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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.
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...
If it wasn't a big deal, why did Ballmer get handed his balls and Microsoft shift direction and at least partially restore the Start menu, with plans to bring it back it completely in the next version?
I'd say it was a very big deal, a very big deal that hurt Microsoft's image.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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. And since the UI is what the user touches more often than anything else in an OS, it is significant. I'm buying another copy of 7 just in case, and intend to wait until OS 10 SP1 (to give it a fair chance) before deciding whether I'm going to continue with Microsoft or not.
At work, management has already given employees a choice between Winders and Mac, and there is a growing community here of enterprise mac users. I don't think that's for me, not really an Apple fan, (my last Mac was a G4 -- I went back to Windows about the time Apple and Adobe got into a pissing contest) but I tried Windows 8 (my copy is now collecting dust on the shelf) and that just isn't happening.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
Windows 8 Start screen sucks for organizing lots of programs. If I go to someone else's computer trying to find the desktop icon can be difficult. Actually with the live tiles most things are the obviously with just glancing at them. According to research done by Microsoft, switching contexts is confusing and non-intuitive, which is exactly what the start screen is.
Metro applications I've found to be too simple to the point of being useless.
Metro apps have to be purchased through the Microsoft Store. If nothing else this makes Metro a non-starter.
Configuration. While this has gotten better with 8.1 and some patches, configuration is now all over the place. Is it in the control panel, do you need to get to it through the charms bar, or the Metro configuration. Basically it went from being fairly easy to find and change the setting you want, to trying to figure out which interface should be used and flipping through multiple screen on that interface to finally find the one setting you need.
Ribbons, nuff said!
Application and games not working. The Sims Medieval, Diablo 2 are the two I know about. Now Diablo 2 is quite a old game, but The Sims Medieval came out after The Sims 3 and The Sims 3 works. Then there is WinDVD Pro 2011. Now I understand that for most people this works. For me it did not because I "upgraded" from Windows 7 and Windows 8 sometimes misses installing some key OS files. I think this case was scripting.dll, or something close to that. Only way to fix this problem would have been to reinstall the OS from scratch. I tried everything else. There were some other programs that I was able to get to work in Windows 8 with compatibility settings that weren't needed in Windows 7.
While file copying, less memory usage and less CPU usage was nice, the reasons listed above, plus some others I'm not remembering right now made me upgrade to Windows 7 when I got a new machine. Basically I was spending a lot of time babysitting an OS, where the OS is supposed to help me get work done.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
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...