Give me XP, or...

...give me another OS altogether.

We need your money !! (desperately)

With the recession and the economic disasters we need your money desperately to make our shareholders happy.

Please buy..err.. license our new windows 7 asap.

Forgive our marketing trick with vista, that was just to wake you up.

Else nobody ever would be interested in a new..err..same..err.. different windows version.

We made just some basic adjustments on the 25 year old windows NT kernel, nicer fonts and graphic looks, and basicly technically nothing changed from 3.51 to xp and w7.

So you can install it without fear on your PC because not much has changed.

There will even be an option to disable anti-virus and firewalls, if they get to annoying to you.

You see, we really are worried about our users

(specially financially if we can milk them some $$)

You also can still run xp with IE6, but need a special processor with vx/vt capability and we will be happy to bring you in contact with one of the by us promoted pc brands. (than we both make $$)

You will spend more money than necessary but it is a good deed to all of us:

We make $$ by licensing (the same old cr%$^)

The pcmaker needs the vx/vt chip and both the chipmaker and the pcbrand makes $$

Your bank gives you credit and will make $$

So we all thank you very very to make a quicker come-back of the economy..

(can i have that beer now, than i can go home to work with my penguin again)

Windows 7 Upgrade

After testing Windows 7 for several months I will not be buying it as a replacement for XP. I would buy XP as a replacement for Vista though.

Windows 7 does fix several of the problems with Vista but you still end up with a hardware hungry OS that won't run older software very well and does not do anything remarkably better than XP. I have had several hardware support issues with Windows 7 that can not and will not be resolved.

If you get Windows 7 on a new PC it will be fine, but upgrading from XP is not a good idea.

Silly Survey

We all know how it goes... They'll keep running XP till they buy a new box that comes with Win7 on it. Positive reaction or not, if they were the type to jump onto the pay-money-to-upgrade-current-box-OS, they'd have already done so.

Isn't it funny the polls only try to answer one narrowly constructed question? Given the stats, if you threw in a couple questions about cheeseburgers and fries you could probably draw a conclusion about whether XP or Win7 users are more likely overweight.

The biggest obstacle

Is that you cannot upgrade to Win7 without a clean install. Many don't fancy the idea of reinstalling everything and there is always that chance that something might 'break'.

Most likely...

There won't be a stampede to upgrade for XP users, but there will be a lot fewer downgrade-to-XP customers.

Windows 7 runs better on lesser hardware but has the features that investors in good graphics cards and RAM will appreciate.

Translation: Windows 7 is what Vista should have been.

@ AC / NT kernel

"We made just some basic adjustments on the 25 year old windows NT kernel"

Um, no. NT3 -> NT4 -> NT5 -> NT6. It's a 25-year-old kernel *line*, but they've actually altered the kernel substantially during that time.

Back more on topic-ish: XP is good for legacy hardware (and come on, C2D is four years old now itself). But it's a legacy OS, and was originally coded/launched almost a decade ago! You people are stuck in the early 2000s where Windows 98 and the P3 were legacy, 2000 was recent, and XP and the P4 are new. C2D and 64-bit were amazing futuristic things just being launched. That's all many years in the past! Get your head out of the little pink cloud you're in and look around you. C2D is four years old, Vista is three years old. Times move, and you have to move with them!

The new economy

@shawnfromnh:

Pricing has to be what it is given that the facts that USD has dropped to new lows and even in Pakistan coders have to be paid!

Nothing Else

Being a gamer and wanting to use the quad core and 4gb of RAM there is no real alternative. I tested it for 6 months and it is by far the most stable OS I have used (I own two Mac's as well and they hardly get switched on now), far better 64 bit OS than XP & Vista could ever be.

If people were too dumb not to buy it at the initially reduced rates they deserve to pay full price.

Happy XP Pro User

I've been happy with XP Pro for six years now, running on my six year old Acer Travelmate 8000. I decided to try Win 7 RC in July (using a spare 2.5" hard drive from my collection of old 2.5" drives).

It will not install if the cluster size is greater than 1K as I found out by experimentation since it did not give any meaningful error messages. If I formatted the drive using its install- time facilities, it then further refused to install with no meaningful error messages. The hard drive was then unreadable using Partition Magic under XP (using my desktop) with a PM error stating that the drive was 'Bad'. I had to use a different utility to recognise the drive and reformat it (and reduce the cluster size).

Eventually, I installed Win 7 on my laptop. I was surprised at how well it ran after I turned off all the eye-candy. It does max out my CPU if I run VLC media player at full screen but with a six year old Acer Travelmate that is not surprising really. Win 7 RC will not let you undock toolbars from the taskbar which was a downer for me because I like my pop-out toolbars around the edges of my screen for quick and easy access to data folders and programs. I can work around that and have done, I am flexible even if Win 7 is not.

Zone Alarm firewall will not run under Win 7 but I'm sure they'll fix that soon (?) and I found that the free 'Sphinx' firewall installs and runs well in WIn 7. A few other minor utility programs I have will not run properly and XP compatibility mode would not be any good with my old laptop CPU (which is to be expected).

Home networking is a pig to set up and the Win 7 GUI is some kind of 'Networks 'R' Us' confection that makes you want to hit it with a hammer. It insists on you providing a user name and password for the network device even though the network device (an old NAS drive) didn't have one set up and did not need one under XP. Actually, the password is the networking 'homegroup' password that Win 7 itself initially gives you (wtf?!) and the 'username' was eventually sorted out by me setting up a named group account on the NAS drive itself. I won't go on........it was a nightmare but I'm a stubborn bastard and I eventually made it all work. I even got it to share files with my XP netbook but I can't get it to share files with my XP desktop - sod it. I wont tell you what happened when I tried swapping to a cabled connection to my router instead of using wireless (for transfer speed reasons) because If I did I'd start some serious swearing. (Bear in mind that I've done all this before with XP Pro - no problem).

Outlook 2000 does not work under Win 7, you can read e-mail but can't send it due to a strange address book error (I wasn't trying to use the address book!). That's ok though because I tried Thunderbird with the Lightning plug in and that installed and works like a dream. It may be a good idea for me to try Open Office next and see how I get along with that. Thank you Microsoft, for starting to wean me away from Microsoft Office.

After the initial frustration and headbanging, it's a reasonable user experience and seems to be very stable as long as you don't try to make any changes on your LAN. I will carry on using it until the RC license runs out in June 2010, then I'll go back to using my trusty old XP Pro hard drive (which I have cloned in case it dies). If my laptop dies, I'll get a new one with Win 7 and will accept and work around its peculiarities; I still have my XP Pro desktop for serious work.

Beer, because you need one after trying to install and set up Win 7.

I like Windows 7

I think Windows 7 is great and will go down well with our users, however one snag I've encountered during some test deployments - we have been issued with license keys by Microsoft only for their enterprise licensing solution however the problem is you have to have 25 active installs of Windows 7 (at any time) to use it. In other words if you are going to buy-in you have to do it in bulk from the start or your OS will expire. I suppose a good news is that VMs count (so I might just load up 23 copies in the ESX server just to get things moving...)

The alternative is we can get a MAK key to be used on each individual machine, but they still have to activate individually via the Internet which will no doubt cause problems with enterprise deployment and disk images (there is also a 'proxy' method but it still talks to the Internet). In typical Microsoft over-engineered-solution-to-a-problem-that-doesn't-exist-fashion there is an entire area of Technet devoted to how to license Windows 7 along with videos showing an overview of the process, and clearly one of the most important things Microsoft thinks it's customers will be concerned about is if MS will be keeping tabs on who is making all those Internet activations - this very question is addressed multiple times in the videos to the point it becomes almost amusing or concerning - take your pick.

I do however see this as a barrier to enterprise deployments for some who will no doubt be thinking if XP isn't broke why fix it along with license paranoia.

I'll be changing from XP...

... to Linux!

I was weaned on Microsoft OSes and spent years working with them. Now, I'm just sick of the robbing bar-stewards and want nothing more to do with them or their products.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Lemmings?

So people are considering Win7 because they read about how good it is? Didn't they also read about how good Vista was? And that turned to be a stinking pile of manure and a giant flop.

So much for learning from your mistakes. I bet Darwin is spinning in his grave.

I will be sticking with XP Pro / XP Pro 64-bit

I have enough licences to keep me happy for a VERY long time with Windows XP, whether I need 32-bit or 64-bit versions. I am planning two Nehalem builds in the short term, although Windows will not be going on either of them - they will be running FreeBSD and Solaris 10 x86. But even if I did build a Nehalem box with 24GB of memory, I would not stick Vista or Windows 7 on it - especially when Windows XP 64-bit would fly on such a configuration.

Thanks to its low resource use, I just don't see the need to upgrade my elderly 3.2GHz Pentium 4 (Northwood) that runs XP Pro, especially as 2GB of memory is still enough to comfortably run CS3.3, Office 2003 and the various other things I like to do (even Amiga and C64 emulation.)

By the time I am really finished with XP Pro, Windows really will be finished - if Microsoft doesn't pull its socks up fairly soon. As the days go by, Microsoft is looking less and less relevant - and it will only be a matter of time before the corporates realise that running a network of Sun Ray thin clients on either Solaris or Linux makes a hell of a lot more sense for the masses, than providing Microsoft with a default income for every desktop...

W7

I agree that W7 is over priced, although it's actually not so bad in the UK...

http://www.dabs.com/learn-more/software-and-books/windows-7-launch-6662.html

Given the price different between Ultimate and Pro, they really shouldn't have bothered with Pro, and just left it at ultimate.

I'm using W7 on my main machine at home and work, and I have to say it's really rather good - a lot better than XP, and not just in the way it looks, it's more responsive too. It's a lot tidier, things are more logically arranged than Vista, and just as easy to get to as XP. The Taskbar is a big improvement.

Admitedly it's a little slow on my Athlon 3700 w/ 1GB RAM at home, but it runs a lot faster than XP ever did on my quad Xeon at work. It's very stable, and I've not encountered much in the way of application/driver incompatibility. Not enough to stop me from using it anyway.

I think take up of W7 will exceed Vista, mainly because they'll have all the new purchases of W7 that they had with Vista through OEM sales on brand new hardware, plus I think there will be some people persuaded to purchase an upgrade once it's hit the street and they've had the chance to try it.

Beer icon, cos I'd rather buy MS a beer for getting it right, than paying for a copy.

What's all the fuss about?

I installed Win7 (well, 6.1) on my wife's Vaio laptop as Vista was constantly causing problems. Sony's continued use of bizarre hardware and drivers meant that I couldn't get all the XP drivers, so an upgrade to XP wasn't an option.

So, I've had a bit of a play with Win7, and it's... okay. I suppose.

But really, what's all the fuss about? You don't seem to get as much pointless pestering from UAC out of the box, and some of the taskbar features are nice. And it's good to see that MS have re-architected the graphics compositing engine so that it's not using daft amounts of memory (and thus running veeerrrryyyy slowly). But, that's it. It still takes far too long to come back from sleep. It still takes too long to find and join a wireless network, and it still feels a bit cluttered.

Am I missing something? Or is Win 7 just a case of 'any port in a storm' compared to the horror of Vista?

Never buy a dot zero

I remember the launch of IE4 - a bunch of us (ISPs) were flown over to Seattle for the official M$ deployment to partners

We spent five days trying to break it in one way or another

On the Thursday M$ took everyone on the team to the ball game

Oddly, none of the M$ coders were available that night

A bunch of us managed to discover SO many holes in the browser that the entire coding team were drafted for last minute fixes nd missed the Baseball

They released on time and had to patch it within weeks

At least I still have the glow in the dark T-Shirt :)

Is there any reason I can't expect the same of Win7?

the hated vista

Am I the only person who uses vista and doesn't hate it? I gather there were big problems when it was first released but I've been using it for months now and it is fine (note: not good or excellent but fine).

I can fully understand why people wouldn't want to shell out for an upgrade, or want the XP downgrade for low powered systems (read: what used to be reasonable powered systems) but that doesn't explain the hate some people seem to have for it.

Did everyone who 'hates' vista try it in the early days and have bad experiance, if so have they used it recently or are they just jumping on the bad press bandwagon?

Okay queue everyone to call me an M$ shill, or fanboi...

@shawnfromnh

Ditto !!

My vehicle is a 1999 Ford F150 pickup truck. It gets 22 MPG (small V-6), rides very comfortably, is easy getting into and out of for an arthritic old fart, is 99% cosmetically, Insurance is <$300/year and it's 100% paid for. I like it, it's almost a classic ... I like it a lot. But the new models are nice: they ride well, get good gasoline mileage, and they look good. But, it's simply not worth paying, oh, $20,000 to get a minor upgrade to something I already have and like. After all I AM a human clunker so I fit my four-wheeled "clunker" quite well. I'm just waiting for the O-BAM-Uh administration to start the "get the old 'clunkers' out of society" program. Unlike the metal ones, flesh and blood clunkers fight back.

XP is like my truck ... a comfortable old friend who treats me well and does for me all the right things. I'm no Linux devote`, but if I were going to have to learn a a whole new OS, I'd opt for Ubuntu 9.04. I have it dual booted with XP Pro on my beta test box and it's very nice. Still rough around the edges, but every release is "getting there".

M$-ing the point

What M$ fail to understand is that there is no killer app , no real reason to upgrade.

People use OS's to run applications , the OS isn't the application. Apple hit this on the head with a ' here is the OS , it costs X ( forgive the pun ! ) , no versions , no up-sell , just the OS....

XP, for all its failings , is now a pretty stable OS and it runs the applications , the purpose of the OS , everything talks to it , hardware compatibility is tight and it works..

To get people to move to 7, will have to come from making XP no longer available and forcing it upon the consumer / corporate, as they are not going to move voluntarily.

Finally , they've got the price points all wrong..... Who is going to pay 200 EUR/GBE /USD , when the machine costs the same ?

It really is time for everyone to wake up, ask the question 'what do I do with my PC' and look at LINUX / Open Office.

For the record , I like the look and feel of 7, but do feel M$ have missed the point with pricing/versions.

I'm Positive

That I will never give microsoft another penny as long as I live.

I'll wait for 7.1...

...unless the Linux world gets it's act together, then it'll be HELLOOOOOOOO penguin at home. Yeah, guess it'll be 7.1 after all. Hey ho. (I can hear the fanbois massing now...*)

Never install a version 0 of any product, just don't do it. Let the early adopters have all the problems and then pick up the working version in the sp1 release. It was true of Vista, XP and it will be true of 7 too.

I've had the misfortune of having to suffer Vista and 2008 Server at work (first action? Make it as XP-like as possible). Biggest gripe? The bloody start orb. I hate that interface in KDE and I hate it in Windows - just how many clicks is it to get to what you want? I also dislike the whole user authentication thing.

It was pretty jarring when I started using Linux where it seemed like every 5 minutes I was getting asked for a password. Of course, that was because I was fiddling around, now I am simply using it, I hardly ever get challenged (except for updates etc). What does Vista do? OK/Cancel. WHAT? I could be any moron with physical access, ask for the bloody password!

The whole 7 UI is just fugly. So much wasted space and so frustrating; it's like the "hide the option" feature of the start orb is the pervading mantra for the entire design.

Actually...I think I've just talked myself into staying with XP.

*I don't want much, just an X that can be easily configured to allow me to set which display is the "master", not the first one found, or the one "above" or whatever unconfigurable madness X uses. Also VPN support**, the ability to use my printer, my webcam, all the buttons on my mouse. Y'know, the little things that "just work" in Windows. Yes, I know some of this is not the fault of Linux per se, it's the OEMs not creating drivers or releasing source; but that does not change the fact that Linux does cannot do what I want/need.

**Yes, I know about OpenSwan etc; it doesn't work with Checkpoint.

to Anon Penguin

We made just some basic adjustments on the 25 year old windows NT kernel, nicer fonts and graphic looks, and basicly technically nothing changed from 3.51 to xp and w7.>>>

Buddy and Linux isnt an updated kernel EVEN older than NT... Or do you REALLY think every linux kernel is written up from scratch?? keep dreaming

Paris because even she is more useful than the Linux fanboy who wrote that

Windows 7 Install

Bit the bullet and installed W7 on my HTPC, using an SSD for the boot drive. Only issue that was thrown up was the Sil 3114 RAID controller on one of my PCI cards was not installed. Quick trawl of the net yielded some Vista drivers tried those, card wouldn't start error 10. Bah! did a Windows update, following which I was informed that there were other optional updates, quick scan of these showed Sil 3114 driver, installed bam RAID controller working, not only that but the XP dynamic disks on this card were picked up and mounted. All the doohickeys attached to this machine had drivers available or were relatively easily installed. Doohickeys include, EP45 UD3R mobo, Q6600 cpu, 1394 card, Sil 3114 RAID card, Hauppage PVR 150, Snapstrem Firefly RF Remote, Eye-Fi manager. Response from the SSD is very good, the armchair experience is snappy, the only lasting annoyance are the Nvidia drivers, Nvidia just can't seem to get their heads around the fact that most people still have CRT TVs, I had to downgrade to older drivers to get the overscan to work properly on my TV, but I had similar problems with XP Nvidia drivers.

Overall a good experience, but then my old XP install was approaching 5 years old and was very creaky, if I wasn't planning a total reinstall and I didn't have a Technet sub would I have done it? Probably not.

...With a gun to my head.

I suspect Im like the massive majority of domestic "at home" xp users. I use word to type letters/resumes/that kind of crap. I use word '03, because lets face it, unless you're an enterprise or DTP or something, what the hell do you need more than that? I use Gmail for my email. I dont use outlook for the same reason I dont drink water from a septic tank.

I play a lot of games, and whilst MS&Co did dally with "vista only" gaming, it didnt stick. why not? because games were never really written with x64-necessary code. games houses like the x32 xp standard, and as long as nVidia and ATi keep churning out whopping great GPUs, I think that'll carry on for a good long while. I dont have any clever cutting-edge hardware, no custom boardery, no odd stuff for specialist use sitting in expansion slots. I am joe public.

what dell is increasingly discovering, and what microsoft discovers as well is, Once joe public can play The Sims, look at penguin-bites-baby videos on "the youtube" and send and recieve inane junkmail to their relatives via gmail, they have a hard time grasping that they 'need' an upgrade, so their pc can do what? the latest urge is a "media box"... for what? movies? joe public has a DVD player and DVDs, and asking him to spend hundreds of dollars or pounds on a new box so he can watch a stack of probably illegally downloaded movies with a remote he'll have to buy seperately and configure to work with software he doesnt have via TV cable hookups he also doesnt have.... well, its going to be a hard sell.

so why am I going to upgrade? everything thats not a game I already own (ancient version of office), I dont need to upgrade a million security holes through outlook, everything I want to own/will own related to the machine will be xp compatible.

Im sure Vista was just lovely once they beat the stink of poop from the code. Im sure it wasnt a bloathog of a thing crammed with features I neither wanted, needed, nor asked for, either. Im sure windows 7 will offer me a plethora of options for integrally managing how much time my evil spawn spends online, whitelisting and blacklisting sites, powermanaging and networking and the easy access to a file system that Im already comfortable with in xp. if I just RTFM thats 180 pages long, 18 pages of which is the EULA.

Only, I dont want to read a book, I dont care about white-and-blacklisting sites. I really dont want to thrash around for a week trying to get some random .avi to play through my TV when I already own a perfectly good DVD player.

So, why the hell do I want Windows 7 again?

..or let me put it a different way

Instead, ask them 2 questions

1. Do you like all this swank new stuff in windows 7?

IF 1. = YES GO TO 2

2. Is it worth you spending around a grand for a new machine with a basic copy of it, or around 150-300 dollars or pounds for a copy of just the software?

IF 2. = YES GO TO WTF.

One variant of Windows 7, please.

It would be more appealing to me go from XP to Windows 7 if there was only one variant. Not Home, Professional, Ultimate...

This is so unnecessary and confusing to the consumer and increases costs of inventory management at Microsoft.

Having said that I am positive about Windows 7 - I think they got it right this time: faster boot time, improved GUI...

Remember Windows ME? That wasn't well received - and I compare that episode with Vista. So I think Microsoft can bounce back like they did before.

Linux is similar with all its variants, Debian, Ubuntu etc. confusing for the consumer.

Where MacOS X has won is because there are no variants. Keeps it simple.

OK, so this is my opinion

And, believe me, opinions are all we get to express here, and should be seen as such.

Having said that, I did my W7RC testing on a PIII with 512MB and the only thing that failed to work adequately was the graphic driver which, when I tried the XP driver, it insisted on uninstalling and reinstalling when booting. That isn't bad, but it tends to lead me to think that the biggest problem for W7 will be driver related rather than OS. That doesn't exclude the problems with excessive memory and HD requirements, code bloat and the insistance on a clean install (actually I prefer this as I've never seen a Windows upgrade that is 100% reliable), but my biggest disappointment will be if not enough effort is put into supporting kit which was happy enough under W2K/WXP which, because of the sheer bloat of Vista, will have been "deprecated" but, with a little effort from their respective support folk, will work fine with W7. If all it takes is a little more effort to get XP driver support into the OS, then M$ can't really lose.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not thinking about immediately upgrading (if that's the right word) every PC I have to W7. I might do one of them as it needs a rebuild (the other one and my netbook will stay with openSUSE), but I believe that there will be a general reluctance to move. Home users won't want to disturb their existing installations and business users will wait for all the bugs to be exposed. The most M$ can hope for will be the installation on new machines as they are sold and those folk that insist on being the first with everything no matter how ill advised it might be.

i'm with Heff

I agree with Heff there, i like shiny new things and gadgets, but the whole point of a computer is to run an application as fast as possible, in a reliable fashion. this is the main reason the first thing i do after installing is to turn off all the fancy fonts. rounded corners and other shiny bits you can't see when you are running an app, which is what you have the computer for presumably.

-do many people spend time in front of their machine just staring at the desktop??

if i were to install windows 7 instead of xp onto the hardware i currently use, would it make my games run faster or load quicker?

-i would get the latest DX version i suppose which has nearly swayed me, but not quite.

if yes it's worth upgrading i'd say, but i seriously doubt it.

XP -> windows 7 -even more expensive than it looks

To upgrade from Xp you need first to 'upgrade' to Vista and then upgrade from Vista to 7.

(I'm talking of upgrading rather than a new installation) -I have a lot of app's on my machine that I've used for years and have lost the original install discs. In the case of 'EasyCad', which I use a lot, my original floppies have become unreadable. I KNOW it's always recommended to do a clean install of Windows and then install all the app's but in my case I can't see a way of doing this.

All your stuff belong to us

User data collection was built into Vista. No indication it's been built out of Win 7.

fail, anyone?

lock all other programs out of windows folder - fail

lock all other programs INTO their own program folder - fail

lock out all hidden files and rootkits - fail

drm - fail

lock all other programs out of registry - fail

lock me out of my own files - fail

require all programs permission to install and execute and access web - fail

won't install over xp - fail

just a cleaned up Fista - fail

Windows update

Version upgrade available. Optional download, no charge.

Campaign for real windows.

Y'know, the good ole days, when windows was really new and good...

Already Switched

I had a couple of machines using the RC release and since getting it from technet, I have upgraded all my machines to 7 Ultimate and it is great. Even on my 5 year old laptop which should really be consigned to the bin as it was out of date when I got it, okay it won't do Aero but everything else is great.