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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.
Windows 8 is pretty much the same OS as 7 with a slightly worse UI.
I've been using Windows 8 with Start8 for well over a year now and I really don't have much to complain. I just simply disabled all the Metro-related hot corners with Start8, set the system to boot to desktop and changed the default apps from Metro-ones to the standard desktop-ones. Visually the only difference to Windows 7 is the lack of translucent window-borders -- something that I do not mind -- and it feels a tad faster in pretty much everything. I upgraded my boyfriend's PC and went and installed a similar Win8 - setup for him, too, and he hasn't been complaining about it, either, and he's just the kind of a person who tends to complain about even quite irrelevant things if they just happen to differ from what he's used to.
All this is to say: I feel Win8 is perfectly useable as long as you don't delve into Metro.
I recently upgraded my main gaming PC to 8.1 after a rebuild and I don't get all the bitching. It boots a lot faster than Win7, performs just as good (if not better), and the UI differences seem pretty trivial to me. I had gotten used to any changes within an hour. And I like that Security Essentials is now built in and doesn't even require a separate download anymore.
Maybe 8.0 was really godawful or something. But I had no trouble at all going from 7 to 8.1.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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!”
A *lot* worse UI.
The UI is not a *lot* worse than windows 7 because the UI is nearly the same as 7. You are not forced to use metro. You can consider it just one more of many features of windows you never need to use.
And since the UI is what the user touches more often than anything else in an OS, it is significant
The UI is the *only* thing the user touches. It's the user interface. It is significant. No one is arguing that it is insignificant.
I've used a lot of UIs. I grew up using dos5, dos6, windows 3.1, 95, 98, Nt4, 2000, xp, 7, and dabbled in 8. I have also used a lot of open source UIs, bash, gnome, KDE, LXDE, XFCE, as well as consoles, android, etc.
I think a lot of people grew up using windows and are really used to it (I know I was). That doesn't mean a start bar is the *best* way to do a UI. It's just the way most people of a certain age group are used to. I am not a huge fan of metro, luckily you are not forced to use it. In linux you can have tens (maybe hundreds) of different UIs for the same OS. In windows 8 you can have 2 (classic and metro). In macOS I think you just get 1.
You should definitely consider whether you continue using Microsoft products carefully. But I would suggest that a bad reason to quit using Microsoft OSes is that they added 1 extra UI choice that you don't like. If your going to quit, don't quit because there are 1 too many choices, quit because there aren't more choices.
For people that were only mildly used to the classic windows UI (e.g. XP), the transition to 8 was only mildly inconvenient. I think the more you stubbornly stick to the UI you are used to, it will not only make adjusting to new versions of windows harder, it makes adjusting to any kind of new UI harder. Before you know it, you'll be the old guy living in a future he doesn't understand because it's not running on windows 7 or windows XP, or DOS 5.2, or VMS, or whatever.
I'm not saying that windows 8 is the UI of the future. It's not. But you should still be able to use it, and it's not worth hording copies of windows 7 to avoid having to disable metro.