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HP Brings Back Windows 7 'By Popular Demand' As Buyers Shun Windows 8
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Gregg Keizer reports at Computerworld that Hewlett-Packard has stuck their finger in Microsoft's eye by launching a new promotion that discounts several consumer PCs by $150 when equipped with Windows 7, saying the four-year-old OS is 'back by popular demand.' 'The reality is that there are a lot of people who still want Windows 7,' says Bob O'Donnel. 'This is a twist, though, and may appeal to those who said, "I do want a new PC, but I thought I couldn't get Windows 7."' The promotion reminded O'Donnell and others of the dark days of Windows Vista, when customers avoided Windows 7's predecessor and instead clamored for the older Windows XP on their new PCs. Then, customers who had heard mostly negative comments about Vista from friends, family and the media, decided they would rather work with the devil they knew rather than the new one they did not. 'It's not a perfect comparison,' says O'Donnell, of equating Windows 8 with Vista, 'but the perception of Windows 8 is negative. I said early on that Windows 8 could clearly be Vista Version 2, and that seems to have happened.' HP has decided that the popularity of Windows 7 is its best chance of encouraging more people to buy new computers in a declining market and is not the first time that HP has spoken out against Microsoft. 'Look at the business model difference between Intel and ARM. Look at the operating systems. In today's world, other than Microsoft there's no one else who charges for an operating system,' said HP executive Sridhar Solur in December, adding that that the next generation of computers could very well not be dominated by Microsoft." Also at SlashCloud.
1) Relabel Windows 7 boxes "Windows 8 Desktop Edition"
2) Raise prices
3) Profit
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
HP has the pull to get MS to fix windows by 8.2/9 or maybe and this is a long shot get mac os X on there hardware.
Any non-business is just dealing with the Start Screen or installed Classic Shell.
Windows 8 is designed around a touch-screen interface; one that is a struggle to operate via a keyboard and mouse.
For entertainment, a touch-screen interface is fine. But, believe it or not, people *still* do *real work* on desktop PCs. And for that use case, Windows 8 is a massive productivity downgrade.
Let's call a spade a spade: the touch-screen interface SUCKS on a traditional desktop or laptop PC. It's not a matter of "trying something new". It's a matter of using the right tool for the job, and the touch-screen interface is the WRONG tool for this job. To be fair, the linux touch-screen interfaces don't belong on a PC any more than windows 8. They belong on phones and tablets.
'Look at the business model difference between Intel and ARM
TFA didn't clarify what he meant by this. Maybe he meant the business models in the different realms, rather than the companies themselves?
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Read Paul T's column on Win Supersite. Windows 9 is going to have a start menu for desktop-centric uses.
Is HP providing an easy upgrade path from 8 to 7?
My daughter is going to College in the fall. She is by no means tech savvy. But she was choosing a Cromebook with local storage instead of anything win8. And she likes a windows phone.
adding that that the next generation of computers could very well not be dominated by Microsoft
People make now these revolutionary statements, but they will forget fast. Behind the scenes, Microsoft is likely already fixing what sucks about Windows 8, including bringing the Start Menu back. After the release of next Windows, this little (extremely expensive) Win8 mistake can be swept under the rug just like ME and Vista. But something which Microsoft knows best is keeping their foothold of running Windows on every PC. I bet Ballmer and Myerson are just spinning around in their office chairs laughing and saying "no, Mr. HP, you will be running Windows".
You can still buy pre-installed Windows 7 on a Dell (business section).
If Microsoft are determined to shoot themselves in the foot, by failing to let people have what they want then so be it.
Philip
Philip
Signatures are broken
1) Why would you buy a PC from HP? The amount of crapware on the laptop we got for my wife several years ago was downright pathetic -- what should have been a fast machine was dog slow because HP has embedded dozens of things little more useful than Clippy ("I see you are near a wireless network, the HP Network assistant is here to help"). The sheer amount of garbage rendered the machine unusable without hours of disabling stuff. (In fairness, the mother in law's Toshiba had the same problems, because vendor builds suck.)
2) Will Microsoft even allow this? I should think they'd be saying "nope, you can't sell those any more".
3) Wow, Windows 8 much be a turd if people are going back to a four-year old OS. Someone missed the mark by a long shot.
4) "adding that that the next generation of computers could very well not be dominated by Microsoft." From the numbers, it would appear that Android is well on its way to dominating the next generation of computers, even if people here don't think tablets are actually computers. Microsoft is no longer competing with Apple and Linux, they're competing with Google.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Windows 8 showed total disregard for the installed Windows 7 user base and is a travesty just like the stupid ribbon that was forced on upgrading Office users. Microsoft (ie Balmer) should have its nuts crushed. What a bunch of idiots.
What's to fix other than the stupid metro interface?
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.
Actually, if the sales numbers are to be believed, people just aren't buying new PCs at all.
The costs for OS development is just added to other items instead - but one still pays for the OS! That even includes most uses of Linux (think about it).
.. is Windows-XP back. Also by popular demand.
How's that migration coming along for you??
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
I hope that means a proper menu with expanding options off it - not the 'fuck you' compromise in Windows 8.1 where a 'start button' brings up the supershitty touch interface
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
That's it entirely, but you say it like it's something small. That's like saying, "what's to fix on the Pontiac Aztek other than the butt-ugly exterior?" Or, "what's to fix in the New Jersey government other than all the corruption?"
Pretty much exactly this.
Except for RAM, the vast majority of PC users will never fully max out their machine. They won't even get close to what the CPU can do. Even 10 years ago when someone asked me what kind of PC they should buy, I would tell them to buy the oldest machine they can find with twice as much memory as they think they need -- because in my experience, lots of RAM contributes more to the longevity of a machine than loads of CPU.
Nowadays, I think gamers and people doing heavy-duty work are the only people who need to be upgrading regularly.
The latest and greatest is often not all that great, and the differences between the old and the new are incremental.
For many many people, the PC they've had for several years now works just fine and doesn't need to be upgraded. For many more, a tablet will cover 90% of their needs 90% of the time (and, yes, that's a completely contrived statistic).
Microsoft made crap tons of money over the years by people being on the upgrade treadmill and getting the latest version of Office. And that is no longer a compelling reason for most people -- I know I use more .doc files than I do .docx files, and I'm not sure I could name a single feature in the latest Office which is any different than the previous version.
And, quite randomly since they mention Vista -- my main PC is a machine I bought in '09 with 8GB of RAM and 4 CPU cores running Vista, and with many TB of disk space. Having thrown a lot of resources at it, I've actually enjoyed Vista. On small machines it was a resource hog, but if you gave it lots of resources, it was actually pretty good in my experience.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
New Jersey? I say we nuke the site from orbit its the only way to be sure :)
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.
If you do that, you'll have to nuke the entire US to be fair. NJ's main fault is that it isn't quite as good at hiding its corruption as many other states. This whole country is hopelessly corrupt.
Actually, if the sales numbers are to be believed, people just aren't buying new PCs at all.
Well, if you ignore the nearly one million PCs sold every day last quarter.
By not making a smooth transition, you open yourself to new problems and probably a wall of hesitation and strong defence. For example, making the new version of DirectX only available to new versions of Windows 8 and same thing with Windows 7 when xp was available was just plain wrong especially for developpers and gamers alike.
Let's face it, a big portion of pc users are gamers which are very important for the pc industry. I rather have a smooth transition than forcing me to use Windows 8 at a certain point. While its true that I don't see a neccessity to get Windows 8 for now its starting to show that certain apps and games are Windows 8 only or so imcompatible that Windows 8 might be the solution
PC Gaming enthousiast that gives comments, opinions and reviews on Games. I'm just having fun with games while doing let
I have a W8 convertible (Sony Flip, fwiw), and the touch screen part of W8 isn't what makes it suck, it's the apps and the keyboard implementation. There are no fullscreen/touch browsers other than IE, and if you have any other browser set to default IE won't come up in touch mode. And even if you do decide to use it, it turns off all/most extensions. WTF? And the keyboard - which doesn't include an alt key by default - doesn't come up automatically or provide any auto-correct or heuristic input help in anything but IE and MS Office, as if MS put those functions into the apps instead of the keyboard function. Whomever did their usability study must have done it in a sterile environment.
As for actual operation when in laptop mode - yes, the Metro interface is bulky for regular operations, but it's more of an annoyance than an actual hindrance. Like all the modern ribbon interfaces the new fullscreen trades finger-accessibility and pretty graphics for efficiency in the form of extra clicks and mouse movement to start programs.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The consumer market is migrating away from the desktop to mobile devices enmass while business clients couldn't give a rats ass about some GUI eye candy. The Metro interface seems to prove, to me at least, that Microsoft has lost its way. If MS doesn't quickly segregate it's development to "consumer" (devices) and "business" (desktops) the next five years are going to be brutal for their bottom line.
but how can you shun Windows 8 while its the only windows OS available in stores pre-installed ? MS do force customers to use Windows 8 when they buy a pc since they come pre-installed with Win8. Unless they take some refurbished pc or laptop with Win7
PC Gaming enthousiast that gives comments, opinions and reviews on Games. I'm just having fun with games while doing let
So someone brought back Windows 7 and it just happens to be the one with the lowest quality laptops with the highest failure rate since numbers were kept. They also are in the bottom 3 worst rated support quality. So to me, this is absolutely nothing. By the way, if you want a computer that doesn't suck, my shop has sold about 20 toshiba laptops from Toshiba Direct. They still have some systems with Windows 7 Home Premium that are built at the factory to order for around $400 with free shipping. They're quite nice too and fully featured. Why is there no "Toshiba brings back Windows 7" headline? Because they never actually stopped shipping it in the first place.
I guess someone at Microsoft believed the hype about it being all about tablets, and tablet OS's. They keep saying crap like PC's are dead....blah blah blah. They still sold more PC's in the last quarter than all of the ipads that have been sold in total ever. I still go into work everyday and sit down at a PC. Not a tablet...not some weird ass touch screen thing, a normal windows computer...running windows 8. Thats right...I'm using 8...well 8.1. But here's the thing, there is no way in hell I would push out a Win8 image to my users right now. Everything is in a different place. Why is there a metro control panel that does only some things, but you have to go to the real control panel to do others? UG One OS to rule them all isn't paying off so well for Microsoft. I haven't heard anything about Windows phone in a while. Windows 8 is still being treated as the evil stepchild. I am hoping 9 takes us back to a place where computers have an OD, and devices have an OS. It's time. Let's get it done. And once that's done, we need to take a look at this OS release cycle, I think this is the root of the problem. We aren't updating, we are overhauling everything. We are trying to come up with crazy ass ideas to replace the wheel that already works. Let's get back to basics.
This, soooo much.
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
I'm pretty convinced that most of the cause of slow PC sales comes from the fact that people just really don't need a faster newer PC every few years anymore. Couple that with people buying tablets and I doubt Windows 8 has much to do with it. Not nothing, but not as much as some people want to believe. Once I bit the bullet and installed 8 once, I started installing it everywhere, because after a few hours of becoming used to it ... it's better. I don't use "Modern" apps, they don't work for me on a desktop, but 8.1 is better than 7 in every way for me.
Except for RAM, the vast majority of PC users will never fully max out their machine. They won't even get close to what the CPU can do. Even 10 years ago when someone asked me what kind of PC they should buy, I would tell them to buy the oldest machine they can find with twice as much memory as they think they need -- because in my experience, lots of RAM contributes more to the longevity of a machine than loads of CPU.
This is probably true, but I don't think most people have realised this. Recently, when a colleague's Win 7 laptop started to run slowly she announced that it was time to get a new computer. Most people I know really do seem to believe that when a computer starts running slowly that is indicative of some sort of flaw that can only be repaired by a violent hardware change. It either doesn't occur them that a reinstall of Windows can fix the problem or they don't have the skills/confidence/motivation to perform the operation.
soylentnews.org
What is wrong with the Start Screen vs Start Menu?
The Start Screen can:
Except for RAM, the vast majority of PC users will never fully max out their machine. They won't even get close to what the CPU can do. Even 10 years ago when someone asked me what kind of PC they should buy, I would tell them to buy the oldest machine they can find with twice as much memory as they think they need -- because in my experience, lots of RAM contributes more to the longevity of a machine than loads of CPU.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but I figured I'd lend a me-too to support what you're saying --
I have a gaming system. It's 2 years old. Core i5 2500k, overclocked at 4.8GHz, with 16GB of RAM. I bought it for $1000, 2 years ago, and haven't needed to upgrade anything. Not even the video card. It's currently connected to the TV via HDMI, with an xbox controller connected to it, and I play Steam games on the big screen with it. It'll be a while before it needs any kind of upgrade, in part because I've gone to Linux on the gaming machine (was originally Windows 7), and in part because since buying a Playstation, I don't see much point in playing the rat race on the desktop.
I'm currently typing this on a 3-year old Dell Vostro v130n, which came with Ubuntu 10.04, 2GB of RAM, and a dual core 1.2GHz Sandy Bridge celeron. The version of Linux that's on it has changed to something much more modern, but other than that, it does *everything* I want on a laptop. I literally cannot see any reason to ever replace this laptop before it dies a horrible death. That could happen as soon as I click submit to this comment, but it could also be years before that happens. My next laptop will probably be a chromebook... wiped for my preferred flavour of Linux, but the majority of computer users wouldn't even need to do that, because ChromeOS does everything they want with their computers for a fraction of the cost of buying a Windows machine, let alone something like a Macbook Pro or Air.
Win NT and 2K were "business" OS's, not consumer. They were also priced accordingly.
The real question is whether this kind of push-back from OEMs will convince Microsoft to let Windows 9 users fully opt-out of Metro in favor of a classic desktop experience. Individual users are easy to ignore, but when OEMs (not to mention large businesses with volume licenses) are telling MS that Metro just isn't happening on the desktop, maybe they will have no choice but to listen.
Except for RAM, the vast majority of PC users will never fully max out their machine. They won't even get close to what the CPU can do. Even 10 years ago when someone asked me what kind of PC they should buy, I would tell them to buy the oldest machine they can find with twice as much memory as they think they need -- because in my experience, lots of RAM contributes more to the longevity of a machine than loads of CPU.
That was not very good advice 10 years ago. While true that OEMs typically sold you a minimum of RAM, hobbling your customers by telling them to buy the oldest machine in the shop was poor advice.
Modern advice is that you need at least a dual-core CPU (makes the O/S much more responsive) along with lots of RAM. For XP, my recommendation was a minimum of 2GB and once RAM got cheaper, 4GB. For Win7, a realistic minimum is 4GB, but 8GB is not that expensive and will work better long-term.
The drop in SSD prices also means that consumer SSDs are a strong recommendation for the primary O/S drive. Even on an older Vista/Win7 machine (that is at least dual-core), dropping in a SSD can breath new life into a machine that seems too slow to be useful. My Thinkpad T61p from 2007 is still a useful machine because it has Win7, 8GB RAM, dual-core CPU and a SSD.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Before you label this as another "year of linux on the desktop!" post, hear me out
I have a retired neighbor that knows nothing of computers, but being retired he needs something to do all day. So with Vista, he uses the internet to connect to his car club and use email with his car club friends. He also uses websites with a fair degree of competency. He is so unsure of himself though, that he asks me hoe for help on a fairly regular basis with questions like "What happened to the little man?" (MSN sys tray icon, discontinued in 2013, replaced with Skype, and yes, that was another question) and "Where'd my icon go?" and plenty of other questions regarding the changing behavior of websites. He's got a very static view of things.A friend of his was also a victim of a virus that stole his banking into, so he was very concerned about that.
So when he asked me what laptop to get, and being on fixed income, his needs were simple, and I didn't want to have to field questions about Windows 8, which would have been a nightmare. Dual mode? Charms Bar? Yeah right.
So I set him up with Linux Mint 15 (Cinnamon) on a bargain laptop from Newegg that came with W8 on it. I pre-configured automatic updates for everything except applications (security and stability) and set the theme to the XP theme (He had previously used XP) very literally and let him have it. I got one question from him since. How to install solitaire. Stupid me, I forgot to show him the Software Center. Its installed now. I check in with him from time to time and he got a MyFi for it, and his girlfriend (also not very computer savvy, but better than him) configured the MyFi, and I never heard a peep. He's had it about 4 months now and only that one question. Not a complaint and no little men have disappeared.
Year of Linux on the desktop? No, but for him it is.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Just be thankful you weren't in the market for a new machine when Vista came out. I looked around and the best deal in my price range was a C2D, 1 GB HP laptop. Should have upped the RAM to 2 GB, but didn't have the cash at the time. Vista itself ran all right performance-wise, but it was the drivers crashing, updates that hosed the OS, and a few other things that made me pull my hair out. Turned off windows update and manually installed the troublesome drivers (wifi, sound, video) and never looked back until SP1 came out. Couldn't nuke and pave quick enough when I got access to the Win 7 RTM through school.
Actually they never stopped selling Win7 , at least into the business market. Many desktops were Win7/8 Pro
Don't get me wrong, the only reason why I upgraded to Windows 8 was to get a cheap upgrade to the professional version. That said, Windows 8 is not as horrible as many people make it sound. For the most part, you don't have to deal with the modern interface. That's even true on stock systems. Once you have launched your application, you are dumped to the desktop You don't have to leave the desktop to switch between tasks either. Frequently used applications can be pinned to the taskbar, just as you did in Windows 7. This means that you pretty much see the start screen after you boot up, bump into the charms bar for shutting down, and may have to go into the modern UI to tweak a few system settings. Outside of people who support Windows, you shouldn't be doing that stuff very often anyhow.
Is Modern itself a disaster? Well, yeah. Even ignoring the bit about a touch UI on a desktop computer, there is a lot wrong with it at so many levels. But that's not the point. The point is that you don't have to use it very often on stock systems, and it's deadly easy to avoid altogether with a start menu replacement.
Yeah, so? That's a heck of a long way from 'people just aren't buying new PCs at all'.
BTW, aren't Mac sales up significantly? I know several people who've dumped Windows and gone all Apple in the last few years.
That was not very good advice 10 years ago. While true that OEMs typically sold you a minimum of RAM, hobbling your customers by telling them to buy the oldest machine in the shop was poor advice.
That depends on what someone wants to do. (Also, I think the GP said the cheapest, not the "oldest.") If all you want is something to do basic word processing, email, web browsing, etc., why not? You can often get the cheapest computer for 1/2 or 1/3 the price of something moderately "up-to-date," and then if it gets slow in 2 or 3 years, you can just buy a new cheap one, and still be ahead in cost.
I build my own desktops, but for laptops, I just buy the cheapest thing I can find and have for many years. I have a 4.5-year-old netbook that cost $250 which I only recently retired from use because of a power connection issue. Aside from being choppy when used for high-quality video, there were very few times I noticed annoying slowness (and if I wanted to watch video, I'd just use a different device). I replaced it with another sub-$300 laptop which works great.
Modern advice is that you need at least a dual-core CPU (makes the O/S much more responsive) along with lots of RAM. For XP, my recommendation was a minimum of 2GB and once RAM got cheaper, 4GB. For Win7
Ah, I see the problem -- you're using Windows. With the flexibility of different Linux distributions, you could be running stuff with very light desktop environments. Heck, I have an 11-year-old laptop that was only low-to-mid range in specs at the time, but it still works well with a light Linux distribution. (The battery is long dead and not worth replacing, so I don't tend to use it much these days. But a year or so ago I needed a spare computer for a project, so I installed a light Linux distro, and it was quite responsive... probably more so than it was with the original XP version installed on it when I bought it.)
The drop in SSD prices also means that consumer SSDs are a strong recommendation for the primary O/S drive. Even on an older Vista/Win7 machine (that is at least dual-core), dropping in a SSD can breath new life into a machine that seems too slow to be useful.
Meh. While I agree that an SSD can make a newer system seem even more speedy, I don't know that it's going to fix some old clunker by itself. On an older machine, the bottleneck is most likely to be either RAM or processor or both if it feels "slow." Sure, you might see an improvement in loading times for applications, but for most normal everyday tasks, the SSD isn't going to result in a performance boost on an old computer for >90% of the time you're actually using it... unless you're doing something requiring heavy caching or something, in which case you'd be better off paying for more RAM rather than an SSD.
But I agree with you on a new system -- get the SSD if the cost is reasonable, though for many folks that will require two drives to get enough space (SSD for primary stuff and OS; traditional large HD for large data).
It:
1. Fits too much crap on your screen at once disorienting you.
2. Doesn't function as a logical tree-style menu.
3. Covers the whole screen.
So you pretty much reworded all the bad things about it to sorta kinda make them appear to not be horrible. Well done. You will have a good career in either advertising or politics.
That's it entirely, but you say it like it's something small. That's like saying, "what's to fix on the Pontiac Aztek other than the butt-ugly exterior?" Or, "what's to fix in the New Jersey government other than all the corruption?"
The Aztek is actually a bad comparison. Other than it's hideous appearance it was actually a pretty good vehicle. (Particularly for a GM product of it's era) If the blueprints hadn't of fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down it would have been seen as a pioneer of the crossover SUV rather than an epic failure of design.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Pretty much this, except that even gamers don't actually need to upgrade as often as before, due to hilarious situation with most games being coded for lowest common denominator of three main gaming machines, two of which are horrendously out of date consoles. Next generation of consoles will probably trigger a limited need to upgrade the older gaming rigs some time late this year as games that are actually designed for those consoles at the very least may be too much to run well on older gaming machines.
That said, don't expect much of a change. The new consoles are horrifyingly behind mid range gaming PCs released two-three years ago and this time their architecture is the same x86/amd64 as modern PCs. There's not going to be much need for overhead due to lack of PC optimizations this time.
I'm a gamer and do some fairly heavy duty work (though I know some do heavier). I bought a new machine about three years ago as a gift to myself for graduating and I wanted to play with an i7 machine. So far I have a hard time maxing the processor out even running multiple games at once. I wont upgrade for some time, except maybe new graphics cards.
It scares users. When my mom types something in a word document and a start button or something else directs her to the full screen thing she freaks out and thinks she has lost the unsaved document.
Not to steer this into a Windows-vs-Mac discussion, but I gave up on the garbage products that are being made by Microsoft. I'm no slouch with computers and have built most of the ones I have owned. Having been a Microsoft user since DOS 6.22, the frustrations with Microsoft products over declining reliability, increasing malware attacks, and re-learning where MS has moved common utilities along with re-learning new keystrokes has pushed me to the Mac world. My WIN2K system mysteriously ceased to recognize my CD drive, and HP no longer makes the ink cartridges for my printer which isn't even ten years old! We use WIN7 at work and Microsoft went the wrong direction with the new IE8 and Windows Explorer (I HATE the mouse-over features, VERY annoying).
Since upgrading would had required replacing my entire system, I opted for a Mac Pro. You pay more but you get what you pay for. It is more reliable than MS, HP, or Dell can ever dream. The learning curve to OSX was easier than I imagined and OSX is far more intuitive. I had been eyeing the Mac for ten years and purposely stayed away from Windows-centric file formats, thus when I jumped ship all of my file formats translated seamlessly. Apple has inexpensive word processor and spreadsheet software on iTunes that will import Word/Excel files with few compatibility problems. OSX is not immune to viruses but I have yet to suffer from an infection. I don't regret the move one iota. I have upgraded OSX from Lion to Mountain Lion to Mavericks without replacing any hardware or paying any 'apple tax'.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I read about this yesterday on zdnet and Win7 has always been available from the major OEMs:
Nothing but marketing tactics from HP, move along, nothing to see here...
When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
Most people I know really do seem to believe that when a computer starts running slowly that is indicative of some sort of flaw that can only be repaired by a violent hardware change.
Actually, many people I know really do seem to believe that when a computer doesn't do what they expect it should that is indicative of some sort of flaw that can only be repaired by a violent hardware change.
"My email doesn't work anymore! Should I upgrade?" (saved wrong password)
"I can't find the buttons I used to have! Do I need to upgrade?" (accidentally hid toolbar)
"I can't hear any sounds on my computer anymore! Do I need a new one?" (volume on mute)
This is particularly true of older people, who don't really understand anything about how a computer functions. I've heard of someone recently who thought a new computer was necessary just because she wanted to change her email address.
So, yeah, when you have folks like this, there definitely is a much larger pool of people who would have no idea how to attempt an OS reinstall or how to "clean" their system to speed it up again.
Before everyone gets their knickers in a twist, read this article by Ed Bott.
In short, this is just a marketing stunt, OEMs are still allowed to keep selling Windows 7 machines for quite a while yet and the number of Win7 machines that HP are selling hasn't actually increased (in fact, it's gone down by 1 - from 4 in August to 3 now).
Now we've sorted that out, I'll let you all get back to the regular programme of bashing Windows 8... :)
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This promotion actually made me go over and check HPs website out, only to be disappointed that the two laptops offered both had 1366x768 resolution screens. Come on HP. You outfit this Envy laptop with the latest i7 and 12GB of RAM, and then hobble it with such a lousy screen? I don't care what the operating system is, no sale.
That's exactly my point. It doesn't matter how great it is underneath if the thing is so fucking ugly it makes you vomit every time you have to drive it. "It's so great, except for the ugly looks!" Yeah, well, how do you fix the ugly looks? You don't. You take it as-is, or you leave it. Most people choose to leave it, and pick something else, which is why the Aztek has been credited by some as being the main reason Pontiac no longer exists.
Really? This has to be explained to you? Some of us use more than one application simultaneously, often spreading out over multiple displays. In this case, starting new programs should not be a full screen focus grab. Using the mouse to ponderously scroll through piles of huge tiles on a huge display is tedious compared with a little menu in the corner. Now if you don't like clicking through folders, I understand, but that is more the fault of vendors who insist on adding extra layers so as to get you to see their brand name regularly. However, it can be fixed easily by the user. A nicely laid out start menu is far superior to any other convolution anyone has come up with. The big tiles thing is fine for constrained touch only devices, but not workstations where people require open ended workflows and no fingerprints on their monitors.
I think I would still pick 8.1 over Windows 7. Metro does suck but it is tolerable and the OS is otherwise very stable and fast, even more so than Windows 7. Microsoft really fucked up though by treating mouse/keyboard/monitor users like second class citizens in an upgrade to their own operating system.
let's have Ars technica review the win7 offering, even do a side-by-side benchmark & performance comparison against Win8
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I disagree in one respect - cache counts. From my experience, the main-line Intel CPUs typically have two to three years longer useful life than Intel's budget cripple-ware CPUs.
Old computers work great... NOW... But certainly didn't a few years ago. When Flash video took over the web, with no hardware acceleration and utterly horrendous performance, the fastest machines a few years before would struggle to play postage stamp sized videos.
A few years before, computers were only just getting fast enough to display 1080p H.264 videos... Then Flash was inflicted upon us, and we went through another round. If not for the horrible Flash plugin, computers would have been fast enough, several years before they finally got there. If Flash (and YouTube) was updated to H.265 today, we'd have another few years of prosperous computer makers, and mobile devices rushing to catch up.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It is - and that's why it was nice that the pizzabox HP I got a month ago came with a virgin Windows 7 SP1 restore disk, so it was easy to blast away HP's crapware (and the 10 gig restore partition) and start over.
Of course, it took the next two hours to download and install updates (on a fast connection), since the jerks at Redmond never made a Service Pack 2.
You forget that Google has not written their own OS. They have customized the kernel and written their own display manager, among (to be fair) a fairly respectable number of other changes. However, they started with Linux, and
will still return 'Linux'.
You have more or less the Filesystem Heirarchy Standard, a limited but unixy shell, and anyone who has cut their teeth on the command line should feel at home. It doesn't by default let you install packages from the command line, but that's to be expected: the biggest security threat to a system is the user, and they need to be able to support a specific subset of features, as opposed to every combination of packages and configurations.
Point being though, they got 98% of the system for free, and the changes they made have been mostly in a fairly common vein. They're hardly the first to create a Linux-based appliance. And of course they get to draw on all of the Chrome-browser efforts.
With regard to your general point, it must be remembered that Microsoft originated the idea of an operating system as being something that was sold directly to consumers. At the risk of being predictive, that is beginning to seem like a bizarre anomaly, and it is difficult to see where any other future business could possibly duplicate their success, even the future Microsoft.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Its genuinely inappropriate for a menu to cover the entire screen
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Newflash: I *want* to drill through folders. When you have enough items, organizing them into folders is the only way you'll find stuff.
I would also settle for it only being accessible via voice interface by saying, "Windows, show me my shit all at once!"
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Here's what I don't get: When I work with a phone or a tablet, I usually hold the screen at a certain distance, so that all the information displayed therein is on a fixed arc of vision. When I work on a PC, I sit in front of a screen. That screen may be big and far, or small and close, but, generally, it occupies more of my vision than a mobile screen does. It is therefore more tiring to scan items displayed all over the screen, which is why interface design (before Windows 8 screwed things up) put list-information and menus in part of the screen. To spray it across the whole screen is fatiguing. But Microsoft never understood that people have screens that are physical sizes and not fixed arrays of pixels. Hell, Windows 8.1 gives me a great choice on my 13.3" full-HD touchscreen: either have Windows do a crappy scaling job to make the screen look like a blurry 720p screen, or render everything properly, but at a resolution where the interface's touch points are smaller than the accuracy of anyone's fingers.
Windows 8.1 has some great things: it's really fast, for one. But Metro sucks, the touch-screen implementation sucks, and all that useless corporate "change for change's sake" sucks. Building software is different from selling clothes (or building hardware). Interfaces don't have "fashions", and retraining operators every three years makes your product less relevant than having them be dependent on your idiom since forever. Just ask Adobe.
The ribbon was introduced in Office 2007, which was first released in Nov 2006.
Not even the original iPhone was out (or even announced) yet, much less tablets. Touchscreen devices at the time (PalmPilot, etc) used styluses, not "fat fingers".
So no, they most certainly did not introduce the ribbon as something optimized for touchscreens. The marketing hype at the time hailed it as "more discoverable" than the previous system of nested menus and unlabelled toolbar icons.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Actually, if the sales numbers are to be believed, people just aren't buying new PCs at all.
Except for RAM, the vast majority of PC users will never fully max out their machine. They won't even get close to what the CPU can do.
That's an interesting point which does not seem to hold up when I read Slashdot. It looks to me that there are 2 conflicting generalisations:
1) the vast majority of users does not max ou their 5 year old PCs
2) all application and web development these days uses too much of all PC available, especially if you use Firefox, Javascript, antivirus and all the bloatware that is pre-installed on new PCs.
So which one is it?
The way I see it, the iPad and Macbook Air show what PCs could optimise in terms of performance: use SSD, use smaller apps (iOS) and and use app markets to offer an easy way for software developers to make sales.
That's the opposite of what happens with the more conventional PC market with laptop computers. A well stocked shop can have laptops with 5 different screen sizes, 20 different CPUs and a varity of HDD sizes, but only a small minority of high end machines have SSDs. If HDDs became secondary storage or more manufacturers accepted to start their price range a bit above the current levels, then there would be more conventional PCs "feeling" fast.
As things are, people are paying more for less CPU power, getting crude applications, spending money on subscriptions and still can claim that the iPad/Android tablet is faster than a similarly priced PC. And they're not wrong.
This was exactly what I did a decade ago when I built my first computer. Maxed out the memory and went with a cheaper CPU (950 T-Bird). System still works and is capable of running Win7-32 due to having 1GB of RAM. Could already see the writing back when still using 98 as the changed requirements from 95 to 98 was a doubling of system memory. Me increased em again then XP came out and needed at least double what Me required (256M minimum/512 to be usable). Hell that system is even capable of running Vista though it would be dog slow - not Vista's fault.
When asked, I recomend at least 8GB for a home user with 16GB as the max for Win7 Home. If they need more, they need the Pro as Home is limited to 16GB (artifically). My current system had the memory maxed out (store bought HP) as soon as possible and I recently upgraded the CPU from a dual to a quad core as I tend to load em a bit. Kept the old CPU as it offers a working chip if I replace/build a new system around a socket 3 board.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Wouldn't be surprised if they rebrand it "Windows Classic".
and this is a long shot get mac os X on there hardware.
Mac OS X doesn't have a start menu. Wouldn't that freak out the same people that cant use Windows 8?
So? What else do you need to look at while selecting something from a menu?
You're right. When I open the bookmarks menu in Firefox, everything on my screen should go away and be replaced by a scrolling mass of big tiles. It just makes perfect sense.
Not everything has to be a tree control.
You're right. When I look for Photoshop to start it, it makes no sense for it to be under 'Adobe', with InDesign and Premiere. They should all just be scattered at random in a big scrolling mass of tiles.
WTF? I mean, really, WTF? Aren't /.ers supposed to have an IQ higher than room temperature?
That why most of us can see what a disaster Window 8 is.
Mac OS X dock is a little like the the start menu. But it's not full F*** screen and you don't get pulled to full screen built in apps by default as well.
It is a bit easier to figure out which Windows operating system to use:
If your computer has a touch screen, use 8.x
If it has a regular screen, use Win 7.
If the software you just bought says "Windows 98 or better"
install Linux.
:)
Agrisea Tsunami - Epyc Servers... https://agrisea.net/products
You're right. When I look for Photoshop to start it, it makes no sense for it to be under 'Adobe', with InDesign and Premiere. They should all just be scattered at random in a big scrolling mass of tiles.
You can put Photoshop, InDesign, and Premiere under a column called 'Adobe' with the Start Screen...
advertising or politics.
There's a difference?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Really? This has to be explained to you? Some of us use more than one application simultaneously, often spreading out over multiple displays. In this case, starting new programs should not be a full screen focus grab.
I asked why you would need to see the active application and the open menu at the same time and you didn't provide me a situation
Using the mouse to ponderously scroll through piles of huge tiles on a huge display is tedious compared with a little menu in the corner.
Wouldn't the fact that the smaller menu has less items visible mean even more tedious scrolling?
Now if you don't like clicking through folders, I understand, but that is more the fault of vendors who insist on adding extra layers so as to get you to see their brand name regularly.
I love the false dichotomy that the Start Menu can be organized but the Start Screen can't
A nicely laid out start menu is far superior to any other convolution anyone has come up with.
Yeah pack it up for we have reached UI Utopia, anything else is a 'convolution'. Nevermind the fact that people were saying the same things about Windows XP's start menu when Windows 7 was in development
.
The Start Screen is, simply, the worst possible UI design I could think up while keeping it still technically usable.
Fitting more shortcuts on the screen at once isn't a good thing. It just increases the clutter.
Drilling through folders is a good thing. It lets you keep less frequently used stuff out of the way, but still easy to find when you need to find it. (And don't say you can just start typing the name of the program you want instead of drilling down. I don't know the name of every program I rarely use, so I'll still be hunting, but in a more difficult way.)
Take advantage of the whole screen is a bad thing. It breaks my mental continuity and flow every single time. I don't want to switch completely away from the desktop to perform an operation on the desktop. That makes no sense at all.
The Start Screen is 1/3 of what makes me hate Windows 8 (which I've been using daily for over a year now). Another third is the "hot areas" you hover your mouse over, and the last third is those damned charms.
The problems with Windwos 8 are all centered around trying to make it both a desktop and a tablet interface. Those two are very, very different use cases and trying to cover them both in a single UI is guaranteed to make that UI suck in one case or the other (or both).
I have been calling that the "fuck you" menu since they announced they were putting the start menu back and we saw what it did...
the touch menu us unweildy, and many professionals have a LOT of muscle memory for tasks.
they have not just moved a few things, they have completely removed a primary tool.
What is wrong with walking in the middle of the street? Sidewalks are so much more restrictive!
third party mods have put the menu back with NO ISSUES WHATSOEVER.
none. Works flawlessly. this is not a complete re-work- this is putting a goddamn sticker on a fucking window kind of easy for microsoft, to abuse your analogy.
I'm surprised HP doesn't apply an OS X look-a-like theme to Windows 7 to make it look "original, unique and innovative".
As a user of both Macs and PC's, I find what was supposed to be your sarcasm as actual truth. You could time transport a user of early Mac systems, and set them down in front of Mavericks or Mountain Lion, and in a very short time, they would be able to be running programs.
On the other hand, I still have to go to the web to figure out how to do stuff on my wife's W8 touchscreen laptop. W8 is original, unique, and innovative.
Not to be confused with good.
The secret is that the Mac OS' are set up so that you can do things remarkably similar to the W8 Metro start screen, Launchpad. What's the difference? Never have to see or use it. It doesn't force itself on me at startup, and I don't have ot install third party apps to make it look like it used to. About the only thing that is so different about the newr Mc OS' form the earlier ones is the Dock, and that seems pretty intuitive. In any event, it's hardly mandatory.
On the other hand, take a W95 user under the same circumstances, and set him down in front of a W8 computer running Metro, and tell him to check out his internet configuration.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Mac OS X dock is a little like the the start menu. But it's not full F*** screen and you don't get pulled to full screen built in apps by default as well.
It's very much like a start menu. The closest thing to Metro on the Mac is the Launchpad. You can access it by mashing the F4 key. Not many people use it though.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I had a chance to log in and remotely look at a buddy's Win 8 system.
The big problem I noticed was all those tiles there that I would never ever use. "Photos, Facebook, Gmail, Other Social Media, Calendar, Contacts, ..." and I can't remember the other 20.
Holistically it's that all those things are dumped there, vs in the old days I use my desktop space for what *I* want there.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Any new PC is hard wiped as soon as I open the box. I then reinstall a clean version of the OS licensed to that box on it, harden it, add malware prevention, and add the software that I (or the wife) will need.
Crapware? I quit worrying about that in the early 90's when Packard Bell started doing it. It baffles me that everyone does not do it.
They are not the same thing. Nobody who needs the efficient input of keyboard and mouse does their work on a table. That said, yes, there are a lot of users who don't need that but, because they had no other choice, bought PC's. The WinTel consortium is losing those users. Microsoft _might_ be able to hang on to some of them with a free mobile OS, but I doubt it. That ship has pretty much sailed.
Find the chipset of [Whateverhardware] and locate Win7 drivers for that from the manufacturer. No, not HP or Dell, from who made the part. BroadComm or Intel or Creative.
While it is possible some piece of hardware has been made to work on Win8 only, I have not found one yet.
They tried to make several games DX10 only (Vista), with DX10 not available on XP. End result was not more Vista sales, but abysmal sales of those games. And some were pretty damn good games. A little DLL hack allowed them to play on DX9 without a flaw, so it was not a compatibility issue..... it was pure fuck-fuck games from microsoft.
You failed to mention solid state drives. They are a huge game changer for any desktop lacking one.
"Recursive bipartite matching"- try it!
A simple fix would be:
1. Bring a proper non-fullscreen hierarchical Start menu back.
2. Let Metro apps run in regular windows on the desktop and show them in the taskbar.
A third party (StarDock) has already implemented both of those, so it's not rocket science.
The equivalent of OS X dock on Windows is the taskbar. It's still there in Win8, and works same as before (except for the Start button).
Ya, the "default" applications seem overall less useful than the defaults you'd get on earlier systems. Given their design most feel more like web pages than applications. What's missing are some basics, like a notepad, file browser, or a game. The other huge drawback is that they all want to be full screen, great for a phone but stupid for a large monitor.
Overall I treat them just like OEM junk. Except that once you remove all the pointless ones you end up with only one button, "Desktop".
I find it amazing that we still have to explain this stuff, as if it wasn't obvious.
They all want to be full screen true. But 8.0 had the 1/3 2/3 view which is still better than iOS let you do. 8.1 added better multi-mon support so you can have a modern app on one screen and your full desktop on the other. The apps can now be arbritary size and up to 3 per screen I think it is.
The default applications were yet more marketing junk: if it didn't come with a Facebook app on the start screen people would say "it can't do facebook, I better get a iPad". Anyways: store apps pre-installed: fluff for casual tablet audience. Store forced as landing page/on the desktop: marketing fluff so they can tell developers there is this huge market their apps can run on vs "the other guys". In actuality desktop/tablet markets are almost completely separate and Windows has ~0% of the one market and ~90% of the other.
Didn't we go through this same nonsense with Windows 7 and XP? Call it buggy software or just a resistance to change, it is effectively guaranteed that in 3ish years the headline will be the same, about a major OEM offering disgruntled low-end consumers the last-gen OS as an option. It does NOT signal the death of Metro, or the supremacy of 7, or even a policy shift at MS - it's a vendor kowtowing to consumer demand.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
Technically, neither Windows 8 nor 8.1 are terrible OSs. Technically.
The incredibly, stupid, clueless fail, flowed from the top (as corporate fails inevitably do). The new desktop-inappropriate GUI was shoved down everyone's throat. No option. You're a captive business audience, so learn it or go fuck yourself. Spent a few years, or decades getting familiar with Windows and its quirks? Tough shit. Learn it all anew, and *pay* for the privilege. Find that difficult? Time consuming? Not our problem.
Oh, and we're going to make damn sure the OS is almost impossible to figure out without a manual, a map, and GOOGLE (how ironic), because we can't be bothered to hire, or listen to, professional human-factors experts. I mean, they're not developers or management. What can they know? Right?
So suddenly, the breathtaking lack of regard that had previously been reserved for Microsoft's development community was heaped on *everybody.* And everybody's leaving. Android is looking good. Linux Mint too. Why not? Seriously Microsoft. At this point, WHY NOT?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
advertising or politics.
There's a difference?
advertisers can be sued for false advertising and are held accountable for not fullfing their promises
politicians can say whatever the hell they want including lying and are not forced to fallow through with their promises.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
You're right. When I look for Photoshop to start it, it makes no sense for it to be under 'Adobe', with InDesign and Premiere. They should all just be scattered at random in a big scrolling mass of tiles.
You can put Photoshop, InDesign, and Premiere under a column called 'Adobe' with the Start Screen...
With the start screen I have to where it should have been put in the first place
With a start menu it is already where it belongs.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
You can literally poop in a can and someone will buy it. But you will see sales fall compared to last year when you were selling bacon.
Oddly, I always liked the simplicity of the Win95 UI, and Mac OS pre-OS X, and light linux desktops with tiny programs that ran blazingly fast on 10-year old computers. Under the hood these had their problems and newer interfaces at least do more for you, but I really can't see that these old paradigms have been improved upon by successors at all. We get hardware that's orders of magnitude faster, only to install bloatware UIs that drags the speed back to what it used to be before. Zero sum gain.
I kept an old Mac running the old OS9 just to use a codec that Apple had dropped from OSX. Both Apple and Microsoft would occasionally have fights with codec vendors. But since I needed to occasionally view or convert a video encoded that way, I had to keep the machine.
It was pretty responsive, as you note.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You sure work hard trying to defend the indefensible. Unfortunately I have bad news for you - you can scream "windows 8 is awesome and everyone who doesn't like it is a moron" until your throat bleeds - and no one here will care. Because they experienced it for themselves and they know it's a turd.
And sadly, people like you are the major cause of the problem. The louder PR people like you scream, the less people at microsoft feel pressured to actually deliver something people would want to use. And so, crappy thin clients like Chrome OS actually grab a significant market share.
If you're a MS shill, you're exceptionally dumb. If you're a google shill, you're exceptionally devious.
Good luck with that. The only thing I can do that maxes out CPU is encoding video. I have a G15/G13 on my desk, and one of them typically runs the cpu load/ram consumption applet, and I usually don't see CPU go over 50%, pretty much ever.
Yes, okay but I still miss my 386.
2 second boot time after BIOS screen.
Programs such as the music player, file manager and Wordstar all launched in less than 1 second.
Load times much more than that was a sign that something was badly wrong.
In some ways we have moved backwards...
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Well, it does try to push you into a roaming account, and adding printers is now completely retarded, but those are relatively minor issues I wouldn't even notice if it wasn't part of my job to add those printers.
You're right. When I open the bookmarks menu in Firefox, everything on my screen should go away and be replaced by a scrolling mass of big tiles. It just makes perfect sense.
Not an actual counterargument. Ignored.
The bookmark menu is a menu, not an application. The items contained in it are small hence the menu should be small, not fullscreen. Same goes for the start menu, the clue is in the name, it's a "menu", something you can flick through if you need to which tucks nicely away when you don't. I certainly don't want it to make picking an item difficult. That's why we use hierarchal views, because grouping similar things makes them easier and quicker to find. It's not even a complicated concept to grasp, I mean, do you keep all of your belongings in one big box?
The old start menu had two areas. A quick launch menu, which you can customize, and a "all programs" button which took you to the tree view. The new start screen has two areas. A quick launch menu which you can customize, and a "all programs" button which takes you to a tree like view, where you will find an Adobe section, with InDesign and Premiere, presuming you have them installed.
I wouldn't call an alphabetised list of everything installed on your computer even remotely "tree like".
Your earlier logic that smart people shouldn't become disoriented doesn't follow at all, and "Not an actual counterargument" is not an actual counterargument if you don't tell us why.
How does one pronounce Windows 8? "Arf, Arf"
While I agree with you, I actually really like the start screen on Server 2012.
I frequently use 10-20 applications on my 2012 systems. It's too many to reliably pin to the task bar (MS really needs to fix that), but not so many that they are difficult to locate. It takes me about one second to hit the Win/CMD key and click a tile.
Granted, I don't use powershell. And I prefer to admin every other OS through shell.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
OK, so now that HP has pulled their head out of their *ss and realized that NO-ONE likes Win 8, are they going to release any drivers for those of us who bought their "Envy" systems and need the drivers for Win 7 so we can make those "Envy" systems work properly?
Or, since they already have our money, are we SOL?
Hmph. SOL it is, then.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
Got my dad a new ultra book and hence a by default Windows 8 machine. About the most useful thing I learned was to use ALT-F4 for everything. If there was an alternative way to shutdown applications I could never find it. Trying to teach my dad shortcuts for stuff works as well as you might think. Installed windows shell on it and it works a bit better. Still you should be able to easily configure a choice of UI really. Am I a tablet, am I not a tablet, my computer doesn't really know.
As someone who used NT at work, I can tell you the number #1 "feature" improvement for 2000 and XP was USB support. At the time everything what coming out with USB versions of stuff. For a couple of years we were forced to by more expensive yet outdated equipment because it was serial, or parallel, or even SCSI (had a special SCSI card for scanner). Much of the hardware had the USB ports, but couldn't use any of them.
Not sure if they still do it anymore, but while Apple does sell their OS as part of their HW, they also used to sell it by itself. Not only that, it came in one version (not 3+). Not only that, but it cost 30$, not 400$. I know bc at the time I looked into making a hackintosh. They may have nixed the idea now, but for a time, while they may have sold it, they did so in a reasonable fashion.
It's 1980s to use a computer provided for you? Man do you guys have some learning to do when you get out in the real world.
You make too many assumptions. I've been working in the real world for a long time.
Nearly all dev software is free these days, and for anything that isn't free, I'd rather pay the cost to have it on my local machine than be stuck in a lab all day.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.