MS now on desktop (like the native MS PDF viewer). Just WTF, man. WTF.
Microsoft needs to change Windows 8's name to Windows Mojave. People tended to like Windows Mojave even though they didn't like Vista which was the same thing.
'but i feel like i'm just too close to love you...'
besides i'm happier with you better looking sister wondows 7
Some places are still offloading old inventory but the vast majority of high-street retailers for example are selling all Win8. This is another Slashdot attempt at convincing everyone Win8 is terrible and Microsoft are doomed - it's been the same tired narrative for as long as I can remember, the only variables are the version-numbers of [product]. Flame away, my crimes of going against the group-think will not go unpunished I'm sure.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Honestly, Windows 8 is a train wreck. Microsoft for some reason thinks that by completely redesigning the UI to a bulky, hard to use, non fluid system, that they would gain customers. They should of done a massive back end upgrade to 7 and called it 8 rather then put make up on a pig and call it a prom date.
I bought my mother an Asus "Ultrabook" for christmas as her old laptop had finally given out. It had a hard drive failure last week, and rather than send it in I decided to swap out the drive myself.
Never have I had more trouble attempting to reinstall something like I did with Windows 8. Previously, you could just get a windows ISO, punch in the OEM serial from the sticker on the case, and you'd be set. Now, everything is certificate based, and will only work with a specific OEM copy of Windows made for that machine, and NOTHING else. On top of this, ASUS wants $50 for the disc to reinstall windows.
This OS was a giant step towards appliance computing for Microsoft. If the next version is like this or worse, I'll deal with support issues for my family on Linux instead.
For the whole month i actually bothered to try it, it felt like my computer skills where impeded by a HUGE brain tumor which hindered and rendered painful each and every action. And someone still wonders why sane people hate it?
Win XP was a win
Win Vista was a flop
Win 7 was a win
Win 8 is a flop
Wonder how Win 9 will fare ...
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I must say I got 2 Windows 8 licence because of the 38$ update price, but if Microsoft had offered Windows 7 licence for 50$ at the same time, I'd have bought 5 licences of it instead for future mahines. I'm having a real hard time liking the Metro interface.
So it was like using a Mac then?
Having recently taken the plunge, the new user experience can be summarised as "swipe a bit, here's some corners, now don't drown". I really like the OS now I've had some practice, in both its content-browsing Metro guise and as an updated version of Windows 7 but they've made no effort to bridge the gap between the two in such a way that a confident use of one can get to grips with the other. It takes some real lateral thinking to see what the mouse or touchpad equivalent of a touchscreen gesture is.
It doesn't help that touchpad gesture support is uniformly terrible. A look at regedit suggests that scrolling support is mostly hacked in on a per-app basis.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Having used Windows since Windows has existed, I only moved from XP because drivers were not available for new hardware.
I'll switch from Windows 7 for the same reason.
Change for the sake of change is a waste of energy.
Oh, and yes, I have paid DELL $100 more for the last three computers I've ordered, just to get Windows 7 instead of buying the cheaper, faster, and better Windows 8 computers.
Windows 7 Still Being Sold On Up To 93% of British PCs
Good old "up to" - how many times have those two little words helped someone weasel out of a corner, or pull in punters from off the street.
PC Pro spoke to several PC builders, with some reporting as many as 93% of recently sold machines were on the older OS
"Some" is most likely journo-speak for "one." And it's probably one that caters to the hardened geek/gamer crowd, both of whom are going to be avoiding 8 for a while yet.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
This happens pretty much every update cycle. The new OS is still terrible and unfamiliar and incompatible, and the old OS still has good availability. The only difference this time is that somebody wrote an article about.
For the record: I'm an OSX, Android and 360 user. I don't particularly LIKE MS, but this is not the world-shaking revelation that the article and the rest of the comments are going to make it out to be.
Do you see what I did there?
and black people hate change, and yellow people hate change, and red people hate change, and brown people hate change...
And they are still using Windows XP with Firefox 7.0.1!
My face when.
Windows 7 yes I understand, but XP? And I did a HNC computing course with them! Now I know why computer nerds are hated. I have gone back to become a Brick layer and Plumber, and they can stuff their ethernet cables up my pipes! I hope the conservative party are proud of themselves!
But the touted benefit (smaller and faster than NT!) was nerfed by each SP. Indeed it seems the only reason why it was smaller and faster at RTM was because they left so much necessary cruft out.
Ive seen here in the US how new pc sales have fallen faster than in a long time but look at the Best Buy and Office Max ads and you have no choice, everything is Win 8. People don't want Win 8, so they don't buy a new computer. At my work, for desktop's we have 5 Win 7's and 3 XP's. All of them working great, the XP's lack the hardware to goto Win 7 and since they serve their purpose just fine they are likely to be in use for several more years. Even with out security updates, with AVG free & Firefox with Ad Block Plus on them and we are good. The Win 7's computers we have will likely remain Win 7 for their entirety, no reason spend money to get something you dont like. Unless Win 9 is better, but I doubt it. Microsoft has thrown away their desktop OS sales, in hopes of getting people to buy a Windows phone & tablet since they look like a Win 8 PC. It wont be much longer before Google or someone else steps in swipes the desktop OS away from MS.
and black people hate change, and yellow people hate change, and red people hate change, and brown people hate change...
But those lousy, change-lovin' purple people! They gotta go man!
Call out the purple people eaters!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Hey Microsoft.
She's not doing you any favors here.
First, that hot mess that is the Office Ribbon.
Now the flaming, shit-covered mess of Metro.
How many more fucked-up interface choices are going to come on her watch? Costing you customers each and every time.
You guys currently have the underpinnings of a decent OS.
But your UI choices lately have people wondering if you got a bad batch of crack.
Fuck XBox, Fuck Touchscreens Everyplace. Give the user back their productive UI, keyboard shortcuts and all.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Mojave was already used for Windows Vista SP1. People tried Windows Vista after the initial hardware compatibility problems and other technical glitches in Windows Vista RTM were fixed, and by that time, it had become a perfectly acceptable Windows OS. There wasn't nearly as much UI change between Windows XP and Windows Vista as there was between Windows XP and Windows 8.
I agree 100% with the end of the summary.
I've been using Windows 8 for about a month now, and as time goes on I'm finding myself using the new "Modern UI" for more and more of my day-to-day browsing, music, etc. However, even as somebody who is very computer literate, it took about an hour to get accustomed to the dual-UI setup and figure out the most common mouse/touchpad gestures.
While for me that hour wasn't a big deal, as I was expecting to spend some time learning the new interface, for the average user I can see the process being very frustrating. While a quick Google search yields hundreds of sites with keyboard shortcuts, hints, and video tutorials of how the new interface works, many "average" computer users probably won't even think to search for these tutorials like I did.
Honestly, I think most users will like the new UI, once they invest the time to learn it. And even if you do hate it, just uninstall/unpin all of the modern apps from the start screen, pin your most-used desktop apps to the start screen, and you'll almost never see "Modern UI" except when using the start screen. The real problem is that Microsoft's "introduction" to its complete rethink of how you interact with your computer is an animation showing you to move your mouse to the top right-hand corner of the screen to bring up the Charms bar. If they gave the option to "Click here for a tour of the new Windows interface", I think the average computer user would find things a lot less frustrating and would be more welcoming of the new Windows user interface.
Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?
It takes me 2 seconds more to find my program in metro than in rocketdock or start menu pinned. But for others i'm sure 10+ seconds if they don't know where they placed their programs. Windows 8 is definitely better then windows 7 is some areas including file transfers. It took me a total of 3 1/2 hours to install windows 7(OS 30 minutes flash drive) os and do all the necessary updates including sp1. Windows 8(OS 8 minutes by flash drive) took me 1 hour including installing all updates(15+) of my drivers and applications(12).
Metro for now belongs on tablets, touchscreens, and lcd tv monitors. Metro will remain as a toy until they get professional applications like office, photoshop, coreldraw, autocad, visual studio, etc... to run. Plus, they need to make metro run 2 apps at the same time for people with dual monitors.
What pisses me off about all windows is the expensive single license. Now, office 2013 will no longer be on a media or just an iso you will get a key code to install office 2013 from either microsoft or their online partners which will be bound to one machine unless you contact microsoft to transfer the license over to another one or something.
I'm disappointed with Ubuntu's because of the spy ware, you can remove the amazon search but I read somewhere that Canonical still get's all your key strokes. I have become in favor of mint kde and looking at opensuse again as well. I think in the end for linux distro's to keep up float it will become spy ware.
I needed to use Windows only e-banking and borrowed an unused laptop from with Windows 8 on it - great chance to see what the fuss was all about, especially since it was stock installation and nobody has used it before.
First impressions were good: I figured out I can click on Desktop box in the Metro UI and I started Internet Explorer from the taskbar (if I needed some other app, though, I have no idea how I would go about it).
Then I wanted to turn off the machine. But I really couldn't figure out how. I realized that if I move the pointer of the mouse to the right, I get some sort of a menu. And screen edge detection is completely unintuitive when using a trackpad! Anywho, once I was back on the Metro thingy, I started Mail, just to see how it looks like. It wasn't setup, so it took me another 10 minutes to figure out how to leave the wizard without taking the battery out of the laptop!
When I finally got back to the Metro thingy, I couldn't find desktop, because things were rearranged!
Then it took me 10 more minutes to figure out how to shutdown the darn thing. The trick was to logout and then find an icon to do it.
I fear the day when some aunt is going to call me and ask me to fix her Windows 8 machine. I honestly won't have any idea what to do with it!
Does anybody else just wish ReactOS and/or WINE would just take over, and reach a point where everything can run on them. That way we could kick out Microsoft and not have to play their upgrade and licensing games all the time.
new slogan "news for nerds... and windows 8 sucks"
*DO NOT WANT*
We the people have spoken.
if 2000 or xp or 7 is working for me, who are you to say otherwise ? and, in teh real world, don't most people upgrade when their hardware dies, or when their job requires it ? i only upgrade when my hardware dies, altho this hasn't worked well for me - in my family, 3 computers died when Vista came out...sigh
Ubuntu, the other white meat!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
You may remember Windows Compact Edition- only Microsoft could make a product whose all-but-official nickname meant "grimace in pain." Well, for WinCE, MS decided to shoehorn the desktop- complete w/the Start Menu- onto phones of the day, phones that had much smaller displays than they do now. Well, with Win8, MS did exactly the opposite thing: instead of shoehorning the desktop onto a phone, they blew up a phone to desktop size. The result is... interesting. But not convincing, and certainly not interesting enough to motivate significant numbers of people- especially not corporate buyers- to upgrade their current desktops.
On the corporate side, you've got plenty of potential buyers who are perhaps only now finishing upgrades from Windows XP- which was patched to "good enough" status after a few service packs- to Windows 7. These potential customers are *not* interested in spending time and money to upgrade systems to Windows 8, given both their recent investments in upgrades to 7, and in the cost of retraining employees to use a completely new desktop metaphor. Look up Neil Stephenson's term "metaphor shear" for more about that.
-Z
Paul Redford, chairman of Manchester-based Computer Planet, has sold more than 500 systems in January, with only 20% of them running Windows 8
The custom build is a tiny slice of the retail market in the states. It is a desktop market in a world that is going mobile.
I am wary of stories that begin like this:
"according to several system builders contacted by PC Pro."
That doesn't tell me how big the system building market is in the UK. That doesn't tell me whether PC Pro is basing its numbers on a representative sampling.
-----
The geek obsesses over the loss of the start menu. My aging eyes are telling me a very different story.
How was 98 SE crap? 98 and its SE were similar IMO.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Before, you were able to walk into a Best Buy and start poking around with the touchpad of display laptops to get a feel of Windows 7. But now display screens are covered with mockups of Windows8 UI??
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Their appearance was similar. There are many changes in 98SE that proved to be both good and bad. It had better support for USB and AGP video cards, but it also enabled full PNP. PCI cards would go wherever they wanted and it was not uncommon for half the devices in your system to be on the same IRQ. It was tolerable unless you had buggy hardware like the Acer laptop I had or an AMD CPU + via chipset motherboard.
I had to reinstall 98SE every three months and I only used it for gaming. It would blue screen randomly. It was a flaming pile.
Conversely, NT4 SP3+ was a nice OS with only one flaw. Drivers could kill the kernel way to easily. Iomega's zip drive drivers were quite bad as were some scsi controllers.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Ah interesting. I did not know about the hardware support. Thanks.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I was not aware that Seven had yet reached that level of penetration. Last I checked, a double-digit percentage of new PCs came with Windows XP installed. When did this change?
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
My new laptop came with only windows 8 as an OS option. I was bummed, my last laptop purchased only a few months before allowed me to choose.
There are some good and bad things, but I think the worst thing is the app launch pad. Windows users come from a tradition of expandable menus that reflect an underlying branching directory structure. Taking that away and expecting them to utilize a nebulous blob of apps defines "counter intuitive".
But, I wouldn't go back. For one thing, I broke myself of the anxiety of needing a physical map to my applications' own private holding pens. For another, I enjoy having everything available to me displayed at a glance.
Something else that bothered me at first was how many things appear to be "missing". But they aren't missing, they just haven't been pinned to anything. These days I much prefer hitting the windows key and typing what I'm looking for rather than "navigating" anxiously through a bunch of annoying, expanding "menus" to get to something I'm just going to click one time anyway. And if it's not an app, it's not something I'm using every day.
Why should a shortcut to my firewall be sitting on my desktop or even in a menu tree? When I need it, I'm already cognitively thinking "firewall" anyway, so I've come to enjoy just typing that out and getting my result. The app/component search feature strikes me as a "closer" interface than a menu system. It's how I'd do things if I was using a CL, so of course it strikes me as more efficient.
I was also anxious about installing my first (and so far only) actual Windows 8 Application. There's some kind of dedicated process to the installation involving signing into a Microsoft account. The installation appeared to be, for lack of a better term, "seamless". Of course, Microsoft owns Skype and it's a hugely popular app, so it probably represents the very best of any possible Windows 8 experience.
But I was able to install and quickly start using Skype in minutes. I was never able to accomplish this in any previous version of Skype and I've been using it since it was released for XP.
One more hiccup I confronted was the "gestures" interface. I panicked when I couldn't find any way to get to an app's settings. Where was the menu? I learned that you have mouse-over and hover in the bottom right corner of the screen. A generic menu will slide out and offer options that are universal and options that are specific to your app, including "settings".
I was upset about this until I realized that it had eliminated some actual work while also de-cluttering my work space. I normally don't like the thought of a "gesture" interface and when I heard it was the future of Windows, I groaned. Now I'm actually glad to be using it.
Another great feature is that Windows 8 happily offers itself up to be re-installed or factory restored. I was worried this was due to some instability, and that was correctly apprehended. It is a fairly unstable system. I hope all the kinks get worked out in time.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Clarifying points (because I'm a "submit first think later" junkie):
1.) Restoring the Windows 8 installation from the protected partition sectors takes moments on a 3GHz machine. Restoring to factory state takes less than an hour, but fans of Windows XP and Windows 7 may be dismayed to find that the Windows 8 Windows Update process more closely resembles the sensation of the Windows VISTA WINDOWS UPDATE PROCESS , which deserves to be in all caps, because when else was the last time you thought you were going for a coffee break and ended up having the entire department down your neck over "When is this fucking thing going to be done? YOU SAID IT WAS ALMOST DONE!"
2.) I have to admit I've also learned "try installing and running fewer things, it's more disciplined, you'll learn to utilize those apps in new and better ways." But that's because I was running BBS's in the early 90's and using computers since the mid-80's. Not every computer user today understands or can comprehend what it means to utilize some function of an application in a new way that gives it some sort of meta-productivity. Users of "elite" apps like {C0MM0} can relate (so can users of "sane" operating systems), while people who were born after ICQ was already dead simply can not. What it means is that I've accepted that *sniff* I love my life living under the *sob* people's republic of the *boohoo* Microsoft corporate marketing scheme.
3.) Everything these days is getting eerily close to Bill Gates' vision of everybody running dumb terminals while all of their apps and data are stored securely in servers in godawful locations like the bottom of the middle of the ocean or the moon. So Windows 8 just resembles a nasty venereally diseased widow that I just knew somebody was going to try to hook me up with, who I've since been somehow betrothed to and now have to perform my marital duties upon the sake of my own life.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Win98se-"this new version of windows is bloated, with security holes and just a update of the last one, stick with the old version"
next update
WinXP-"this new version of windows is bloated, with security holes and just a SP update of the last one, stick with the old version now that it has sp2"
next update
Win7-"this new version of windows sucks and is well... its not bloated or insecure anymore but its not like the one before it, stick with the old version now that it has sp2"
Rinse.... Wash... Repeat
Apparently Metro UI is the worse thing to happen around here, really?
I am having a feeling that an SP update will change minds around here. I never understood the whining around here about Win7 and I always spoke against it, but prevailing mod points won. Of the irony of the ass kissing of Win7 now to try to prevent people from using/buying Win8, I saw the same kind of stories shared here when Win7 came out and how terrible it was. You could obviously tell the credibility factor represents nothing of the real world on here, but still.
What happened to the whole "you only need a browser and text pad to accomplish all your work on the computer". Personally I don't like the Win8 right away, but than again I didn't like the Win7 taskbar and converted back to classic. Now I use Win7 taskbar all the time, personally they need to add the lower left windows icon to the same corner again and have the taskbar popup as if I had checked 'auto-hide taskbar'.
Use Linux day to day, and Windows where I have to. I have a legit Win 8 Pro upgrade and a home built machine: i7-2600, 16GB RAM, Nvidia 8800GTS, no built-in video. I cannot get Win 8 to install on this machine, never get to the "Personalize" screen after the reboot during install: just a black screen. No diagnostics, no safe mode available unless the machine can boot far enough to get a display, no failed to boot menu because Win8 thinks it has booted successfully. Great experience all round...
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
up to 93%...
well that's a useful metric... and title to get clicks to your article and what about the sample size of the other companies and were those customers businesses or home users? I don't see businesses jumping on a new OS if there's a tried and tested OS available. But hey M$ right?
If you're trying to argue that Star Trek: Nemesis was any good, imma hafta stop you right there.
Obviously most firms won't be rolling out systems with a new OS most firms will await service pack 1 before they even think about it. Just like every OS since Dos 3.1
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I can believe it - bought son a new laptop two weeks ago and John Lewis was swarming with people all asking for (and not getting) Windows 7. So we acquired Windows 8 and it took the whole household, and Google, to find such essential features as *shutting the damn thing down*.