Windows 7 Trumps Vista By Reaching 20% Share 404
CWmike writes "Windows 7 cracked the 20% share mark last month, a milestone the problem-plagued Vista never reached, Web measurement vendor Net Application said over the weekend. Gregg Keizer reports that Windows 7's online usage share reached 20.9% in December, up 1.2 percentage points from the month before. Windows Vista, meanwhile, fell by half a point to 12.1%, its lowest share since July 2008. Vista peaked at 18.8% in October 2009, the same month that Microsoft launched Windows 7. The other standout finding: XP is projected to still account for 13% when it's retired in 2014."
An anonymous reader adds news that Google's Chrome browser is nearing 10% market share.
Bad news for anyone doing web sites (Score:5, Informative)
With the continuing use of XP we'll still be supporting IE6, 7 and 8 for the forseeable future, given that IE9 won't run on XP.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:2, Informative)
Even the new task bar and Aero Snap alone give great productivity increases. It takes a while of getting used to them though.
The "libraries" feature can be useful too. For example if you have a large amount of music on your external hard drive, some on a network drive and some on your local disk, you can create a "library" which is basically a virtual folder which combines files from multiple sources. You can have as many as you like and they show up as folders in Windows Explorer and in file dialogs.
Then there are features in Vista that aren't in XP that are now worth looking at because 7 isn't slow like Vista is such as Windows Search and the DWM.
Basically, lots and lots of very small things. You might not care about them very much individually, but after switching it is annoying for me to go back and not be able to use these features.
TL;DR version (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Informative)
Time to read bud, there is a ton of info on it. Since Win 7 is basically Vista+, you have to start with the difference between XP and Vista. This is where the majority of changes occurred.
Read the following to fully understand the difference between 7 and XP, or cherry pick to get a basic idea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista [wikipedia.org] - stuff the end user will care about
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_features_new_to_Windows_Vista [wikipedia.org] - stuff that actually makes it better
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_safety_features_new_to_Windows_Vista [wikipedia.org] - stuff your IT guys will care about
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_features_new_to_Windows_Vista [wikipedia.org] - more stuff your IT guys will care about
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7 [wikipedia.org] - stuff the end user will care about, including the features that were removed since Vista
Re:Windows 7 (Score:2, Informative)
Decent IPv6 support, decent x86_64 support..not to mention that XP was TERRIBLE at managing multiple cores/processors and memory. XP would prefer the page file over real memory for some reason, too. Also, if you've ever done OS imaging via RIS, WDS is worlds better.
Re:Here come the "its not better than XP" posts (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Informative)
Windows 7 won't do an upgrade on an XP system, period. You have to do a clean install.
If you really, really want to upgrade from XP to 7 you need to upgrade from XP to Vista, then Vista to 7.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:2, Informative)
I'm a devout Linux/Mac user that has to support Windows 7 for a living. I can say that it's a dog.
- It doesn't work all that well on low-end hardware or virtual machines
- Every time you deploy an image you have to manually re-register the thing with Microsoft so it doesn't disable itself
- Still no decent backup system
- XP Mode is buggy and compatibility in general is bad (especially in the 64-bit versions)
- Still no EXT3/EXT4 (or any Unix-type), Large FAT or GPT support
- Limit of 2 physical processors? Really? It's easy to get 4 processors in a box these days with 8 cores each especially in the academic world
- Full Disk Encryption requires TPM chips which are missing in just about any system these days so you still have to go into a 3rd party solution.
- You still have to download a virus scanner, there is none built-in nor is the OS self-contained enough to be used without one.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:3, Informative)
Almost nothing you cited is actually true. There's no 2 physical limit on processors (for the Professional and higher versions)... heck, I'm using Win7 on a 4 year old box with 4 procesors (dual CPU with hyper-threading for 4 "virtual" processors). We also use virtual machines all over the place and it works quite well... with no need to constantly 'register' them. And yeah, you have to download "Microsoft Security Essentials" separately, thanks to wanting to avoid issues with the DOJ and law-suit happy McAffee and Norton... not exactly Win7's or Microsoft's fault there. So basically all your rationalizations and justifications for why Win7 is a dog are complete bunk. Sorry.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't work all that well on low-end hardware or virtual machines
It's been demonstrated to match XP performance on even quite low-end gear by several third-party tests. My experience is that's it's faster, particularly the 64-bit builds, which increase the file cache size from ~400MB max to "all of physical memory", which is a big improvement.
Every time you deploy an image you have to manually re-register the thing with Microsoft so it doesn't disable itself
You're Doing It Wrong. If you're supporting Windows 7 for businesses, you should be using KMS or MAK, and using the volume licensed Enterprise editions, not Windows 7 Home or whatever.
Still no decent backup system
It's the best ever - it has both file-level and image-based backups, it can take live snapshots of disks for both types, back up open files, it has a built-in scheduler, and a bunch of other features.
The VHD disk images created by Windows 7 can be mounted as virtual disks using a GUI or the command-line, can be used to boot from directly without having to be restored first, can be trivially converted into a virtual machine disk, and the install CD has a built-in restore wizard.
I haven't seen comparable features in any other operating system except OSX.
More importantly, if you're backing up desktops, You're Doing It Wrong. Laptops should use offline folders to sync with the master copy of the user data on a server, and shouldn't need backing up. Desktops should use folder redirection and/or roaming profiles. Back up your servers, not your desktops.
You can even do it the "Linux way" if you want to: I've seen sample scripts floating about that take a VSS snapshot of a disk, mount it as a folder or drive letter, and use rsync to incrementally update a backup, then release the snapshot automatically. I've done this myself for Windows Server 2003, about 6 years ago, it's nothing new.
XP Mode is buggy and compatibility in general is bad (especially in the 64-bit versions)
You shouldn't even need XP-mode most of the time, particularly on 32-bit editions of Windows 7. I've found that even the 64-bit editions will run just about anything if you simply set the "compatibility flags" on the main program executables. Just how bad are these applications that you have to support? Shouldn't you be blaming the app vendors instead of Microsoft?
Still no EXT3/EXT4 (or any Unix-type), Large FAT or GPT support
Are you kidding me? First, Windows has had GPT disk and boot support since Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, it has xFAT, NTFS on removable drives, and there's third-party EXT3 plugins.
If you think EXT3 on Windows is an important feature, again, You're Doing It Wrong. NTFS is a superior filesystem for Windows in practically every way. If you want to share data between Windows and Linux, use NTFS drivers on Linux, or a server with SAMBA.
Limit of 2 physical processors? Really? It's easy to get 4 processors in a box these days with 8 cores each especially in the academic world
That sucks, but 2 sockets is 12-16 cores these days. If you need more computing power than that, than you can afford a Windows Server 2008 R2 license, which gives you almost all the Windows 7 features, and more processor socket licenses. It's a commercial operating system, and it costs money.
Full Disk Encryption requires TPM chips which are missing in just about any system these days so you still have to go into a 3rd party solution.
The TPM requirement can be turned off using a group policy setting, but then it's not transparent to users, they have to enter a pass-phrase on every boot. External disk encryption doesn't require a TPM chip by default, I use that feature on my rather old laptop that doesn't have a TPM chip.
You still have to downlo
Re:Windows 7 (Score:3, Informative)
I've often said that I'd upgrade from XP to Win7 once they get a file browser and start menu that works as cleanly as XP's
Classic Shell [sourceforge.net] helps to fix those issues.
Re:Vendors are Lazy (Score:4, Informative)
All I know is that every Christmas when she comes by I do a complete format on that machine to refresh it for another year for her. She never complains about it!
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Informative)
There is actually a fundamental reason for this rather than just oversight. The ATA BIOS command set gives you a 32-bit sector index to load data off the disk in real mode (2 TB of addressable data). On a conventional BIOS system execution will start in real mode after the BIOS has loaded the boot sector (first sector) of the boot device, which of course is just 512 bytes. Normally this sector would also contain your MBR partition table, but the BIOS doesn't really care. Whatever boot device you point it at it's just going to load the first sector into memory and start executing it in real mode. In order to access data beyond 2 TB you need to:
1. Initialize at least 32-bit protected mode, which itself involves several steps and data structures
2. Complete basic hardware enumeration with the information given to you by the BIOS
3. Load a suitable driver for the disk device class.
4. Now you can load and read the GPT and figure out where the OS is actually located and load THAT, then finally transfer control to it.
Step 1 alone will take generally take the 512 bytes available to you if you do it robustly, so where do you put the code for the other steps? Wherever you put it, it needs to be within the first 2 TB of the disk. Windows COULD support booting from GPT on legacy BIOS systems, however, there would have to be 1 of 2 restrictions: Either your OS partition would need to start in the first 2 TB of the disk, or Windows would require a dummy partition located in the first 2 TB of the disk to use as the second stage boot loader. Although you might see those things as a reasonable compromise, the folks at Microsoft obviously don't and have decided that trying to shoehorn it in with restrictions and gotchas is probably just sillier than using the modern EFI boot system for the modern GPT partition table.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:4, Informative)