XP? Thanks for the memories

Windows 7

I have 32bit Windows 7 on a work laptop, the same on a personal laptop and Windows 7 64bit on a home quad-core desktop. All three machines had XP on before, and are all a couple of years old, or a bit more. I've yet to have a single system crash on any of them in about 8 months of total (adding up all three machines). Fortunately I've found drives for all my peripherals.

In essence, the stability and time to boot and responsiveness is a huge improvement and I don't think it is down to just clean builds, but we'll see as the patches build up. Don't have less than 2GB or 2 cores and there's a few changes for changes sake, but basically it is all good. On the basis that Vista was a beta, Windows 7 for, the first time, feels like I could live with it for ever.

Chicken or the egg

Reading about all the nice people who are having a great experience with Windows 7. I wonder if it is a chicken or the egg argument. I see people who buy computers with Window 7 and the computers have a large increase in processor power over their old computers. For most users, the people with Win 7 run the same programs as they did with Windows 98. So is it that Windows 7 is a step up for the user or another step in the Wintel cycle? Is the eventual goal of this never ending cycle of software-hardware upgrades every 2 to 4 years going to give people more things that they can do with their computer,,,,,, or will we have computers with the power of the computer on the Star Ship Enterprise running Windows 666 taking over a minute to bring up a Word document? Only the future knows for sure.

Shillness

I doubt if a more glowing article about the reasons for dumping XP for Windows 7 could have been written if Steve Balmer had done it himself.

Migration was a failure here.

Windows 7 Migration – is it time to move to 64-bit?

NO. Too many apps don't work with EXTERNAL NON COMPUTER (I guess ya call it 3rd party) hardware, and have no equal. When I have no job, and need to toss out $10,000+ of rack effects and other hardware, and then BUY $2000 new hardware and the OS for $250 (rounded)... and then spend MONTHS tweaking the system and debugging..all while no production..

NO.

Also ....

Also, I forgot to mention, I WOULD be willing to PAY for Security updates beyond the EOL

What would the team think about a corporate that was

about to upgrade from Windows 2000 and XP to Vista 32?

Would you be any less surprised if the IT outsourcerers name involved the initials E and S and D (not necessarily in that order)?

With all the people gushing about XP

XP sucks. It's just that it sucks in ways that users throughout the last ten years have gotten used to. For crying out loud, I had to do a complete OS reinstall this month because a game misbehaved, and hosed the entire box. Thing is, when XP goes Windows and needs a wee re-install, I'm fairly sure I know the voodoo to fix it. When 7 goes Windows, I haven't a clue. Chances are, neither does your IT department.

Economic uncertainty

I recently had an XP box die and faced this choice : spend money I cannot afford on new mobo/RAM/CPU/GPU/SATA and reconstitute the XP32 system, or spend 3x as much on a spiffy Win7-64 ditto with more cores and more RAM.

In the end poverty won. This isn't lack of foresight, it's just the math of survival in a stagnant economy that is unlikely to improve much. I would, by the time I'd upgraded apps, peripherals, and wasted weeks learning, have spent 10x as much, to basically stand still. I just don't have it, and the banks won't lend it, and even if they would, I don't know that I'll be able to repay it.

XP performance isn't the productivity bottleneck in my business, it's lack of customers with budget. If they won't spend, I can't spend. And that's the problem facing much of UK PLC as well as SoHo's like me, and we will delay IT upgrades for as long as possible as a result. Just like the car industry, many fewer people will be able to buy new every few years. And yes, Linux might make some gains in this environment as a way of extending the life of old clunkers - but the learning curve is where Linux costs are hidden.

Posted from my Nokia 6310i.

Multi Core has been around for a lot longer than we remember.

The first mass-produced multi-core device was in fact the Sega Saturn....with a quad core (or close approximation) it's taken almost 15 years to get to that point again.

64-bit

Hmm yes some programs will never work with Win 7 in 64-bit mode. Classic example of this is some software we want to use it's an overlay program for something the program underneath will run on Win 7 x64 but the overlay doesn't and the overlay is the only one that supports the newer hardware we want to interface with - Classic Fail and once we had a win 7 32-bit pc built the other piece of software that links into this to give us the full system layout view doesn't work with the new software yet - so total failure of the software in essence.

I mean what is the point of putting nice shiny hardware out if you've not got the software to work with it in the environment your customer is going to have which is Win 7 x64bit we don't have the need for Professional can't really see the upgrade we'd get from Home Premium but hey bet this is happening a lot where there is specialist software that does a specific task that no-other software out there can replicate since it doesn't know how to interface with the hardware - almost makes me want to break out the programmers guide and write the software myself which I could probably do given a few years.