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Windows 95 to Windows 7: How Microsoft lost its vision

Much better than Vista, and the best Windows yet. That seems to be the consensus view on Windows 7, and after two and a half months with the final build, I more or less agree - despite the niggling voice that says behind the new taskbar it is not really so different from Windows Vista. Nevertheless, Windows 7 on its launch today …

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@Mike Gravgaard

i think you have been slightly unfair to the Amiga 100 here, if I recall correctly it originally came with 256Kb of memory, not 256Mb! Even the successor the Amiga 500 only shipped with 512Kb, I still remember the must have upgrade to 1Mb of memory. PS, I can't help but think of the Cleveland show when I'm mentally pronouncing your custom word: terrorable ;)

FAIL

@To DZ-Jau # By Jim 10

If you don't know what you're talking about, don't talk at all.

Go "Fail" yourself.

FAIL

Shyte Hype

Why would I spend my cash on another insecure mess that needs constant attention? My money will be spend on another HDD+graphics card+memory for my Ubuntu thanks!

Side effect

One side effect of the Vista failure is that people like me have been weaned off the assumption that we need to upgrade hardware/OS/software, every couple of years or so.

I imagine that a fair chunk of the industry has prospered on that assumption.

But, today, my 'main' machine is six years old, as is the OS (XP - on WIndows Classic theme). Most of the apps are pretty old too. Yes, there are updates, but I've lost the compulsion to download the latest version of everything - when the version I have is working as well as I can expect (and I no longer expect a new version to be problem-free).

I may well stick with XP, until it becomes positively dangerous. By that time, I may well feel more comfortable using one of the Linux distros, rather than some marketing exercise from Redmond.

One thing still bugs me

Why do you need the memory and CPU resources equal to or larger than a Cray Y-MP to run your desktop OS and write a letter?

I used to do image processing on a 286 at 8 MHz with 640 kB of RAM. In the words of Niklaus Wirth:

Software is becoming slower faster than hardware is becoming faster.

Anonymous Coward
Boffin

Re : MS Rocks

"Win 3.1/95 created the industry standard for how people would interact with a personal computer via a GUI."

I thought that was down the original work done at PARC. I saw and used an Apple LISA way back in the days of yore that ran a perfectly usable WIMP environment. Then there was the Symbolics LISP machines running Genera. They was pretty useful too.

I think that you'll find that MS came into the Windows GUI game very late in the day.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Microsucks has only one vision

Microsucks only goal is to remove every bit of money from your pocket by selling you defective goods.

Anonymous Coward
WTF?

Re: What a stupid article...

>>It is the same with pretty much any established product.

No it isn't.

>> My stereo looks/works pretty similar to what it did in 1995.

Then take a look at what everyone else is doing. I have no "stereo" at all any more, my computer attached to a 5.1 system does the job instead. Other people have systems that are basically dumb speakers + a docking bay for an iPod. Things have moved on a lot.

>>My home phone is a dead ringer for the 1995 model.

We have DECT phones dotted throughout the house that synchronise phone books and can accept and send text messages. Even the handset is different, remember cordless handsets from the early 90s? Think bricks that your neighbour with the big aerials loved because he could listen to you chatting about your bunions to Aunt Mable.

Would you still use a 1995 mobile? I mean, really...

>> The aircraft I fly on are the same.

Mostly true, except you can no longer smoke on them!

>> My TV is a similar deal, sure, it is now thinner, but it does the same job.

I don't remember having hundreds of free to air channels, some in HD, broadcast to flat screen HD TVs in the 90s? Do you?

The point is, most, if not all things have moved on a lot since 1995. You may not think so, but even cars are radically different under the skin than they were 14 years ago, the electronics, safety and emissions systems are completely different.

Windows OTOH, has had a few licks of paint and now supports 64 bit architecture. Whoopee. Fundamentally, since I started using Windows 3.0 back in 1991, nothing has really changed all that much in the user experience of a GUI. Sure there's some cute tools which can screw stuff up in the background (saves me the effort of doing it myself) and lots of add-ons for this and that as the fashions for new tools come and go, but it may as well be DOS with a second rate interface thrown on for all that has really changed. Indeed, I wonder how much of the code from those days is still lurking there...

Truly I cannot see any advantage of leaving XP for now. I only intend to do so when there is an absolutely vital application on the latest Windows for which there is no XP alternative. I can't see that day coming for many years yet. Possibly, by then, the paradigm will have moved on so much that there will be no desktops with operating systems at all. Or at least not as we know them.

I can't say the same of cars, mobile phones, consoles etc that have been out since 2001. None of the latest technology from that year is still appeals to me now, except for XP! :)

Pint

Re: I'm off!

"The only reason to use M$ products was because they were free to copy and would run on a generic cheap to assemble box."

Yes, I think that pretty well sums it up. Microsoft's big success was in bringing computing to "the masses" with a barely-adequate operating system and mediocre applications -- that ran on cheap hardware.

Those of us who were spoiled by UNIX workstations always found Windows to be horribly unusable until XP. If not for the Unix wars and BillG being at the right place at the right time, Windows would never have been able to get off the ground.

Win 3.1

Bring back 3.1 GUI !

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

I'm worried that

most of the changes made between Vista and 7 are geared towards making 7 feel faster out of the box and look nicer. I'm worried that these changes have been "tacked on" as last minute amendments, with no real thought as to how the computer is going to perform 3 months down the line, 6 months, 12 months etc. Almost all Windows OSs, excluding Vista, have been reasonably fleet out of the box, imho, but in every case give it 6 months and what you're left with is a huge mess.

Every piece of hardware you use, every program you install, every network share you access, all seem to live on as ghosts inside your computer, slowing it down when Windows realises those things aren't there anymore.

Then in Windows 7 you've got b0rked file permissions, b0rked interface ripped straight from an early beta of OSX that I can only assume haunts Steve Jobs' worst nightmares, b0rked rip off of the way Linux handles user accounts, b0rked control panel, b0rked messenger program (and so on)

And yet it merely has to be "better than vista" and all those faults are forgiven. You'll completely forget about them, until, 6 months down the line, your computer will be completely broken as usual and Windows 8 will come along and you can all jump on that bandwagon.

Flame

UAC, the warning that your progamming sucks

3.11 and 95. Brings back a great many memories. Most of which involved a large amount of swearing. Back in those days, I did a huge amount of graphics and multimedia work, including a large portion of 3D raytracing, which meant there was only one serious platform, the Amiga.

My Amiga 4000 tower, with its 40Mhz Motorola 68060 wiped the floor with both the IBM compatibles and the Macs due to the ahead-of-their-time custom chipsets. I had a plethora of software for it, most of which was delivered full-fat, unrestricted and free on the monthly cover discs.

You can imagine then my seething bitterness and hatred when Commodore died, and I needed the raw cpu horsepower of the Pentiums if I was going to progress with my raytracing.

Windows 95 sucked Sweaty Dead Donkey Dick(tm) by comparrison. Printing was a risky enough business ("You didn't save before you hit 'Print'? You moron!") but being a seriously heavy duty user, I spent more time staring at blue screens than a BBC weatherman. Needless to say, my opinion of Wee Willy Gates and his Mickey Mouse OS was not exactly shining.

12 years later, and how things have changed. I'm a sysadmin now, primarily developing enterprise management solutions, and boy, was this career choice a real eye opener.

Cutting my teeth in schools that had experienced an explosive IT growth, remote application deployment is now the only viable method of keeping on top of things. For me, this meant a great deal of time re-packaging software into unattended MSI files, and it was here that I unearthed all the software industries dirty little secrets.

Has anyone yet noticed that an application designed for Vista works perfectly under XP, but not the other way round? Obviously excluding those that utuilise Vista specific features, but surely it should be the complete opposite?

The student machines had to be locked down tight as a drum. None of this woolly "freedom for the user" rubbish. The understaffed, underpaid technicians have enough on their plate with printer jams, password resets and broken keyboards without having to constantly clean systems of rogue apps designed to get around their content filtering software.

And here is the rub. Any linux fanboi will tell you then when you are USING a computer, you should only be logged on as a USER, but you can't do that under XP. This isn't a failing of the OS itself, but the software developers who still haven't come to terms with the concept of basic user rights.

The more I locked down the system, the more exceptions I discovered needed making. Not because it was hampering the user, but because the installed software was trying to do something it should have no right to do. I won't go into massive detail, but the most common mistake is assuming that it should have write access to its own program folder.

If you want to write a self update utility, that utility should be installed as a windows service with specific permissions to your programs folder ONLY. This is just one example of thousands that I could list where software developers go about things the WRONG way. Whenever you see that UAC message in Vista while not actually installing something, the developer has made a mistake.

These are not Vista specific issues. This is how it should have been done under XP in the first place. Unfortunately, it's been a vicious circle. Because of the poorly designed software ported from 95, users started running as admins, because everybody ran XP as admins, newcomers to software design assumed that was the way it was meant to be.

When you run XP under a restricted account (which by all rights you should be able to do without adverse effects) 99% of security issues suddenly vanish, with individual applications neatly sandboxed away from each other. Don't forget, the vast majority of modern malware targets 3rd party apps, not the actual windows platform these days.

This could be almost forgiven in small software houses, but Google, Mozilla and Adobe are some of the worst offenders. Adobe repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to their installers. Despite massive academic discounts, schools would only buy a handfull of photoshop copies, simply because there was no way to automate the install and registration until CS2, and even then you really need a software deployment system to do it properly. The schools simply couldn't afford the labour involved.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who sees the irony that the UAC was Microsofts attempt to bitch-slap the rest of the software industry into implementing correct security and usage methodologies which they should have done 8 years ago for XP.

After 8 years of hair pulling over badly designed software, I'm certainly hoping that the warm(er) reception to win7 will act as a wake-up call to software developers who haven't really moved on since their days in C and VB6.

@zake

Wow, I thought I was the last person alive who was still voluntarily running Win2k. I like it and I'll keep running it until this old box dies (not likely soon since it's an IBM xSeries server that got, um, "lost" from our server room a few years ago, and is STILL under maintenance contract ).

There are too many UI tweaks in XP/2k3 that I just never cared for - the first to mind is always the way MS totally borked the luser.msc app in XP. Man, it's just SO much easier to handle local users in 2k than in XP. Then there's the braindeadness of the services.msc app (at least under Server 2k3) - who at MS thought that big empty column on the left was a good idea? It's fixable, but still a PITA. Oh, and then there's the evil shutdown tracker thingy in Server 2k3 - what a total waste of the 45 seconds it takes to remember how to disable it.

The only thing that's ever made me pine for XP was the Netflix online viewing.

I looked at Win7 back during the beta/RC days earlier this year. In some ways it _is_ better than Vista, but why oh WHY did MS have to nuke the old Win95-style Start menu? I hate that amorphous shape-shifting start menu that they've saddled it with. Oh, and the new ribbon interface in Notepad (or maybe it's MSPaint) is total shit. I guess some of us old farts just like things to be where they are supposed to be, not shifting around all the time depending on the whims of the guys in Redmond.

Anonymous Coward
Thumb Down

My Problem With This Article

The problem I have with this article is that it isn't really about Windows 7. Regarding most of the negative comments or concerns, you could say that about most current operating systems. Even my OS of choice Mac OS X still basically looks like Windows 95 or Finder 6.0 with windows and scroll bars and close boxes.

I think you could go through this article, replace Windows 7 with any current OS and the comments would still be valid. That doesn't invalidate the concerns of things not evolving regarding OS appearances or user input, however, it does mean this article is much more general then about Windows 7.

FAIL

@ Jim 10

"Hope you explained to your Father that he can only drive his shiney (sic) new mac mobile on 5% of the roads!"

Yeah, just like a BMW can only drive on [whatever their market share is]% of roads right?

Idiot !

Happy

Re: For a long time, I was, in fact, quite happy with Windows 2000.

I moved my trusty Windows 2000 box out from under my desk exactly two weeks ago. It's still up and running in the corner running various servers and the like. Up until then it was my main (read: only) development machine with Visual Studio 2003 installed. I've never had any virus on it, nor any problems at all. (The trick is to not allow system services access to the internet. Once you stop all that malarkey it's a pretty safe system.)

My new (actually an aging PC I picked up from someone at work on the cheap) desktop machine? Windows 7. It's awesome. (And those who know me know I rarely praise anything.)

@ReadingTooMuchSciFi

Win 95/98 had 32-bit preemptive multitasking. What they didn't have (and neither did the Amiga for that) was any kind of seperation between user and kernel mode. Thus badly written applications could quite happily trash kernel memory and bring the whole system to a screaming halt. That came to Windows in the NT line, which is why the migration from the 9x line to XP was hailed a such a breakthrough in stability.

Windows 7 Experience

I have used Windows 7 Beta for a few months and I would have to say that I like it. It is much faster and programs don't lag even when you running multiple programs at once. There are some neat features introduced into Windows 7 and the overall use is much easier and simpler. Microsoft took Windows 7 seriously and they needed to do that. I have written a detailed experience about my use of Windows 7 and I hope you can find it useful. Please comment and let me know

http://ketiva.com/Computers_and_Internet/my_experience_with_windows_7_using_the_beta_version1.html

It is still too early to determine what kind of problems might rise from Windows 7, but overall I think it will be a great operating system.

Thumb Down

Hype and Eye Candy

It's oh so easy to diss 3.1 and 95 but they did the job asked of them at the time and still do for the most part. 95 was a major leap over 3.1 and 3.11 "Windows for Workgroups", but 98 was really an incremental change from 95, XP was the jump to add decent USB and Wi-Fi support. Somewhere in there was the joke that was "Me".

All-in though, while we've seen ( only to be expected ) support added for new hardware and technology as it evolves, above all else, so-called progress has been eye-candy and anti-piracy protection, with the need for ridiculously powerful processors, huge memories and huge disks.

I still use 98 on many machines because it's lean and does the job I need on hardware I've got. There really is no benefit for me in upgrading. When I want something 98 doesn't offer I use XP.

I won't be attending what is really just a Vista Service Pack party.

Anonymous Coward
Flame

@AC 13:25

>>>> My stereo looks/works pretty similar to what it did in 1995.

>>Then take a look at what everyone else is doing. I have no "stereo" at all any more, my computer >>attached to a 5.1 system does the job instead. Other people have systems that are basically dumb >>speakers + a docking bay for an iPod. Things have moved on a lot.

Then you are obviously content with poor quality sound.

That's fine for your average Joe but those of us who care about music can easily be identified by the kind of speakers and amplifiers we use and their positioning in the room. i.e. Good quality speakers + amp placed so as to give the best possible stereo soundstage. You know, because music is mastered in STEREO. Do humans have 5 ears? Yes! Ooops typo, I mean NO!

In our PC analogy that means using a good quality unix-like OS. With Windows 7 being akin to your tacky 5.1 "surround" systems and iPod boom boxes.

They work, yes. They're fun, yes. But are they made to a decent standard? Will they last very long? No.

For the average Joe that is of course perfectly acceptable. Some people just demand a little more from their software.

Is the author 14 or senile?

The Windows 95 that amazed him so was actually a shell running atop Windows 3.11 (and a poor copy of then-existing 3rd party shells, to be precise), as any developer in those days will remember - I still have the disks. The identical process, in fact, to the jump from NT 4 to 2000.

The bulk of non-eye candy developments took place within a version: 3.1 and 2000, with lesser amounts in 98 and XP after 2000's SP4. The slow, measured, semi-reliable, constant improvement cycle of XP was actually a good thing.

Microsoft programmers aren't really as slow and incompetent they seem, they're mostly just off on projects trying to capture new markets with monopoly rents (and failing) - but that would be illegal, so Microsoft says they were all working on Vista SE.

FAIL

you need a title

So we have an OS that requires very significant hardware simply to do the job of an OS - ie to run programs and manipulate files and run that hardware....... Shouldn't it be the apps and whatever you're trying to acheive with them driving the hardware market, rather than the degree of OS bloat.

"Windows 7, it's less shitty than Vista" is hardly a good marketing thrust. I'll adopt win 7 when I have no realistic alternative, ie when my copy of XP is no longer supporting my choice of apps and the hardware I select in order to run them.

Oh yes, Moderatrix, with the departure of Gates from Redmond, could we have a sweaty Monkeyboy icon please.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

So much drivel...

There's so much drivel written on this topic that it's tricky to know where to start with it all. Yes, Silverlight *is* cross platform. Yes, .NET is used a lot by Microsoft - lots of Visual Studio itself uses it for a start. LOL at the guy that's abandoning Windows because he can't pirate it - sure MS will be worried about losing you as a 'customer'. LOL at the guy who "assumes" that just because UAC has been changed, that MS have "give up completely on any idea of security", then spat out his dummy. Honestly, the anti-MS vitriol sure does prompt people to talk a lot of shit and make tits of themselves.

Paris Hilton

@Si 1, and @Mike the fellow Amigan

@Mike Gravgaard: I think you meant 256k, but we get the gist. I, too, enjoyed wild performance in almost all applications over Windows 95 machines at the time, until it came time to decode JPG pictures in IRC. Oh, my, how long fjpeg took to show me the supposed picture of the supposed girl on the other side! My 50Mhz 68060 with 144MB RAM and 1280x1024 SVGA video does much better, though I now salivate to the thought of the newly-unincumbered AmigaOS 4 running on a PPC MacMini -- please, Hyperion?!

@Si 1: Utter and complete rubbish. In virtual environments, VirtualPC and VirtualBox, I have run Vista and 7 and found Vista to be painfully sluggish while 7 almost literally flies. The installation was over an hour for Vista and right around 40 minutes for 7. To ensure that what I was seeing was not simply better support for one over the other in the virtualization software I put both on the bare metal to find identical results in performance. 7 is more than just a polished turd in terms of performance. Although it does maintain the horrid Vista user interface and methodology, both of which I absolutely despise.

Paris, more than just polished, possibly glazed.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Amiga misses

To all the Amiga fanboys: yes, you had preemtive multitasking. What you didn't have was memory protection. That's sort of like driving a sports car at 120 mph with bald tires and no seat belts. The Amiga had NOTHING like mainframe or UNIX functionality.

FAIL

@Mal Franks

How polite of you. Yes, Windows 7 is very marginally faster that Vista but it's much slower than XP, which is was what I was running before I upgraded. The performance drop is quite clear.

Do you believe if Windows 7 came out when Vista did it would have been a success story? It would still have been a dog in terms of performance, a hog in terms of memory and the software support would still have been pathetic. Modern hardware always hides Microsoft's increasing bloat. I still remember when XP first came out and ran like a dog compared to Windows 98!

Heart

Apologies

It appears I may have hit a nerve with those running minority operating systems.

Definite improvement over Vista

I've had the same computer since Vista came out. I ran Vista for a few months, down (up?)-graded to XP, and later installed the Win 7 release candidate (which I am still running). My sense is that Win 7 is basically "Vista done right". My experience running 7 has been quite good (whereas Vista was a dog on the same hardware). I would not hesitate to recommend 7 to friends/small business clients who are getting new computers. At the same time, XP is perfectly serviceable and Win 7 is nothing to go blow extra cash on.

Not only but also

Lost in the mists of time is OS/2, which gave Windows a run for its money at the time (as well as the Taskbar) thereby demonstrating that a little competition can improve the end result, even if the other competitors fall by the wayside.

Yes, I did run OS/2 Warp for a while and found it much better than Win 3.11.

Go

Freetard

I'm a freetard and double booted my pc with osx and win7... guess what? I don't go into win7 EVER! Osx is really quite nice... I never thought I would say as much, being a windows man, but there ya go... All freetards out there, spend a few hours getting osx to run on your pc... you'll be happy! And your gf will be very impressed!

More Fonts = More slowness

Does it still have the same 16 bit font setup (including the font viewer)?

@music is played in stereo

Aside, of course, from all the three channel classical music created off the master tapes from the 50s onwards and stuck onto SACD or DVD Audio (plus the small amount of genuine full surround works).

I'll agree that MP3 isn't exactly a step forward, though, even if it is ideal for portable devices or in car entertainment.

@Geoff Mackenzie

Actually, Win95 was the first Windows to have pre-emptive multitasking. All 32-bit Win9X programs and beyond used that model. What hobbled it was the legacy stuff it still had to lug around and could still potentially cripple the whole works. That's why Win2000 and up (which ditched the legacy stuff) became so much more stable.

FAIL

@M S Rocks

Clearly you're a halfwit, troll or an MS shill, but...

"Win 3.1/95 created the industry standard for how people would interact with a personal computer via a GUI."

Wrong. Others created and developed, Microsoft (as they still do now) copied.

IIRC, it was Zerox (Parc) that introduced the GUI (Alto, 1973), brought to the desktop by Apple (Lisa, 1983) and introduced to the home (and little oiks like me when I was a kid) by Commodore (Amiga A1000, 1985*). AFAIR Windows (in ANY of it flavours) has not introduced any new concepts to interacting with a personal computer that the three aforementioned machines didn't already have!

In future, please don't feel compelled to comment on things you clearly have no idea about!

* Yes, Windows 1.01 was released in 1985 too but it, by no means, could be considered to be a GUI we have been accustomed to (No window dragging/overlapping, no icons etc). Windows 2 which DID have those features was released in >1988<, three years after the Amiga.

@BristolBachelor

The trouble was that you couldn't have the cake and eat it as well, so (ever since Win95, I may note), they provided a common-sense workaround--quote encapsulation. Since quotes themselves are not allowed in a path, you can use them to encapsulate a name with a space in it. Many more recent programs are a little smarter about the use of spaces and don't always need the quotes. It's usually when you need to send program parameters that the quotes come back into play

@Psymon

You are not alone. I find the concept of User Access Control to be one of the more comforting things ever added to the Windows line. Linux is out for me since most of the software I use regularly doesn't come in a Linux flavor and is not WINE-friendly (not to mention I play games on this thing--games that don't make the compatibility lists). I've never minded even for a moment those times when I see the screen blink out and hear the double-beep of a UAC prompt--it's like the old "Are you sure?" prompts when you're about to format disks. Not only that, I know that if the prompt comes up without my expecting it, I can always call it off and then start searching my system for the culprit. To date, that hasn't happened.

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Why upgrade?

The problem is, progress isn't what's been needed so much since W95-- STABILITY is. But you have to get users to upgrade if you want to stay in business so there has to be at least some appearance of progress... Users don't upgrade without a reason-- and I have several friends still happily using W98SE. Their experience isn't much different than mine on XP, nor, apparently, yours on W7.

Anonymous Coward
Boffin

DOS/W95 falacies

Whilst I hate to put some of you supposed experts right on the whole win95 on DOS reality, as it does give me an easy way of knowing who to ignore. Please take the time to read an explanation

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/12/24/6849530.aspx

FAIL

Reminds me of

an old equation I learned in grad school:

Windows 95 = Mac 89.

Micrsoft

It's great that Windows 7 looks reasonably good. But quality is surely not the focus of Microsoft's OS business, which depends more on simply making sure every PC comes with Windows installed and factory-integrated. As long as that continues to happen, Windows will always dominate the desktop, regardless of quality. Cheap PC hardware will keep Apple in second place, and lack of integration will keep Linux at third.

Heart

Came for the frothing fanboi hate . . .

. . . leaving satisfied.

Anonymous Coward
Coat

Revolutionary?

Revolting is more like it.

Yes, that's my coat with the big target on the back.

Boffin

@Si

Windows 7 DOES *feel* faster than Vista, regardless of hardware. The reason? They've upped the priority of the graphics engine, and trimmed down it's complexity. Previously, background tasks could fight for contention against the display, and the display would hold everything in memory TWICE.

These days, Windows 7 doesn't actually benchmark any faster than Windows, but the UI will respond to make you think it's doing something. Copying a file is a simple example - Windows (Vista and 7) has some work to do first, calculate the time, check the paths, calculate the free space, allocate contiguous blocks if possible etc etc. Under Vista, this could happen first, before the "copying file" interface popped up. Now, Win 7 prioritises the UI updates first, so it gives the impression of being faster (you see the progress instantly). However the underlying copy doesn't happen any quicker.

Lame example maybe, but one of the key ways in which MS have sped up the Windows experience.

Flame

@DZ-Jay

"Of course, it is hard for the Toyota owner to imagine why would anybody drive a car for the pleasure of driving it"

What a complete pile of sanctimonious shite.

Grenade

Win7? Not yet for me

I just got MS Office running under Wine yesterday while running Ubuntu 9 on my dual booting laptop. If I can get other software to run under wine in Ubuntu, I won't need Windows for anything but gaming, and I do that on my Vista desktop, which will NOT be upgraded to Windows 7 at least until there is a Service pack 1. Won't be "beta testing" Windows 7 for Microsoft or filling their pockets with my hard earned money. As a matter of fact, after setting up my mom's new Vista computer (that gets a free Windows 7 upgrade with only shipping paid for), I get her XP Laptop, which I'm installing a new hard drive on and dual booting XP and Ubuntu. YEE HAAA!!!

Grenade

@ Jim 10

With that logic, Windows sucks because Mac can run Windows applications AND Mac applications.

Personally, I find the smaller number of freeware/shareware Mac applications a boon rather than a bust. How many DVD ripping applications have I downloaded in the Windows world that don't work? A lot. There are thousands! How many did I download on the Mac? One -- and it worked perfectly, with only a handful to choose from.

Don't get me wrong -- choice is great! That's why I choose Mac. I have an application that I use to convert my movies to PS3 format and it runs on Windows only. That, and my 5-year-old GPS are my only reasons to even have Windows on my Mac. Everything else is Mac-only.

Oh, and I run two hackintoshes along with 3 real Macs at home.

The OS aint done till WinFS is cut

Never take a Microsoft plan seriously while it still has WinFS on it. For nearly 20 years WinFS has been trotted out during developer conferences etc but it has never shipped.

Coat

ME UPGRADE?

I SEE NO REASON TO UPGRADE FROM MY

TRUSTY OLD C=64, UNLESS THIS NEW-

FANGLED WINDOWS SUPPORTS 80 COLUMN

MODE OR MAYBE THOSE NLQ DOT MATRIXES

I SAW AT MONTGOMERY WARD THE OTHER

DAY.

MINE'S THE ONE WITH PETSCII CAPS IN

THE POCKET.

Thumb Down

Short Memories. Windows 7 = Mohave Experiment.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/mojave-experiment/

Coat

@Andy Enderby 1

"Oh yes, Moderatrix, with the departure of Gates from Redmond, could we have a sweaty Monkeyboy icon please."

How about a nice flying chair?

Mine's the one with the 800 page 3.1 user's manual in the pocket.

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