Windows 7 outstrips Windows 8.x with small November growth Windows 7 beat Windows 8.x in trench-war battle for growing market share in November. Netmarketshare stats for the month found Windows 7 had increased its share of desktops from 46.42 to 46.64 per cent of machines. This meant it outpaced the Windows 8.x family, which gained just 0.05 per cent. Windows 8 fell from 7.53 per …
It's not an HP laptop with those horrible "nobody uses function keys anymore, so we'll default them to important things like numlock and pause and force users to press some Fn key or something in addition to the function key to get the function" keyboards, is it?
I haven't found any shortcuts that don't work yet.
Have MS really tied the kernel and the UI so closely together that you can't have an
Aero or Metro option.
The desktop does look flat in desktop mode, why can't I have the Aero bling in there?
And what is it with UI devs these days where everything is going flat and boring, IOS7 went the same way horrid bright kiddie colours.
The industry seems to be ignoring the 30+ Male with money to spend and is going after WAGs and kids
Like all other design trends, Flat UI is amazing when done right; and bloody awful when done by ham-fisted amateur designers who are just following the trend rather than putting serious thought into the How and Why.
I think Metro falls into the former camp myself. Yes, it took a lot of getting used to, but so did Windows 95 back in the day.
What's the odds that the marketing gnomes at MS will balk at introducing anything labeled "8.n" or "9" with the next leap forward? Unless they jump clear out of the associative mind-set of 8 ... perhaps to "Windows Century" edition, ie, Win100 ... except that might sound completey back-slid from earlier Win2000 product?
More likely they'll jump tracks completely with something like "Windows Emperator" ... you know, a long-awaited response to Linux?
But it just isn't in the same ball park as Windows 7 for a power users OS. Everything from RAID, to installing AMD video drivers with multiple screens, to just about anything you can think of, was a total pain in the ass. I spent about a month of my life trying to live in Ubuntu.
BUT.... I use Ubuntu VM's for developing on. Works fine when you are using Linux for something specific (I also run both my servers off Ubuntu Server.)
Windows 8 just drives me nuts - I had it 1.5 weeks and it completely strangled my productivity - even after I worked out all the hidden secret ways you could do the stuff that you used to be able to do easily. Total shite and useless for work.
I guess it is a case of PEBKAC. Those same things work fine on the various (20+) boxes switched so far. ATI, NVidea or Intel, one or many monitors, tablet pc, notebook or classic tower - all worked. One of them was "build for Win8" (Dad's new box) but the rest where 2+ year old Win7 boxes, including the rather special tablet pc and convertible units.
Lets forget for the moment I rarely boot into windows for work.
1) As a sysadmin, i don't give a shit about its look, it has not tools to incentivies me to switch.
2) As a consumer, I have a tablet for any consumption, and get nothing really "OMG!" from switching my home box (which might go away depending on how steam on linux does).
3) As a upgrade path, I am still getting people off XP on to 7, I don't really need to start the next path to Windows 8 just because Microsoft tripped on their own ignorance and missed the UI craze.
4) As support path, its easier to maintain a single OS version with multiple applications, than multiple OS versions with multiple applications.
5) The features that would have made think about moving for upgrades (IE UNIX support) are locked in shitty licensing models. Honestly, I dispise Windows Licensing (Which is where I direct most of my MS hate), I actually don't mind the OS.
Microsoft may have a deadline to rid the world of Windows XP by April, but those of us in the US Medical Fields have some more stringent requirements to meet if we still want to get paid for the care we provide.
Affordable Care Act, Meaningful Use Stage 2, HIPPA Ombudsman Rules, ICD10 Deployments all have hard deadlines in 2014. All of which impacts the amount of money we are reimbursed by Medicare/Medicaid for our provided care (80% of our revenue stream).
There are still several Medical Software vendors that are still stuck on Internet Explorer 7/8, Java 1.6, Windows 2000 etc.
We're lucky we can even try Windows 7, let alone Windows 8.x.
Really. MSFT should stop plugging their ears and admit that Win8.x is a failure. No, having shills propping up a turd won't bring up a Jobsian effect. Hell, even Apple can't keep it up as Android is slowly but surely taking over the #1 spot in most markets. Of course, the difference is that the Jobs-powered RDF was pushing out stuff that was actually likeable, while the MS stuff is just plain awful.
Windows 7 is a great OS but it feels antiquated after using windows 8 and now 8.1.
There are so many imp0rovements in windows 8 and the only thing that people seem upset about is the metro start screen. jeez get over it, or download one of the many classic menus.
You get everything windows 7 has plus a whole lot more.
No-one is going to "get over it" until it's made optional or just plain GONE. See, Apple also monkeyed with "let's put a mobile UI on our desktop OS" but they made it optional (Launchpad). It ended up being rarely used by most, but didn't bring the shitstorm on Apple. Why? Because it is OPTIONAL. As in, you're not forced to use it if you don't want to.
The Metro abomination is forced upon everyone, and 8.1's idea of "choice" means "you can choose to boot into a desktop view" but you're still forced to use the damn thing the moment you click on the "start button".
By the way, the last time a previous OS looked antiquated compared to the new one would be OSX (for Apple), Win2000/XP (for Microsoft) and the 2.6.x release of the Linux kernel for the Linux world. Arguably 7 might qualify, but even then it wasn't that much of a jump. Most posts I've seen claiming 8 makes all other OSen look prehistoric have been obvious astroturfers.
My Sony Laptop is 7 years old and running XP.
Win 7 and 8 do not support some of the hardware, fingerprint scanner,wireless networking and bluetooth so I will stick with XP regardless of support until the thing physically dies on me.
It still does everything I spent the £1700 asking price for it to do.
I also have a Samsung Win8 laptop,I dont like the OS,for me its just not easy to learn so thats going on ebay !
"Win 7 and 8 do not support some of the hardware, fingerprint scanner,wireless networking and bluetooth"
I'll bet that most recent Linux distros will support the majority of your hardware, though - take a LiveCD for a spin and find out. At least you'd be safe from zero-day exploits after next April.
A friend of mine bought a Windows 8 laptop even though I told him not to. I set it up for him (which took a week by the time I had finished fucking around with it). He tried to use it once and hasn't opened the lid for about 6 months now.
He can't even be bothered to put it on e-bay as it's effectively worth not much more than fuck all.
windows 7 is good for 10 years,. it have crap security, and amakes professional or ultimate a waste of money
you have to create your own start up shortcut in the start menu folder to load your own custom theme :
"%SystemRoot%\system32\rundll32.exe" "%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL %SystemRoot%\system32\desk.cpl desk,@Themes /Action:OpenTheme /file:" C:\Users\*\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\*.theme"
the vistual styles for the .theme files are rubbish and there is`nt a editor, and all colors cant be changed, and colors/desktop colors in the registry are never both set
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and so on and so on
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