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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...
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.
Next year. April 2014.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
XP is still tolerable but gets it support removed this year
What, AGAIN?
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
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?
No doubt. I think MS would have been better off had they called their mobile OS "Metro" and left Windows for their desktop OS. Trying to blend the two is a disaster waiting to happen. Really, that's not even true, it is a repeat of the same disaster that has been happening to MS for a decade as they've tried to establish Windows on tablets and mobile phones, only now going in the other direction. Sane people create an OS that is suitable for the conditions in which it is to be used. MS creates an OS and decrees it is suitable for use in any conditions. At one point, they had the power to make that (mostly) stick. They no longer do.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Up to?
So, 0% of British PCs may be sold with Windows 7 on them?
That terminology bugs me.
From TFA:
Redford's Computer Planet isn't the only British firm struggling with the launch of Windows 8. One company told us that of the 1,459 machines it's sold so far in 2013, only 7% have left the factory with Windows 8 installed. A spokesman said that "Windows 7 fulfils the requirements" of its customers, and that driver issues and the unfamiliarity of the new OS was putting people off.
Win8 is just horrible win 7 is at least what vista should of been ..
That's because W7 is the service pack for Vista. Also, the phrase is, "should have been".
XP is still tolerable but gets it support removed this year
XP is far superior in numerous ways to W7. What used to take seconds is now a long, drawn out process of burrowing deep into menus or worse, having to go someplace else to make a change to where you are currently at. Add in that setting a folder view is not consistent across drives, you can't see every program installed through the butchered Start menu or if you mistype a network path through the Search box you can't immediately retype but have to wait for the timeout to occur, and W7 is a classic example of why you never let programmers design your applications.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Although i'm a fervent mac hater i must admit Win8 felt much much worse than any MacOS i've ever tried.
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?
Tolerable? There is barely any practical difference between winxp and win8 to me, apart from the amount of money that was theoretically supposed to have left my wallet in between them in order to support the development of further versions of windows that I didn't need or ask for. Necessity being the mother of invention after all. The only way I even notice they are still making them is the artificial barriers they include in every new version in order to make people who don't slavishly fawn over them suffer. I have no idea how they manage to make so much noise and yet achieve so little.
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.
Windows 2000 was also a win.
The ideas behind Windows Vista were sound, they were just badly implemented until about SP2. Windows 7 was Vista done properly.
The difference with Windows 8 is that the whole idea of having a single interface for both tablets and desktops was wrong. It's not that there are some annoying bugs that need to be fixed, the whole specification of it is flawed. For Windows 9, Microsoft will need to either go back to the drawing board, or alternatively release a Windows 7.1 that brings any new under-the-hood stuff to the Windows 7 UI.
If MSFT keeps screwing with their licensing terms, ala Office 2013 for us folks who aren't connected all the time, I won't be buying it so no worries.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The article is about PC builders who are installing Win7 at the customers request, not high-street retailers where customers are not given a choice. This is not Slashdot trying to convince everyone Win8 is terrible, it's PC buyers who are rejecting it when given the option.
and black people hate change, and yellow people hate change, and red people hate change, and brown people hate change...
The pattern:
95- Crap
NT- Good
98- Crap
98 SE- Good enough
ME- Crap
2000- Good
XP at launch- Crap
XP after a near complete rewrite through service packs- Good
Vista- Crap
7- Good
8- Crap
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
There is no harm in trying to look the same but the desktop overlooks the fact that hardly anybody has a touch screen monitor and not many people are likely to get one whilst they sit vertically on the desk.
It makes sense in a tablet or phone format but if you have a separate keyboard you may as well have a separate mouse and this makes the whole touch interface redundant.
Win 7 was, and is, great. It does what it's supposed to with some flaws but flaws that are easy to live with.
Windows 2000 was also a win.
In terms of quality at release, Windows 2000 is unmatched by any other version of windows save perhaps 3.51. All the problems with Windows 8 seem to lie in the interface, which differentiates it from other hated versions of Windows. It's a shame Microsoft can't admit failure in a timely fashion.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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!!!
So what is XP looses support ? We have 3 XP machines, they havent received updates in months, maybe years and still work 24/7. I would not be surprised to have them until 2015 or later, given no major hardware failure.
One company told us that of the 1,459 machines it's sold so far in 2013, only 7% have left the factory with Windows 8 installed.
A quick googling came up with this:
The U.K. PC market totaled 3 million units in the first quarter of 2012
So far in 2013 should be about half that or 1.5 million units, so this is a company with about a 0,1% market share. I think we already know Win8 is not doing great from browser stats, but this is just a way to create a big headline.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You can still use Office 365 offline (the licence lets you download the desktop apps). Of course, you have to pay for it every year.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
The difference with Windows 8 is that the whole idea of having a single interface for both tablets and desktops was wrong.
You're mostly right. But the idea is to have a single interface for tablets, computers and *phones*. I'm on my second Windows Phone, and the interface is the best in the industry (ie: better than i* and Android) for smart phones, as far as I'm concerned. That being said, I haven't spent any time with Windows 8 on a computer. I still use XP at work and home, for the most part.
I don't respond to AC's.
XP is still tolerable but gets it support removed this year
In my opinion, I think that XP is much better than Windows 7 in lots of ways. It runs much, much faster on the same hardware than Windows 7. When I recently had to switch to Windows 7 on my home server because I bought 3 TB drives (there's no way to get XP to work with 3 TB drives natively), I had to swap out computers entirely, because Windows 7 was such a dog on the same hardware. Even with a fancy new-ish PC running Windows 7, the performance is still rotten compared to my ancient PC running Windows XP, with the exact same functionality.
I don't respond to AC's.
It isn't the fact that the screen is vertical that would prevent people from getting a touch screen. As much as people looking for an excuse to hate Win8 want to deny it, a touch screen does not have to, nor should it replace a mouse and keyboard. The problem is that a touch screen is way to expensive for most people to rationalize for the functions it would improve. Without lots of people buying the touch screens the price will stay to high.
So, MS overdid the touch features on their OS in an attempt to push users to buy touchscreens. If enough people buy them, the price will come down. Unfortunately, since MS overdid the touch on Win8, they gave people who want to hate Win8 an valid excuse and pushed a lot of people who wanted to like Win8 in to the hating Win8 camp along with them.
Absolutely wrong.
Service pack 1 added native support for USB 2.0. The OS did not ship with this support (much like Windows 7 added official USB 3 in SP1).
Service pack 2 completely redid the security system in XP: the firewall that was ALWAYS included was switched on by-default, they added native support for the NX bit (hardware-level protection from buffer overflows), and they created the new Windows Security Center to BUG PEOPLE to make sure their computer was secured (could see the state of Firewall, Antivirus and Automatic Updates, all in one place).
That's a huge orbital drop of features in my book!
Windows XP today is impressive, but when it first launched it seemed no more than a carbon-copy of Win2k with a pretty skin. This change in OS featureset is entirely due to the service packs.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Why am I reminded of Star Trek?
....plus there's the fact that the XP-64 was shit. It was and is buggier then hell, lacks drivers for common hardware as no one was offering them - high end was decently supported but forget about most workstations and printers! Drivers simply weren't there even for most corporate printers.
Amen brother. I also had several games that I had purchased for my (then new quad-core intel w/8GB RAM) that *refused to install* because they thought it was a *server* OS. *sigh*
XP-64 was simply MS saying "Wait guys, don't defect... we have 64bit for the workstation too!!!"
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
But the idea is to have a single interface for tablets, computers and *phones*.
So that brings the idea from "wrong" into "brain-fucked stupid."
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
Floopy disks! The smoke of choice for all true nerds.
Win 3.51 was a lot better than DOS4! On a good day, you could probably read a file and network (using add-ons), although not necessarily in the same hour.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
ME was released after 2000.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
It isn't the fact that the screen is vertical that would prevent people from getting a touch screen.
Yes, yes it is. The industry learned that lesson in the 80s. Of course, we like to repeat our mistakes every 20-30 years in this industry, so who knows.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's worse than you think: they missed a very smart play for this nonsense. A single system-level API for tablets, computers, phones, and the X-Box would have been an amazing thing. The same UI is exactly wrong: the same API call for, e.g., a context menu, producing something appropriate for each platform would have been great - and while you can't go very far in that direction on the UI, you sure can on the system-facing parts. If the same system call gets me a new file in the right place for, e.g., program settings, on a phone, game console, or server, it would be far easier to hire devs for any of those platforms.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.