Reply to post: Re: What's to look forward to?

Re: What's to look forward to?

Stupid statement. How can people prefer the poor-security, slower and less manageable XP to modern 7/8?

I have a number of machiens here in my home office. Some run XP and some run Windows 7.

I do my nightly database runs for my business on the XP machines as these involve lots of tens of thousands of SQL statements each day and even on ancient equipment the code runs faster on the XP machines than they do on the new faster machines running Windows 7. By about a factor of five or six.

I can set off my run at about 6pm on the XP machines and then by about nine or ten in the evening the XP machines are finished with the run. By breakfast the Win7 machines are still chewing it over. That is, if they haven't died due to their somewhat strange implmenentation of ADO (no, I am not rewring tens of thousands of line of code to match this week's version of the Microsoft Database of the Week).

Furthermore, starting up the XP machines takes no longer than the W7 machines. And didn't I read somewhere that that shutdown/startup on Windows 8 was nothing more than a clever hibernation rather than a boot from the metal?

Windows XP may have its flaws but when you compare it to Windows 7 speed is certainly not one of them. I made the mistake of 'upgrading' to Windows 7 because Adobe Lightroom wouldn't work on XP any more and that was one application which I needed the update for.

As for Office? Well, one can't beat the flexiblity of the old menu system. If one doesn't want certain things on the menu then a few lines of VBA will sort that out. Want other things in? Again,. a few lines of code would sort that. Office 2013 may be better and cleaner if and only if you wish to share Microsoft's idea of cleaner.

And speaking as a developer who sometimes maintains some of the many billions lines of VS6 code that's out there; I can tell you that Windows 7 and Visual Studio 6 are a match made in hell and for any decent sized project won't even load, let along compile, under Windows 7.

Faster? No chance. Better? Not if one is developing or, worse, if one has many thousand files in a folder that's pointed to by a library pointer such as 'My Music'. More secure? not sure about that; they have to get past my firewall,my scripts, my add-ons and the third party software. Since I don't go to dodgy pr0n or download sites I can't tell the difference.

One of my clients is moving to w7 on all of their machines. I would love to see how they get on with their required 3rd Party Active-X plug ins for IE6.