XP Users Are Willing To Give Windows 7 a Chance

Harry writes "PC World and Technologizer conducted a survey of 5,000 people who use Windows XP as their primary operating system. Many have no plans to leave it, and 80% will be unhappy when Microsoft completely discontinues it. And attitudes towards Vista remain extremely negative. But a majority of those who know something about Windows 7 have a positive reaction. More important, 70 percent of respondents who have used Windows 7 say they like it, which is a sign that Windows 7 stands a chance of being what Vista never was: an upgrade good enough to convince most XP users to switch."

DRM?

[OrangeTide]

Does Windows 7 have more DRM or less than Windows XP? I think my decision to switch will be primarily biased along that criteria.

so they've rebranded vista...

[mrboyd]

and now that the various device drivers for vista works people like it... Is it a feat of engineering or marketing?

Windows 7

[DaMattster]

I acutally like Windows 7, it crusies on my low-end, Sam's Club Dell Inspiron 1525 Celeron with 2GB of RAM. I still have plenty of memory for doing other things. Gnome and KDE have some catching up to do again. Looks like Microsoft took a page from the open source play book of only accepting quality code. That said, I am still pro open source but, at my job, we are going to Windows 7 so I'd better learn it, kicking and screaming.

Re:Resigned to it

[Anonymous Coward]

Funnily enough, I've been giving Windows 7 (Vista Plus) a go on a dual boot system when I have time. It's slick and has some nifty features but poor backwards compatibility, ugly interface, and death by mouse click usability is driving me nuts. If OS X worked on generic systems and was cheap, or Linux just worked without the bollocks "community" attitude I'd ditch Windows TODAY and feel relieved.

There's just so many arbitrary decision made by Microsoft it's stupid. Poor DOS support for games. Bad move. Forcing .NET on everyone. Bad move. API's multiplying exponentially. Bad move. Forcing their own media formats. Bad move. Braindead userland security. Bad move. The worlds richest company playing party donations bother ways. Bad move. Fragmentation of export versions. Bad move.

I'm sick of overbearing politicians. I'm sick of Hollywood. I'm sick of Microsoft.

Re:Windows 7

[je ne sais quoi]

That said, I am still pro open source but, at my job, we are going to Windows 7 so I'd better learn it, kicking and screaming.

At my job, we're all learning linux, latex, openoffice and hiring programmers to get us off MS software all together. Granted, I'm the boss, so it makes it easier, but it is still a very gradual process. Also, my employees have started bringing in their personal laptops with Ubuntu on them -- I figure now is as good a time as any. Our IT department will try to get us to upgrade to Win7 but I will fight the upgrade train as much as politically sane to do, because I'm just not interested in learning it and I'm really tired of getting screwed by MS with every other OS. I keep XP around because lots of software runs only on it and nothing else, especially PCs that control equipment. These PCs will need to stay, but we no longer need dedicated windows desktops in the group, the last one is now dual-booting to debian. Everything else except the equipment drivers is mac or linux.

Re:Windows 7?

[Keen Anthony]

I've thought about this a lot. I feel Microsoft is trying to say that its returned to the roots of Windows. It's been many years since a Windows release was formally identified by a standard version number. It's very common now for software to have more eye-catching abstractly descriptive version identifiers like Pro, Lite, Special Edition, etc. Standard version numbers for an OS like Windows communicates a sense of a return to old school software efficiency and productivity.

Sounds a little silly maybe, but follow me a sec. "Windows 3.11" was just a piece of software; cold and boring. NT was "new technology". It communicated a sense of industrial strength computing. The Year-based Windows releases were all about being modern. You needed them to be modern. "Me" and "XP" were attempts at being trendy. Multimedia was standard, and Windows XP communicated a new kind of "Xcitement", "Xperience", etc. Vista is the post modern, post multimedia OS, communicating the idea that it's forward looking.

Windows 7 is simple, plain, and in the West, comforting. It's lucky number seven. It sounds like it's a serious operating system that is focused on doing its job, and not blinding me with flashy trends. It sounds like an operating system I can trust. In any case, that's the marketing strategy I got from the name. I have no specific insight into Redmond's actual reason.

Re:Mohave

[Anonymous Coward]

That's really clever how you use a dollar sign instead of an 'S' since Microsoft is so crass as to be interested in making money with software. You must be really smart - yell upstairs for Mom to make you another hot pocket. You earned it!

Re:so they've rebranded vista...

[michaelhood]

As someone running Windows 7 final (MSDN), I have to say that it's pretty ridiculous to expect end users to "trim the fat" from their OS.

That said, I haven't had any such issues except once when I opened the system information dialog and inadvertently triggered the refresh of my Windows Experience Index measurement. This spawned a background process to run some benchmarks, and continued running after I closed the dialog. Took me a few minutes to figure out what was going on.

Re:Try Windows 7?

[InlawBiker]

It's a big plus that embedded, low-power 3d graphic chipsets like Intel's x4500 are finally ready for Microsoft. When Vista first came out the 3d processors simply were not there on the budget machines. It is important to add the 3d effects to the UI, no matter what anybody says. But it's funny how my wife's old Macbook with the ancient GMA 950 chip runs OS-X liquid smooth.

Windows 7 is worthy for some

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're an XP user, Windows 7 appears to be a worthy upgrade. If you're a Vista user, I would be pissed about the upgrade price and wait to see the next version of Windows.

I am a Vista user.

Re:Resigned to it

[shutdown -p now]

Vista objectively sucked on release, before hotfixes and service packs came along. By the time it became a usable OS, it received too much negative publicity.

The difference with Win7 is that the latter works great out of the box (this isn't hearsay - I was using it since beta, and I use Win7 RTM since the day of its release for MSDN subscribers).

Re:Try Windows 7?

[IntlHarvester]

OS X was designed in an era when 3D chips were pretty primitive, so it falls back onto the CPU if the graphics chips aren't up to snuff. If you check the system profiler, "Quartz Extreme" probably isn't enabled on your MacBook.

IIRC, MS eventually came around to the same conclusion and Win7 will emulate DX9 on the CPU for certain chipsets.

Well of Course

[MadUndergrad]

Of course the people who've "tried" Windows 7 are gonna like it. They more than likely have used it on some special demo machine with the specs and thorough setup to make it usable. Just like Mojave, when users try it in a custom environment designed to make them like it, they'll like it. But that's not what they're getting on their Compaq POS-9000. They'll eventually realize they're unsatisfied with 7 and look forward to the new version of windows without realizing they're going to be duped again just like before.

Users like Macs so it will go down well

[dbIII]

If I wanted to use it in my office I would want the features in the full version. With the proposed price for that it's even beginning to look as if OS X on Mac hardware instead of what superficially looks like an OS X ripoff would be better value. However, the important thing is the applications so you buy the platform that will run them.
It's a pity that the 5 digits per seat software my users run starts and stop services just to put stuff on the screen so every user would need Admin access and UAC turned off. It's really not Microsofts fault that people are still writing applications with an MSDOS mindset even when they are paid a fortune to drag it screaming into the new century, but as I said, you get the platform that runs the applications.

Re:Try Windows 7?

[caitsith01]

As an XP user all I can say is GO TO HELL Microsoft. I am done with your carnival sideshow of needless upgrades and pointless eye candy.

Once XP is completely dead, then I guess I'm done with Windows entirely.

I'm also a dedicated XP user. You are being unreasonable.

I have been using Windows 7 for a couple of months. Without having metrics to back up my personal experience, I find that it does everything at least as well as XP, and many things better.

Most noticeably, it has a user interface which doesn't look like it was designed in the mid 1990s. It looks and 'feels' a hell of a lot better, as well as being vastly more customizable. Maybe this doesn't matter to you, but it does to me and I would suggest to most computer users. Overall the UI in Windows 7 looks good and is very responsive.

Various other things work a lot better than they used to - for instance, my laptop has an HDMI port. This was a constant nightmare on XP, and frequently didn't work at all or did weird things like resetting my display settings for the laptop itself whenever it was connected to a TV. Windows 7 just figures out what it is plugged into and switches to the most appropriate video-out mode. Similarly, whereas switching screens under XP frequently causes issues with a video that was playing fine on one screen not transferring to another without restarting playback, in Win 7 this seems to happen seamlessly. Audio likewise is a lot simpler and easier to configure.

Unlike Vista, MS seems to have done a good job of working out when additional security is appropriate - e.g. when software wants to actually make changes to installed components or add drivers to the system, a password or fingerprint scan is required, but I am yet to be annoyed at an inappropriate time as I was in Vista.

Games seem to work just as well as they do in XP, which is a huge contrast to Vista (which came with my laptop and ran games like an absolute dog).

It starts up and shuts down a lot more quickly than XP.

The media centre (can't remember what it's called) is actually pretty good for use on a plasma TV.

However, most noticeable is that most of the time I DON'T notice that I'm using Win 7, or any particular OS - stuff just works properly without any real need for fiddling around.

So, from one XP adherent to another, I say: maybe you should give it a go. Vista was a horror from the pits of hell as far as I am concerned. MS may be a big evil lumbering corporate monster, but someone there appears to have taken the problems with Windows by the balls and actually focused on making an operating system that has the following features: modern; actually works even on modest hardware; good user experience. My experience so far indicates that they have largely succeeded.

Re:Windows Vista is a good product

[ducomputergeek]

I recently put Windows 7 on my Bootcamp partition and I've been pleasantly surprised. It runs pretty snappy on this older MacBook with 2GB of ram. All of our Windows based apps work fine. I could even get it to boot in Parallels Desktop 3, but not do much. (Need to upgrade to Parallels 4 to get it to work with Windows 7). Hell, it recognized the Airport card out of the box. Same with the Intel GMA drivers. Only thing I needed from Bootcamp was the "Restart in OSX" option.

I've even installed Windows 7 on a number of friends vista machine and they all are much more impressed at how snappy it is compared to Vista even on older hardware.

Re:Users like Macs so it will go down well

[dbIII]

What I really should have added is that in many cases any security enhancements in MS Windows 7 are neutered by very poorly written applications so all you really get is a shiny new interface. In that sort of environment the nice new VPN features instead become a disaster waiting to happen as you giving a lot of trust to a machine that has had a almost all of it's security features turned off or bypassed. If the system only runs a few well behaved applications it would be a different story - but many "enterprise" environments are burdened with multiple pieces of legacy crap on their MS Windows workstations.

Re:Windows 7

[Bent Mind]

There is no "learning" Windows - if your job requires you to "learn" your operating system, and you're not a desktop tech, you're spending too much time dicking around with fonts, themes, and control panel widgets.

As a certified office instructor (one of many side jobs), I'm required by my job to learn Windows. A lot of users are confused when they start Vista for the first time. Within 30 minutes, and a few "Where is" questions, they are up, running and playing with fonts, themes, and control panel widgets. As to Unix desktop bashing, I prefer KDE 4.2 to Vista. Everything is easy to use and it doesn't require 2GB RAM to run. But, to each their own...

Heathen

[Spad]

OK, I admit it, I like Windows 7. I've been running Enterprise x64 at work since it was released on Technet and it's really good - driver support was almost flawless out of the box (Although when I tried to install the latest Catalyst drivers they consistant BSOD it, but that's really an ATI issue) and it runs much better than Vista on the same machine. The only things I've had problems with so far are old or stupid apps with hardcoded OS detection limits or 32-bit only libraries and so far all of them have worked via the XP Mode VM (Although there are some quirks with multiple monitors). My current plan is to upgrade my home PC from XP Pro to Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (Technet again) in the coming weeks. One completely awesome feature that they should have added years ago is the ability to right-click on a DHCP lease and convert it into a reservation, which saves me a hell of a lot of time.

There are still negatives - there are some real issues with pinning certain apps to the taskbar, especially if they're located on a network drive (though there are workarounds), I'm not a fan of the way that they've over-simplified some of the menus making it difficult to find the advanced settings you want and the libraries are annoying, though I suspect they'll grow on me; also, Sharepoint still behaves inconsistently when trying to save documents directly to the site via Office 2007 as it did in Vista, especially with Visio for some reason. Oh, and even the new and improved UAC still annoyed me, so I had to turn it off completely - though I'd imagine non-power users probably wouldn't have as many issues with it.

All in all, I think we all know that Windows 7 is the OS Vista should have been - and probably would have been if Microsoft hadn't decided on an arbitrary release date for it whether it was done or not (ignoring the business implications of letting Vista development continue for another 2 years) and I for one am very impressed with it so far.

Win7 is do or die for MS

[nulled]

Did you know that the ONLY reason why Windows 7 was 'trimmed down' (ram, cpu and resource hog that Vista was)... was simply BECAUSE of Linux running on NetBooks?

It is well known fact, that internal to MS, and to the top executives there, that they did not think Vista had ANY issues at all. Why do you think they spend all those MILLIONs of dollars on Mojave and the silly SienField commercials? They actually THOUGHT it was PUBLIC perception problem, not a technical one.

It was not until the massive influx of the Netbooks, running Linux, that MS went 'Oh SH*T' we better do something. So, they HAD to make Win7 run on a Netbook.

THIS and mostly only this, (seriously) was the reason for the 'trimming of the fat' and the rest was MASSIVE investment into WHY people hated vista. Hense, why the security popups are now GONE.

Just remember, MS does not innovate... they simply copy others or react to negative things. If it were not for LINUX...MS would STILL be pushing out retarded Mojave ADs and others...

Kinda ironic isn't it?

Re:Try Windows 7?

[Zancarius]

I think you're being a little unfair (or trolling). I'll bite. First, a qualifier:

I'm not a huge fan of MS, but I confess that I like Windows 7. (To qualify: I used Gentoo as my primary desktop OS for about 1.5 years, switched to XP when I had a semester of .NET development at uni, and then recently switched to Win 7 to try it out with the public beta--I've been impressed thus far.)

Looks and 'feels' aren't going to increase productivity. The complete lack of text on the task bar means I have to learn what each icon represents and then have to mouse over it or open the item to figure out what it actually is. In XP or Vista I can just look at the task bar and figure out which server's I've RDP's and SSH'd into, what page my browser is on, any IM's demanding my attention and who they are from. I'm going to lose a crap load of productivity from this alone and probably some hair as well. There are good reasons we favour text based language over a pictogram or hieroglyphic language, complex text is far easier to read.

Spend about 5 minutes learning the OS. The new taskbar wasn't something I appreciated at first--but it grows on you. Although another couple folks have already suggested this fix, here's mine: Right-click your start button, go to properties, and under the Taskbar tab, change "taskbar buttons" to "combine when taskbar is full." Poof! Text magically appears on your buttons. I don't select "never combine" as someone else suggested, because I happen to like having similar applications groups together.

Fancy that.

That stupid "network and sharing centre" is still there, still trying to tell me that it knows what to do with my network. Why do I have to assign a "location" popup to every different DHCP address I get, the OS should handle this invisibly.

I agree the network and sharing center is stupidly designed (and severely dumbed down). I'll grant you this. I haven't noticed the DHCP issue, but then... I don't use 7 on a laptop. I suspect this might just be specific to your configuration, however.

Customisability is a two edged sword, with customisability comes more chances for something critical to fail. I'm not saying that extenisve customisability is a bad thing but most users will only change their screensaver and background. Some will pick a different pre-selected colour "theme" but most will leave it as default. Most users do not care about customisability beyond major superficial points like the background.

That's being a bit petty, IMO. Gnome, KDE, and just about every other user-facing desktop allows for the customization of some things. Are they bad? Maybe.

If it were as horrible as you suggest, perhaps you should stick with bash? csh, maybe? Actually, forget I said that bit about csh [faqs.org].

Actually, screw this bit about multiprocessing OSes. Why not head back to a modern DOS-based system [freedos.org]?

Game performance is nowhere near the level of XP and the old games which didn't work in Vista still don't work in 7. I'm not completely cynical however, I know 7 is still immature and many of the drivers will have issues. It will take time for the drivers (esp graphics drivers) to mature.

Umm, I haven't noticed a difference. Mind you, I don't play a lot of games, but the ones I do play actually appear to have a higher average framerate (~5-10, so it's within the margin of error) than XP.

Unfortunately in the Windows world, upgrades are synonymous with planned obsolescence. If you want your old games to work, run your favorite Linux distro and install them under Wine (no, I'm not kidding). I got Carmageddon 2 to play just fine (joystick included) under Wine. I could never get it working, even under XP.

The RC does not start nearly as quickly as a fr

Re:Try Windows 7?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's compare [slashdot.org].

Re:Try Windows 7?

[mdwh2]

Agreed - I love how this story gets tagged "astroturf" simply because it presents news that's favourable to Microsoft.

Yet the daily Apple Slashvertisements (including today's news about the Iphone being the number one selling phone in Japan this month - god knows why that's news, we never get stories on all the other phones that are number one selling phones in any country, every month), oh, that's fine.

I could at least understand the pro-Linux / anti-MS stance, as at least that's embracing open solutions. But given that it's Apple - who provide a far more locked down and controlled platform - it makes no sense.

Cut maintenance 90% with Ubuntu or OS X

[SgtChaireBourne]

Sounds like you're a liar, alternately a shill. Based on several hundred first and second hand contacts, not counting schools, tech support calls go away after upgrading parents or non-technical users to Ubuntu or OS X. Really. If you failed to give a quick orientation, then you'll get a few days of 'how do I' calls. After that it's smooth sailing. Maintenance is a major savings once you leave M$ products behind.

A hidden savings is found with the end users. The end users are more productive as well, once you leave M$ products behind. Interestingly, even crusty, old KDE 3.5 is easier to use than XP [kde.org], even for those with a Windows legacy.

YMMV, but I find the above based on several hundred first and second hand contacts, not counting schools.

Re:Try Windows 7?

[KillerBob]

I would have called it XP Pro, SP7 - but who's counting, right?

You'd be wrong, though... XP is NT5 kernel, vista is NT6, 7 is NT6.1... aside from the numbering changes, though, Vista/7 make some pretty significant changes to the way that drivers talk to the hardware/operating system that mean that, aside from the UI changes, it's not really fair to call either Vista or 7 an extension of XP. Vista really is a complete rewrite, and 7 is more of a bugfix and new UI for Vista (which, incidentally, is a huge upgrade over Vista... they've fixed all of the reasons I ended up going back to XP on that system).

Specifically... drivers now run in userspace, with no direct access to the system, and without being run with kernel level or privileges. This means that if a subsystem crashes, it can be restarted without having to restart the computer, and in fact, that's happened a few times with the graphics subsystem on my laptop (my primary gaming system), which is now running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (from MSDN). Also, user accounts/userspace is limited. That's the main reason that people kept running afoul of the UAC, actually... it's not that the UAC was so invasive (though it is pretty annoying in Vista), it's that their software/drivers were all expecting to be run in a lower ring, with greater access, and the OS was asking the user's permission because that's not what software is supposed to be doing.

Incidentally, since installing Windows 7 x64 on my laptop, I've installed Office 2007, World of Warcraft, Civilization IV, Jade Empire, and both of the KOTOR games, without running into the UAC even once. It's there, I've seen it while installing drivers and when I first installed antivirus. But it's nowhere near as invasive as it was in Vista. I am a Linux user on anything where I have a choice, but for my experience with 7, it really is a *huge* improvement over Vista, and I think enough of an improvement over XP to make switching worthwhile.

Re:Anyone with Windows 7 experience confirm these?

[lennier]

"Use a different file manager, and your problems are gone."

I'm sorry, but 'swap out the standard system shell to work around braindead behaviour' is an automatic OS DESIGN FAIL.

You just don't bypass Explorer in production environments. Not optional.