Windows 7

Money to burn!

I still use XP-64 and have absolutely no problems with hardware support. After running both Vista 64 and XP-64 on my system, XP-64 provides better all around support on my Quad Opteron, 12GB, RAID'ed system. Although, neither will support mu ATI All-In-Wonder board.
XP-64 sees my X-Box just fine, and detects and installs drivers for my Cakewalk Firewire Personal Studio also.

Still, most of the time I now have dropped Microsoft for exactly the reasons you provide above. I am now a very pleased and content Ubuntu user. Microsoft will have to come out with something much more compelling than Windows 7 to get me to spend good money on them again. Perhaps Windows 9 will offer more.

In their continuing pursuit of domination of the PC market, Microsoft has completely lost customer-focus and as far as their OS business goes, MS is now teetering blindly on the brink of an abyss. And there seems no way back, without sacrificing their near-monopoly....
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You have an OS (inc. libraries etc..) and you have an Applications Layer, including the UI and many other convenient utilities. A long, long time ago in the distant past, certainly in the world of the multitasking Amiga ( ~ 1985 !) and even in the Microsoft world, these were two very distinct entities. However, in their quest to retain their OS monopoly and attract new customers, starting with Windows 9x, Microsoft began to deliberately tightly bind applications features such as IE with the OS and accelerated the addition of tightly-OS-bound 'bells'n whistles' applications when they introduced Vista. Any attempt by governments, 3rd-party developers and other interest-groups around the world to separate Microsoft applications layers from the core Windows OS has been met by strenous legal resistance from Microsoft.

Microsoft has finally been "hoist on their own petard" with these Microsoft-imposed mandatory applications-offerings bloating the size and slowing the core OS. Endeavoring to continue their OS monopoly with Windows 7, MS dare not remove features that people have valued in XP and others that they have started to value in Vista. Microsoft also dare not cleanly separate the now hugely-bloated applications/UI layer from the core OS, (a) because they could not charge anything near the current prices for just the core OS (think Linux..) and (b) that would potentially open up the OS to 3rd-party development of UI and applications packages far superior or far more efficient than those currently packaged with Vista.

Of course, Microsoft could come up with a slimmed down OS just for netbooks ( er, maybe Windows XP.... sorry, I forgot WinXP has been forcibly discontinued, except for OEM netbooks for a grace-time entirely under MS control...). However, since the typical customer expectations for a netbook is a total transparency between the netbook, laptop and desktop, a netbook OS package missing some laptop or desktop features is unlikely to fly very well.

There are many thousands of 3rd-party and custom applications developed under XP ( the growth of the PC business literally exploded during this 6 years.. ) that fail completely or sporadically under Vista, regardless of the so-called "backward compatibility" of Vista. For that reason, penetration of Vista within business, educational and government entities has been pitiful. Only those businesses using standard office and data-base software have seen any successful penetration of Vista. Intel, for just one example, has refused to adopt Vista as their default Windows OS, due to its poor backward compatibility with 3rd-party and custom applications developed under Win XP. Which business in its right mind and in these recession-type circumstances is going to invest development and test resources just to patch an application for a new OS when it works perfectly fine under Windows XP?? There is no declaration from Microsoft of any intent to improve Windows 7 backward-compatibility over that of Vista for legacy WindowsXP-developed apps. And of course, Windows XP has been deliberately discontinued (and Dx 10+ mandatorily only available on Vista/Windows 7), so that Vista (er, I mean Windows 7) can be jammed down the customers' throats. Except that many of those professional customers who cannot or will not accept Vista/Windows7 as an "upgrade" from Win XP are moving to Linux for their future OS and applications development-platform and in the meantime sticking with Windows XP.

Didn't I say Vista was a failure when Ballmer made the admission? And guess who paid? You did. The consumer. US$259 in Matt's case...And you're going to keep paying until you wake up to this nonsense.

What's worse, you folks keep going back for more! Its like battered wife syndrome. (Constantly giving him chance after chance because you're so dependent on him).

Maybe its more like a prostitute...The one hot one that you can't get enough of, no matter how badly she treats you, you keep going back and paying. Oh! You can't do it with the other girls? Because she's one that does these things no one else can? And when your friends point the situation out, you fiercely defend it! Oh no, nothing is wrong. Its all good!

Sad. Really sad.

Well, its your choice. So keep paying, and keep giving Microsoft chance after chance. And if Windows 7 doesn't work out for you? Heck, there's always a Service Pack 1, right?

And if that doesn't fit your bill, well there's Windows 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, ... Oh gosh! It doesn't end, does it?

I'm actually fighting my computer illiterate and literate acquaintances alike to drop the FUD and give it a try. I'm pretty much the only computer-literate person in my family, which has 6 PCs altogether for example, and I've upgraded them all to Vista and nobody ever complained.
I must be doing something right where others fumble, I'm not sure.

Anyway, I'm also an early adopter and I won't hesitate to buy Windows 7... whenever. It's even more of a no-brainer than what Vista was back then, since I have to do nothing but move my current drivers over to it and it'll work top-notch from release day.

With the exception of my LifeDrive not yet having support for Vista (Palm's fault, it's been years now), Vista HP x64 works fantastically for me. Hasn't hard crashed since I bought this machine 14 months ago, and the computer runs pretty much 24/7. Doesn't slow down no matter how much I have going on at once....solid all-around. Guess I'm a lucky "Group B" user.

I'm not pleased with Vista. I consider it broken, and I haven't yet found anything in Vista that is an improvement over XP.

I have the following issues with Vista:

1- I can out type Vista. This occurs in AOL IM, but also in many other text box windows. Most of the time it catches up without losing characters - but if I persist, it will drop chars. If I want to backspace, I have to delay a second to make sure all the typed chars display before hitting backspace.

2- I've had to close the taskbar and restart it many times.

3- I routinely have to close IE, and restart.

4- Ok - this is trivial, but Freecell doesn't even work right. It tries to anticipate how many cards I'm moving in a stack, and highlight them, but it doesn't work. When moving a stack - I frequently have to go back to the "from" stack, and click it again - making sure it highlights, then drag it to the new location. I never had this problem with XP. I think it's a classic case of trying to do "too much" and failing to meet basic functionality instead.

I have purchased a copy of XP, which I'm going to use to replace Vista.

Plus

[best-troll-impression]
A). Vista absolutely sucks in every way imaginable and is Second Coming of Windows ME! Its slower than molasses rolling uphill in January, none of my hardware works, my software randomly crashes for no readily apparent reason, UAC goes off every time I type a character in Notepad and it needs 120GB of RAM before it can run smoothly!

B). Vista is perfect in every way imaginable and is the Second Coming of Windows XP SP2! Its faster than a speeding bullet, supports all my hardware out of the box, its as secure as a bank vault, is as stable as John Wayne in a gunfight, and can run smoothly on as little as 1GB RAM!

C). Hm, Vista looks nice enough. I like the GUI and some of the security features are spiffy. But all in all there's not much here that I can't do on XP. Since I already own XP and it runs everything how I want, I don't see a point in upgrading to Vista just yet. Maybe when more DirectX 10 games come out...

Its absolutely hilarious how 99% of people commenting on it automagically polarize into A (PRIME1-type) or B (Meadows-type) based on my strawmanned descriptions, with a pathetically small handful of people falling into C (Levelheaded-type). Oh, and I'll mention this before a bunch of people start falling over themselves claiming to be a C-type, a maximum of only 3 of them have posted in this thread. They know who they are. I'll also cheerfully admit to being a B-type.

Of course, in addition to that you have category D (AMDisDEC-type) who believe Vista is the herald to the Golden Age of Linux (which is so incredibly hilarious I can barely type straight), and category E, the OS X-philes who actually have a valid point in saying that Vista has done alot to push forward Mac OS X to consumers.

And yes, I have put Macintosh-ites last just because I dislike you that much.
[/best-troll-impression]

If MS wants to get it right this time, they really need to make Windows 7 64-bit-only, and push the industry forward. 3 flavors of one OS, in both 32 and 64-bit versions, is a disaster, promotes confusion over hardware and driver compatibility, creates unnecessary work for 3rd party devs, and results in a lot of people not leveraging their CPUs to their full capacity.

The arrival of 64-bit more or less concurrently with Vista was an opportunity, and would have provided a genuine reason for users to upgrade - beyond funnelling cash to Seattle - and MS blew it. I hope they aren't planning on doing the same all over again.

Ubuntu 8.10 out performs MS Vista in every measurable area, and it's, Free, as in beer.
http://www.crn.com/software/211800390

http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/08/windows-xp-downgrade-deadline-ex...

Looks like MS will let you keep getting XP until Windows 7 gets here.

The key difference is that Apple's operating system upgrades cost $129. You don't have to worry about what edition to buy, and the full-featured retail version doesn't have a $399 MSRP. I'll happily withdraw my complaints if Microsoft can match the competition with Windows 7's pricing scheme.

Without getting into the whole Home Premium vs. Business vs. Ultimate argument; that $129 will get you software that would run on a narrow band of hardware, while Vista can be installed on most anything including the PC's that Apple makes.
I love how people always reference $399 as some kind of magic number, I'll gladly sell you Ultimate retail for $399 and have 100$ profit. I'll sell you my Q6600 for $549 or whatever the retail launch price of it was and not tell you that the price has dropped since launch.

I simply don't get it. I'm running vista ultimate x64, and having no problems with it, and loving it. I'm running dual monitors, and 4megapixels on one of them. I have no complaints. I play games, I watch video, I program, I do graphic design. It's a business machine, and a fun one at that.

I have no problem paying for windows 7, or vista sp2. Better is better, not mandatory. I don't expect more for free -- from anyone, ever. Vista's a perfectly good and sound product, and I look forward to yet another one in windows 7.

That's not to say that vista's perfect in every way, there are boat-loads of things that I'd change to suit me. But vista's not designed to suit only me -- it's supposed to suit you too. It'll take me yet another six months to get all of my customizations figured out just right, and to learn the remaining few IT tools that I've been avoiding.

But really, why would I complain? It's more and better than XP. More management tools, better visuals, more power, 64bit, drivers and hardware work fluidly. x86 applications still work.

I think those of you who prefer XP simply do so out of familiarity. I wonder if you preferred XP when it was new.

If windows 7 is nothing more than a few upgrades to vista, that's fine. Quite frankly XP sp2 was a huge upgrade, and could have itself been a new OS. It brought firewalls, and security, and pretty well IE7, along with a whole host of tools. If windows 7 is bringing new control consoles, a new taskbar, and a few interface tweaks, really that's all I expect from a OS upgrade after a year or two. And it'll solidify IE8 as well.

I think you guys simply expect too much out of an OS for a mere $300. Look at all it does and can do. Granted you likely don't use most of it. Hence the multiple versions. So for $150, what is it that you'd want? Perfection across third-party applications? The perfect interface?

Come on! Virtually all of the windows 7 UI changes are purely out of the ubiquity of higher resolutions! Bigger icons, touch controls, gadgets, fancy effects. None of that is possible at 640x480. Not even 1024x768 could handle a sidebar, a big taskbar, a quick-launch, and a system tray. How big can your icons be if you need to fit a few dozen on your desktop? How useful are transparent windows when you're blurring low resolution pixels.

It's simply an incremental upgrade, but every OS is just that -- another iteration. You don't need to purchase each and every one of them. You can skip an increment whenever you choose. Just stop complaining about increments that you feel are unnecessary. Others, such as myself, very much enjoy Vista. Hey, my primary machine jumped from 98 to Vista, completely skipping both ME and XP. To me, they were the worthless steps, because they brought nothing particularly useful -- to myself and to my business -- over 98. I got ten years out of 98 -- first edition.

Have fun.

The first year was certainly not a fun experience, but SP1 came along and did away with many of the initial bugs.

My first year with Vista pre-SP1 was just fine, and I bought my Ultimate upgrade just a month after you did. I ran Vista x86 until about 9 months ago when I switched to x64 (you get both versions inside the Ultimate upgrade package.) During the entire time I've been using Vista I've never even thought about reinstalling XP (which we still use at work and is fairly crude by comparison, imo.) I've found Vista just fine in every respect.

I have no idea what you mean by "Vista = ME"--first time I've heard that one...;) Must've been coined by someone determined not to use Vista. There isn't the remotest scintilla of similarity that I can see.

Moving on, just what the heck has your use of Vista got to do with OSX? OSX barely supports a fraction of the hardware and software that Vista supports. It's not even in the same league, frankly--unless you're some strange person who doesn't want to pick and choose his hardware and runs only his OS more than anything else...;)

Basically, it appears to me that this sort of sentiment isn't objective--and the people who didn't like Vista won't like "Windows 7," either--and for the same reason--it's a Microsoft OS...;) No matter how much things change they stay the same, don't they?

Your bias shows pretty clearly here:

Perhaps Windows XP gave me an unrealistic sense of what to expect from an operating system. After all, it had an unusually long life-cycle for a Microsoft product, lasting over five years and receiving two service packs before finally being supplanted by Windows Vista.

The only way to take this is that you prefer a "longer life cycle" for an OS release. (Let's don't talk about the fact that Vista's life cycle hasn't been defined as of yet.) But then you say:

Speaking of Apple, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the much shorter Mac OS X release cycles, which Microsoft could end up mirroring with its future OS updates. Do I have a problem with that? No.

Right--if Apple's cycles are shorter it's OK, but if Vista's cycle is shorter, it sucks.

The key difference is that Apple's operating system upgrades cost $129.

So how's about the several *years* of "system upgrades* that you get with Microsoft's OSes for free through Windows update? Forgot all about that, right?

You don't have to worry about what edition to buy, and the full-featured retail version doesn't have a $399 MSRP.

Gee, but neither your nor I paid anything close to $399, did we, for our "full featured" Ultimate versions? Guess you forgot about that, too. I really don't see what there was to *worry* about, because the differences between the versions are spelled out right on the box, so even a dummy can decide what he wants to pay for and what he doesn't. To top that off, if you decide you want more you can upgrade your OS directly from the original system DVD you purchased--all you have to do is contact Microsoft for an upgrade price, they'll give you a key, and away you go--no further purchases required. A person could upgrade all the way up from basic to ultimate, in steps or all at once, without having to purchase another DVD install disk--ever. Forgot about that one, too, I bet.

Good analysis. I appreciate the insight.

What I keep thinking is that MS needs to re-think the release price and such. Here's what I think they should do:
$75-$150 Windows 7 Upgrade - Only for Vista Users
$150-$250 for Everyone Else

And there would be 3 price points within those to align with 3 versions:

Home- no domain or RDP support
Business - domain, RDP, no Media Center
Ultimate - domain support. RDP, and Media Center

EDIT: post in wrong place.

Either way I guess the death of Vista can't come too soon. Not even for Microsoft. At least they are admitting what a defective product they released, it's just to bad they are going to make us pay (upgrade) for their mistake.

Here's to hoping that MS does the right thing and include a lot of the "fixes" in SP2.

The things i like in Vista are the easy to find Event Viewer, and the Reliability and Performance Monitor. Those tools are wicked.

I follow the golden rule with all Microsoft products don't pick-up till at least one Service Pack is out the door, seriously! If you buy a MS product before SP1 you'll have problems. To be fair this isn't just limited to MS.

I also don't see the need to buy anything more then an OEM, and you can get two OEM for the Price of a regular Vista that allows multi-install, so given the short shelf life Vista apparently will have spending more mightn't not be a wise investment.

This next Windows is going to be no different, this is just more hype. If you really believe everything is some how going to be all better your wrong. Vista is now really good, the Alpha version has moved onto a Beta with SP1. I can use with it without any issues and after a little tweaking I prefer it to Windows XP. All that will happen is people will be using the Vista engine (so to speak) with a new theme under Aero. I agree that there should only be a 64bit release. 32bit is now obsolete.

We don't need new Operating Systems every 2 years! We just need the patches to fix the problems. That's the real issue with all MS products. Since Windows 2000 I've only upgraded because of games. I don't need XP but if I wanted SLI I had to. I don't need Vista, but I want DX10 I had to. Once Windows gaming move on to the next big thing or copy protect required biometrics to play I've very little reason to upgrade. As it stands I have a laptop & gaming PC running vista, all my older systems run Linux. I still find Linux on a laptop a bit of a pain. OS X isn't all that amazing but it is a nice blend of BSD + pretty graphics.

Oh, I see that my that MS and especially Windows being one of the topics that gets huge frontpage comments is holding true :)

"Perhaps Windows XP gave me an unrealistic sense of what to expect from an operating system. After all, it had an unusually long life-cycle for a Microsoft product, lasting over five years and receiving two service packs before finally being supplanted by Windows Vista. Since then, XP has received its third service pack, and only recently has Microsoft started phasing it out of the pre-built PC market. Those service packs not only fixed bugs and security exploits, but they also added a multitude of user interface and functionality enhancements like improved Wi-Fi support, Data Execution Prevention, and a much better integrated firewall, just to name a few."

Short memory. Windows NT 4.0 saw six service packs in 3.5 years, with a final security roll up released in 2001. Microsoft didn't formally discontinue all NT support until 2004 (8 years).

Windows 95 didn't become fully unsupported until the end of 2001 (6 years), and Windows 98 didn't become fully unsupported until 2006 (8 years).

Windows 2000 launched in early 2000 and may have felt like it had a short life, because XP and Server 2003 came hot on its heels, but it was widely deployed in business environments and saw four service packs, with the final security roll-up being released in 2005. Extended support is still available until 2010 (5/10 years).

IMO the only reason why XP might seem unique is because it was the first Microsoft OS release that launched both consumer- and business-targeted versions from the NT code base and with the same name branding. Consequently it is widespread and hard to kill. However the lifetime so far and level of support it has received are not particularly unique.

"Windows 7" looks to be merely a rehash of Vista - it's using kernel 6.1 just like Server 2008 right now, making the "7" moniker marketing alone - makes me even less likely to give Microsoft money in the future. Justified or not, the damage Vista has done to Microsoft's image makes me think that Microsoft might be better off in the long run to either make Windows 7 free for existing Vista users, or make it very,very cheap. Did they spend a lot to develop it? Probably. Does that mean charging everyone 100 bucks or more to "upgrade" to what Vista should have been a good PR move? I doubt it. Even in the corporate world, where products are more likely to be evaluated and tested by technical people before implementation, it seems Microsoft has an increasing unawareness of what people might actually want and what they're trying to sell; like pre-SP1 SCCM 2007 or Office 2007. Fortunately for them, enterprise licensing agreements make sure we're paying for 12,000 copies of Office 2007 every year even if we are unlikely to implement it anytime soon. The next couple of years are shaping up to be EXTREMELY interesting. We'll have to see what transpires. Microsoft, the ball is in you court.

Interesting: Matt Butrovich's Win machine is... his gaming machine!
And he relies "on a MacBook to fulfill my other computing needs."
Does that mean that Windows has in essence become a toy?
I remember Sir Clive Sinclair once saying that he had lost interest in his own Sinclair Quantum Leap because people started to use it as a toy in the first place, and not as a business machine.

In the end I paid $500CDN for my Ultimate the day it came out. I don't know why everyone is so bent out of shape for paying 1/2 that. Seriously. I'll probably end up getting whatever version of Windows 7 mirrors Ultimate too, full Retail.

WinME was such a disaster that I still think MS should've given anyone who bought it a coupon for a free XP upgrade. I mean the product just plain didn't work. Period. Most companies would have folded under class action lawsuits after releasing a product like that.

Vista is definitely not the second coming of ME. While I don't have it and really haven't used it, the outrage isn't really there. It's just not so much better than XP that a lot of people see the need to spend money to upgrade. Microsoft is basically competing with themselves by trying to outdo an OS that is still good enough for most people, regardless of its age.

I actually liked Windows Me. It seemed more stable/usable than 95/98.

Windows7 is the next XP. It takes the v1.0 of changes that come in an OS and really tweaks them (along with a few years of hardware advancements) for end users.

It's too bad that Vista was targetted at consumers AND businesses. Like Windows 2000, it should have gone to IT staffs first, hammered it out, THEN to consumers like XP (you could have gotten 2000 on default system installs, but there were more rare).

woooohoooo, I paid 250 USD for my Zune 80 almost 1 year ago....now you can get one for 199 USD

is this Techreport or whinereport ?
Come on, you cover computers news and such. What is (one of) the basic rule of computing ? you buy today it cost less tomorrow.

Windows XP has 3 Service Packs. get the facts. and SP2 was more security related than anything.

Windows Vista will get at least 2 Service Packs.

Great post! My thoughts exactly.

I moved from XP to Vista because I had an MSDN subscription (so it didn't cost me anything) and an almost brand-new laptop, but my general policy is to only switch OS versions with new hardware. Win2K->XP wasn't a huge upgrade (though if I'd been runnin Win98 or ME, it might have been a different story), certainly not worth the fuss of installing a new OS, but not a downgrade on current hardware either. Same with XP->Vista. And XP->Win7 looks like that, too; there's a reason the server version is Windows Server 2008 R2, not Windows Server 2010 (though Win2008 R2 is dropping the 32-bit versions, unlike Win7).