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OEM Windows 7 License Sales End This Friday
colinneagle writes This Friday is Halloween, but if you try to buy a PC with Windows 7 pre-loaded after that, you're going to get a rock instead of a treat. Microsoft will stop selling Windows 7 licenses to OEMs after this Friday and you will only be able to buy a machine with Windows 8.1. The good news is that business/enterprise customers will still be able to order PCs 'downgraded' to Windows 7 Professional. Microsoft has not set an end date for when it will cut off Windows 7 Professional to OEMs, but it will likely be a while. This all fits in with typical Microsoft timing. Microsoft usually pulls OEM supply of an OS a year after it removes it from retail. Microsoft cut off the retail supply of Windows 7 in October of last year, although some retailers still have some remaining stock left. If the analytics from Steam are any indicator, Windows 8 is slowly working its way into the American public, but mostly as a Windows XP replacement. Windows 7, both 32-bit and 64-bit, account for 59% of their user base. Windows 8 and 8.1 account for 28%, while XP has dwindled to 4%.
Windows 7 64 bit
I think Windows 7 is going to be the last Microsoft OS I'm going to buy. Linux is free. Hell, even OSX is free. Yet MS wants to keep gouging customers $100+. Uhm, no thanks.
Especially since you can use the Safe Boot > Repair Computer > and this batch file to have "unlimited" time to "register"
Microsoft doens't want Windows 7 to become the next Windows XP and denying them years of upgrade revenues.
Because I will NEVER use your windows 8 junk on a desktop. I gave it a fair chance, 2 weeks of uses and it was 2 week of utter shit.
I find it hard to believe that there's this big mass of home users out there who
1. Have a problem with pre-installed Windows 8.
and
2. Use only the pre-installed OS on the PCs they buy.
If 1, then why 2? If 2, then why 1?
Well we can start with the memory limit. I'd only be able to use 1/4 of the RAM in my laptop if I had the 32 bit edition of Win7.
Sauce: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-c...
I run virtual machines, large development systems, etc. This likes to have more then 3.5GB of memory to allocate. Thus 64bit.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
If you want to run Windows on a 4GB system, be my guess. But you need a 64-bit OS to see more than 4GB of RAM. Most motherboards can run 16GB or 32GB.
Or maybe you could stop living in 2002.
Have you seen the size of some PC games these days? Limit your OS to 4GB of ram? Are you insane?!?!?!?
On a sidenote, I can use up 4GB of ram in my laptop pretty damn fast. Perhaps your computing needs aren't quite as heavy as other users. Like say, power users. Dare I say, step up your game a bit?
Man, I'm sad to see this go. Even the Extended Support will end in January 2020 which comes sooner than we know. Yes, Windows 10 is bringing the classic desktop back, but it seems that it is becoming a unelegant mishmash of Modern UI widgets and classic Windows widgets. I guess it's back to Linux-land, the place where I camped during the whole Windows XP era.
That's a pretty low UID for such a stupid post. When did you buy it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
So the shareholders can stop complaining.
Gotta love capitalism.
32 bit cannot utilize more than 4GB ram. These days most new PC's come with 8GB as standard, and some even 16GB.
That's the big reason to move to 64 bit.
wouldn't the informed argument be stop developing 32 bit? That would solve your running parallel versions of things. And seeing that there's practically no difference in speed between the two, the more memory would be nice.
Mh... Maybe for coding or just reading email 64bit is irrelevant, but in the world of graphics, 3gb of ram is completely insufficient.
I've only used windows in my life since linux simply doesn't support any of the software that I use; but in windows you can't get more than 3gb of ram in 32bit.
If there are any other advantages to 64bit, no idea. But this alone is enough for me.
You just listed all the reasons why they should stop developing 32-bit.
I'm shocked to see such a comment from someone with a four digit UID. Maybe today the difference between 32 and 64 bit isn't obvious, but Window 3.x, a 16 bit OS, didn't become unusable immediately following the release of NT4 and 95, but could you imagine trying to use 3.x in, say, 2004?
Remember, no one needed more than 640k of ram at one time, either.
Posts like this are why we need a "+1 Stupid but funny" option. This comment is so ridiculously uninformed that modding it up makes no scene, but it is enjoyable simply for its stupidity.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Are you trolling or what?
If you have a single process that needs to use more than 1.6 - 2.0 GB of memory ... you need the 64 bit version. And on top of that, if you've got 4 GB of memory the OS can use about 3 GB (total) due to the way Windows handles things.
The vaunted promise that 'things will run better and faster'
Who made that promise? I don't recall ever seeing that.
The bad thing is that things get a little bit wonky if you're trying to run old 16-bit apps on a 64-bit OS. Built-in emulation and Dosbox are not perfect solutions.
For the rest of us, a 32-bit OS with 2-4 GB of RAM is more than enough to meet our daily needs. We're not running some super intensive stuff which requires 8 GB or more RAM.
The drivers are also different for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. Yes, it is already 2014, but 32-bit drivers tend to have less problems.
Has no one here ever heard of Classic Shell? That should the absolute first software you put on a fresh Windows 8 install.... www.classicshell.net
My Windows XP 64-bit SP1 (AKA server 2003 without the server tools) still works perfectly fine. While I don't have dx11, I'm not going to drop $100 on the rest of the horseshit that is Windows.
For all those who herp-a-derp about viruses and whatever. Only a fool would use a windows machine on the internet.
If your biggest concern is running 16-bit applications, then stick with XP. Don't drag everyone else down because you're stuck on antiquated software.
goodbye sweet prince.
The better chess programs use bitmaps to do state manipulations.. 64 bits.. 64 squares...
You'll be going slower trying that on a 32bit machine..
They must forfeit all privileges granted by copyright and patent law to allow others to pick up.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I wonder how many other benefits it brings?
Are the 64 bit registers and arithmetic used often, or would that have more of a scientific number crunching (corporate) application than anything else?
Or can they sometimes cram two 32 bit numbers in a register and process a 32-bit program twice as fast?
I assume that that 64-bit opens up a lot of extra room for processor commands. Do they use more commands making bitcode more succinct and faster?
And of course it would make them quicker to execute as more data can be crammed into a single word (The Word length would go up to match the number of bits, I assume. I think I remember working with 32 bit words in univ, so that makes sense)?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Well over half the Steam hardware survey's machines have 4GB or more. A 32-bit OS means you can't actually leverage that amount.
Are you drunk, or trolling?
My 2TB drives wouldn't have worked with a 32-bit OS, because they can see count past 4GB.
My machine with 8GB of RAM, also wouldn't work on an 32-bit OS, for the same reason.
The ability to have files over 4GB, also can't be done in a 32-bit OS. I have HD video files which are bigger than a 32-bit OS could address.
My 2GB VM running as a guest machine? No way I'd be able to do that on a 32-bit host.
Those servers I have at work with 32GB or RAM, again, not something you do on 32-bit machines.
So, what the hell are you running which in no way benefits from the address space of a 64-bit machine? Is it steam powered?
Because those of us in the real world are routinely doing things which 32-bit OSs couldn't handle.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Quick!! Let's buy some extra licenses now before it's too late!
:-/
Oh wait...
Never mind, we switched to Linux a long time ago already
I am not really here right now.
There is no earthly benefit to running Windows as 64bit
How about 16Gb+ RAM in ArcGIS or AutoCAD? You quite literally don't know what the fuck you are blabbering about.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Chapter 11, that is, for Microsoft.
To OEMs
But won't the OEMs stock up on Win7 (especially if they sell to the business market.)
Actually that is a MS licensing limitation. It does have nothing to do with the system being 32 or 64bit, because stuff like PAE was developed long ago to fix it, yet MS only implements it in server editions.
I can tolerate the Windows 8 UI on the desktop. It's the huge push towards cloud services for everything that I really dislike. I can see it now. Bundle and save! Get Windows, Office365, OneDrive, Skype, and XBox Music for the low monthly price of $XX. It's like triple play services for your computer and you'll get to pick from 3 competitors; Apple, Google, Microsoft. Of course all the pricing will be eerily similar even though they're "competing".
PAE is enabled in normal editions as well. The issue is that a single process can still only access 4GB, and there is nothing PAE can do to fix it.
There are times when you don't have a choice, but then, I agree, XP is a good solution. Or the XP emulation built into 7 Pro.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I buy a downloadable copy online for $75 that comes with a license key that registers as genuine.
I hope it's still available after October since I still have a few XP boxes to upgrade.
www.digisoftstore.com/Windows-7-Professional-SP1-64-Bit--Download-_p_265.html
Microsoft charges for upgrades which Apple does not. Over long run, this adds up to the cost of machine for customers. For MS, this is costly too as it has to maintain multiple versions of Windows. I think, microsoft should have option of unlimited upgrade either as a single charge or a reasonable subscription service. That will keep most customers (at least premium customers) up to date all the time.
Windows 7 will be a around for a very long time.. but I suspect it will be the last OS they have a monopoly on.
Anyone remember the background on boot for Windows 95, and all the controversy over "hidden shapes"?
Oh, the irony it was the cloud that killed Windows by rendering, largely, OS agnostic computing.
..don't panic
32 bit cannot utilize more than 4GB ram
This is incorrect, x86 can address up to 64GB of memory with PAE or 16GB if using PAE with AWE and the /3GB switch. MS limited desktop OSs to 4GB partially due to market segmentation, and partially due to a large number of consumer oriented drivers that failed validation if PAE is enabled.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
ArcGIS and AutoCAD are specialized professional software which most people do not run.
If you are old enough, the mind starts to go.
Grounhog day forever!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
The OS can address up to 64GB with PAE, but each application is still limited to 4GB for use.
Sometimes old people get stuck in the past.
Back in *my* day, we had to measure addressing power in tenths of a bit! Hell, if your machine ran half a bit you could run circles around anything that anyone needed, or will ever need!
Damn bit-addicted whippersnappers.
No, AWE allows more than 4GB in a single application, SQL Enterprise or Oracle 10G running on 2003 x86 Enterprise can utilize 32GB just fine, I know because I ran just such a configuration back in 2006 before x64 was mainstream.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
As someone who has investigated what the compiler (.NET) does on a 64-bit machine I can answer your questions somewhat:
Are the 64 bit registers and arithmetic used often, or would that have more of a scientific number crunching (corporate) application than anything else?
Yes. The original registers were ax, bx, cx, dx, si (code pointer), di (data pointer), bp (byte pointer), sp (stack pointer). As you can see, there are only 4 values that you can hold at once. And cx and dx have special meanings in some commands, so only a and b are really free. This means that if you have even 3-4 local variables, most likely one or more are being stored on the heap. 32-bit doubled the size of all of these, but you were still basically severely limited to 2-3 registers at a time for actual programmer usage.
64-bit adds 8 more free and open registers (r8-r15). These can be filled with anything meaning that any subroutine that has local variables that go out of scope quickly most likely doesn't actually store these values on the heap at all anymore. This means that there is no memory access at all, which leads to much faster code.
32-bit goes up to 2 billion, so 64-bit math is rarely used for integers. But 64-bit floats are very common. And floating point math is much faster. Also, there are extensions for math like MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, SIMD, etc., all of which also have their own registers. And now people are using graphic cards to do really fast math sometimes as well.
Or can they sometimes cram two 32 bit numbers in a register and process a 32-bit program twice as fast?
You can, but with so many registers available now, there's usually no reason to so it rarely happens.
I assume that that 64-bit opens up a lot of extra room for processor commands. Do they use more commands making bitcode more succinct and faster?
All the new processor commands are called: MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, SIMD, etc.
It's not so much that the new commands make things more succinct, they just do more in hardware. For instance, if you have ever zipped anything, you have probably seen the CRC32 checksum that goes along with each compressed file. Well, that's now a command in SSE4.2. So you can have the CPU do CRC32 for you and it's 10-times (or more) faster than doing it in hardware. It's just a matter of whether, for instance, WinZip, 7-Zip, Explorer or whoever actually rewrites their code to use this CPU command. (And whether you downloaded a new version since they did this.)
Similarly, it's not a matter of whether a programmer knows about these commands, because these days most people write in Java or C#. It's a matter of whether the .NET or Java compiler gurus that turn the IL into assembly with on-the-fly compilation on your machine know about all these new commands. Since there is no CRC32 command in .NET, that command will never be used by most normal people, even if they are using CRC32's, because the Just-In-Time compiler can't tell that that's what their subroutine is doing.
And of course it would make them quicker to execute as more data can be crammed into a single word (The Word length would go up to match the number of bits, I assume. I think I remember working with 32 bit words in univ, so that makes sense)?
Actually, strings are a hair slower in 64-bit because they are usually UTF-8 or UTF-16 so characters are a little more inefficient to work with. I'm really not sure why there aren't new CPU instructions for the most common string functions for the most common string types. Maybe somebody can get on that. But I guess that most string handling is so efficient already that nobody notices that much.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
And for years, many poorly-written buggy drivers would crash immediately if PAE was enabled.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Most of those things can be done on a 32-bit OS when the CPU has a feature like PAE, but the fact is that even when not using desktop Windows (which is purposely crippled) you're far more limited than when in a 64 bit environment.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
MS clearly wants to force Windows 8 onto its users, even if it means pissing them off, we knew that from day one. This is clearly their last ditched method of getting it done.
Cant get someone to buy your "upgraded" product? Force them.
The sheer backlog of OEM keys will remain in circulation for at least 2-6months afterwards.
If you cant get a 7 Key after that, might as well buy a tablet. Then you can read on wikipedia about what computers were like before the "Useless Big Empty Square Monster" took over your PC.
Why not just run dos? Then you don't need any emulation at all.
My employer is only starting to move from XP (spend the last 3 days sorting the mess out with IT help desk). They won't be moving again or the next 10 years. The equipment with XP embedded is staying on XP.
Each application is still capped at 4GB of addressable space in PAE. So if you are hitting the 4GB cap because of lots of apps using a lot of memory rather than 1 app using all the memory, then PAE is a "good" solution. But upgrading to a 64 bit OS is probably a better solution.
Dealing with win 7 after running unstable branch of debian for 8 years.
MS is still a running joke watching the hard drive light chugging away. Then there is windows 8 which is a slap in the face. Beautiful and slow on a modern computer BEFORE any software is running!
An OS is not an 'experience' its a f**king Operating system to 'run' software. MS has long since forgotten this.
No, AWE allows more than 4GB in a single application, SQL Enterprise or Oracle 10G running on 2003 x86 Enterprise can utilize 32GB just fine, I know because I ran just such a configuration back in 2006 before x64 was mainstream.
Or you could use a modern OS which does it natively without any switches. Not to mention Windows 7 takes advantage of modern hardware which XP/2003 does not.
I've always hated the UID system... However, seeing someone with that low of a UID, stating that no one can state a single benefit of running Windows in 64-bit, is just ridiculous. I expect someone on Slashdot to be much more knowledgeable about computers than the average person, and this is a person who has been reading Slashdot since before the year 2000.
That's not "the issue" I was replying to, since barely anyone needs >3GB address spaces today. But even that is fixed on 32bit operating systems with AWE.
32 bit cannot utilize more than 4GB ram
This is incorrect, x86 can address up to 64GB of memory with PAE
But I have 65GB of memory, you insensitive clod!
One should be legally able to downgrade any version of the software he/she legally acquired. Without support obligations, of course. This will make the software market crippled by overly broad copyright laws much healthier.
That's because the promise was written on Balmer's dick and you were to busy shoving it down your throat to notice.
Thanks for letting us know, Captain Obvious! I almost ran out and bought a copy of each because I thought I was missing out on what everyone else was using!
There is no earthly benefit to running Windows as 64bit and no one can articulate what that benefit is. Oftentimes it makes things worse as one is required to run parallel versions of things and not even Java is a one-size-fits-all across the board. The vaunted promise that 'things will run better and faster' is complete nonsense and hardware vendors as it is find it difficult or impossible to create useful distinctions in drivers or even sort out which version is a maintenance fix for what. So they killed off XP? Fine. Killing off Win7? Fine. Killed off Win8 with no clear path forward whereas 8.1 isn't an upgrade it's a replacement? Fine. And now Win9 is Win10 and once again Redmond will give us 36 dozen different sub-versions? Wonderful. But let's at least disabuse ourselves that 64bit is meaningful.
Regarding the benefits of Microsoft OS 32bit vs 64bit
These values are a huge deal for Citrix (or terminal server) admins:
Paged pool 32bit: 550 MB 64bit: 128 GB /3GB switch, but it's unusual to do that with Citrix or TS
Non-paged pool 32bit: 256 MB 64bit: 75%RAM up to 128 GB
Page Table Entry 32 bit: 250K 64 bit: 33 M
System Cache: 32bit: 860MB 64bit 1TB
Note: 32bit values are much lower with
si = source pointer
di = destination pointer
bp = base pointer (also known as the frame pointer)
If you have a single process that needs to use more than 1.6 - 2.0 GB of memory ... you need the 64 bit version.
Unfortunately Firefox doesn't have official, stable a 64 bit Windows version yet.
However when they do they will have no problem leaking memory up to 16 Exabytes.
the next good version of Windows coming out?
I hear they're skippimg Win 9 and going straight to Win 10 which will presumably suck, so when is eleven coming out?
How can I use PAE when I am running it as a VM. Mind blown.
What you said did not refute that 32 bit can not utilize more than 4GB. PAE is 36 bit, not 32.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Linux is free. Hell, even OSX is free. Yet MS wants to keep gouging customers $100
We have been down this road countless times before.
In the general consumer market what people buy is the OEM Windows system install. Which tends to be a one time purchase for the life of their PC - with maybe one $15 to $20 upgrade to the next-generation OS.
When shopping for a new or refurbished PC or laptop, hardware with more or less the same specs will sell for more or less the same price, no matter what mass market OS comes installed.
Are you seriously that dense, or just trolling? The bitness is almost always referring to the size of an integer in the chips primary ISA.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I finally got a new Nvidia card this generation after debugging attempts to use /PAE with an older PCIe AMD card and discovering that the onboard Nvidia shared graphics worked. Turns out ATI/AMD never fixed their drivers to support PAE (they go 2d unaccelerated with PAE enabled), whereas Nvidia has support for their entire product line dating back to the 'legacy' driver packages.
Really cast AMD in another light for me regarding the driver support angle. And the Gen 2 GT6x0 cards are both cooler and more efficient than similiar 'budget level' AMD cards nowadays. If Nvidia just started throwing serious support behind OpenCL instead of Cuda/PhysX, I'd probably migrate to them full-time.
For instance, if you have ever zipped anything, you have probably seen the CRC32 checksum that goes along with each compressed file. Well, that's now a command in SSE4.2. So you can have the CPU do CRC32 for you and it's 10-times (or more) faster than doing it in hardware. It's just a matter of whether, for instance, WinZip, 7-Zip, Explorer or whoever actually rewrites their code to use this CPU command.
ZIP, GZ, and 7Z files use the same CRC32 as Ethernet does. SSE4.2 supports CRC32C (Castagnoli) which is used for example in iSCSI. The CRC32 instruction in SSE4.2 is useless for ZIP files.
Ouch. You did not have to go full-on dick mode. It is possible to have a civilized discussion about this:
The MC68000 was a fake 32 bit chip. It had 32 bit data registers but only a 16 bit bus with 24 bit memory pointers; therefore, it is arguable that the "bitness" of a CPU is determined by the width of its memory registers/data bus.
A CPU with 32 bit data registers but a 36 bit width bus is arguably not a true 32 bit CPU.
Regardless, you were trying to be overly pedantic when you responded to
32 bit cannot utilize more than 4GB ram.
when he (she?) was responding to
There is no earthly benefit to running Windows as 64bit
which obviously is about XP or Win7 32 bit. Only Server 2003 and Server 2008 non-R2 had PAE capabilities... which would make his statement correct: 32 bits can not represent a number larger than 4GB.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
I'm sorry but x86 has had a 36bit virtual address space since the Pentium Pro, but I have NEVER seen it called a 36bit architecture, because it's not. Also to be pedantic, XP RTM and XP SP1 supported >4GB of ram, and SP2+ support PAE (it's required for NX) but limit the visibility of physical memory above the 4GB line for driver compatibility reasons. MS could easily support PAE and AWE in Windows client versions, they are based on the same code and kernel as the server variants, they just choose not to. I'm not really arguing FOR x86 and against AMD64, just providing a little bit of information and clarifying some statements made in the thread =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
A CPU with 32-bit registers and 36-bit addresses is going to surprise people and software that assume that a memory address will fit in a register. I'd expect a lot of software to be simply unable to use more than 32 address bits. If I needed more than 4G for apps (and I do where I work), I'd much rather go straight 64-bit.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Further to that point. Putting aside business/enterprise/corporate customers who are basically buying to maintain compatibility and training, they may be in a a rude awakening soon from their consumer base.
I have Windows 7, and for many, one of the big reasons you run a windows product is for computer games.
With things like Steam moving more and more compatibility to Linux and more and more titles becoming available it is becoming a legitimate option. Hell I could move right now really, because of all the games I have, I pretty much spend 100% of my time playing DOTA 2, which is available for Linux.
Interesting. I took this opportunity to check and it appears that XP SP2 does support PAE. I did not know that. I was mistaken because even with PAE, XP will still only support 4GB. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-u...
Regardless, the discussion has been quite illuminating. Thank you.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Very interesting stuff. I would have rather went straight to 64 but, but climbing upwards is rarely pretty.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
It's using the same technique that they used on the early consoles. It's a really nasty hack and if you were running that kind of workload, you'd damn well better know the particulars of why it sucked then and is now completely ridiculous. We've had 64bit options available for decades and it's truly sad that a workload of that size would be forced to run under paging hacks to access that much RAM.
It looks like PAE doesn't extend the address space in a given process. It looks like a way either to do old-fashioned overlays, or to have more memory allocated directly to additional processes. It's a step forward, but it wouldn't serve my particular needs.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes