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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."
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.
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?
No its not, all those shell replacements do is HIDE metro but do NOT kill it, so all that tweeting twitting FB crap is still sucking memory and bandwidth, you just can't see it. Not to mention that unlike Win 7 a good chunk of the programs in win 8 are ADWARE so you also have to figure in the time to remove that crap.
This article just confirms what any of us little shop guys could have told you, nobody wants Windows 8. There really is no point in windows 8 unless its on a cellphone or tablet and the "extra speed" is frankly just a VERY bad hack (look up "hybrid boot" to see what is actually happening, you no longer can get a clean start of Win 8 without going CLI, instead you get hybrid boot which is more like hibernate than shutdown) and Win 7 on an SSD more than makes up for it.
If for no other reason refuse to take windows 8 on principle...I mean do you REALLY want MSFT to continue in this direction? Stuffing the OS full of ads, making UIs that look like a 14 year old with ADHD went nuts with a box of crayons, not to mention trying to drive us towards an appstore?
Windows 7 is fast, its rock solid stable, and most importantly IT JUST WORKS and will keep on working until 2020 at the least, so why get stuck with something you don't want and tell MSFT its okay to ignore the users like that because you're willing to "put up with it" and try to hack your way back to a functional OS? Just say No to Metro, if enough people just say no then MSFT will have no choice but go back to the drawing board and fix their mess, just as they did with Vista.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.