Windows 7 Not Getting A Second Service Pack 441
An anonymous reader writes "Windows 7 was expected to have Service Pack 2 issued roughly 3 years from its introduction (late 2009). People, including myself, have been asking 'Where is it?' and the answer apparently is, 'It isn't, and will never be' which lends itself to the giant pain of installing Windows 7, then Service Pack 1, and hundreds of smaller hotfix patches. Why Microsoft? No go to Service Pack 2 for Windows 7!"
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Duh. People won't willingly switch to Windows 8, so this is just another way to push them there.
Having barely used Windows for the last few years I'd almost forgotten the horror of Windows Update compared to apt-get or yum update.
Re:to continue the trend? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:to continue the trend? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, just seems like they are trying to phase out older OSes faster and keep people current.
Read: make more money
Disappointing, but not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
This is disappointing, but not surprising. Microsoft knows that most experienced Windows users don't want any part of Windows 8. But they are convinced that Windows 8 is a vital part of their business strategy going forward. So they are doing whatever they can to bribe, force, or coerce users to switch to Windows 8. They don't want Windows 7 to become the new XP, even though they profited handsomely for many years from XP licenses. The power user/business desktop just isn't cool enough for Steve Ballmer, Steven Sinofsky, and the other myopic decision-makers at MS these days.
Re:to continue the trend? (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I understand, the driver model for 7 and 8 are the same, and if anything 8 seems to run faster on older hardware (probably due to removing aero, among other things). This isn't like the upgrade from XP to Vista, where a ton of stuff broke. I still won't use it, because I think creating two separate UI's for the Desktop was a horrible design choice and I need to get work done. They could have been elegant, and created a generic font/icon/UI scaling engine that would allow the OS to work on displays of any arbitrary resolution, but I suppose they thought ratcheting the Xbox 360's UI on top of Windows was the quick and dirty way to get it done. I actually just bought an upgrade to Ultimate Edition for my laptop, if that says anything about what I think of Windows 8.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:to continue the trend? (Score:3, Insightful)
NT4 - 6 2000 - 4 XP - 3 Vista - 2 7 - 1 8 - 0???
Never deploy a Microsoft OS until at least the first service pack release.
Sinofsky (Score:4, Insightful)
Has decided that its out with the old and in with the new. Anyone opposing him is binned or sidelined. To underline the drive involved in Windows 8 - Windows 7 will quite quickly face a lock. If they can force you onto 8 thats where they will do so.
If he doesn't do this, the moment they will get on 8 will be minimised and he will look a private and public failure. And Mr Sinofsky doesn't like to be a failure.
It may questionably be good for windows users long term - as this might mean that the eco system has the earthquake required to shunt a billion trillion manhours of ecostructure from old win to new win.
Personally I think metro/notro is very poor. And it would take more than Sinofsky being a knob and a shitty UI to persuade people in the real world. Thus, looks rocky to me.
Its a shame, because to be blunt, 8 has some good engineering as does server 2012, utterly ruined by Sinofsky's insane LSD based unwindows, no windows allowed, ported from zune, but still broken beta UI. To rub your nose in it, they broke the old UI as well, and denied you the start bar and old desktop even if you like it. From now on its notro for you. Unless you go get classic shell and give sinofsky the finger.
The problem is I think he'd like the finger, so lets not.
I'll get my coat.
Re:to continue the trend? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft doesn't make drivers, they repackage and sign what vendors send them.
I wouldn't give up on a service pack just yet. I would expect it after Windows 8 is released and any cross-version bugs are found. THEN it will be the last one.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
How about people that set up many PCs daily or weekly? Sure, home users aren't overtly affected by it but businesses are. Even automating it (IE: WSUS) still makes it a pain in the ass. "You would have had your new PC yesterday, but it's still updating Windows"
Anyone that installs multiple PCs and doesn't have a slipstream version deserves their punishment.
It's like digging a canal with spoons.
Re:to continue the trend? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:patches on patches (Score:3, Insightful)
I also think so, and I think that's one difference. I'm pretty sure MS patches are incremental.
Suppose patch B depends on patch A. In the Windows model, installing patch A is faster than the Linux model (ignoring all the other crap like system restore points that Windows does during updates to actually make it slower). The same is true of patch B when applied to a system with patch A: since MS only sends Windows users the things that need to change, it's smaller and faster to apply than under the Linux model where they have to send you everything.
The problem with the Windows model comes when you want to apply both patches to a system that has neither. Under the Linux model, you just get patch B since that's a full image, but under the Linux model you need patch A first.
My feeling is that the Windows model is better for the long-term, since incremental patching is what you do most of the time anyway; but it gets really really annoying when you want to do an initial install, as you have to install tons and tons of patches.
The other consequence is that (re. your other post about 1.0/2.0 to 1.0.1/2.0.1) is that in some sense there isn't a latest version of Windows, while there is usually a latest version of Linux and its software. (And the main exceptions to the latter case are when you have two separate packages, e.g. Qt3 and 4, where one doesn't strictly override the other.) But in the Windows model, you can have person 1 who has patches M, N, and O, and person 2 who has patches N, O, and P. Why doesn't person 1 have P? Maybe P is to fix some specific piece of hardware or something, and person 1 either deliberately chose not to install it under the "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" mantra or doesn't even know that the hotfix exists because Windows Update didn't suggest it (perhaps because it knows that person 1 doesn't have that piece of software). This also works in favor of the Windows model in terms of long-term behavior: on Linux, I'd guess I get updates for things which I don't even care about or use, while those would be filtered out of what I see on Windows. (OTOH under the Windows model maybe there's some problem I'm having which would be fixed by a patch, but I don't know about it.)
Of course, then the actual Windows Update mechanism goes and kills those benefits by dicking around and doing-who-knows what during the actual installation.(Taking 30 minutes to just install updates that were already downloaded -- even on a desktop drive -- in my experience was fairly common.) I strongly suspect those are independent of the incremental/full decision though.
The answer is simple: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:to continue the trend? (Score:4, Insightful)
What would be a nice thing would be something that would be a combination of the two:
You boot a USB flash drive [1] which can get on the Internet and download signed updates to the OS. It then makes a temporary directory and slipstreams the updated packages in (perhaps keeping that directory on the USB media for faster subsequent reinstalls.)
Result -- one has an up to date install of the OS, but without having to transfer the bulk of it through an Internet connection, a lot of them being metered and expensive for bandwidth.
[1]: Ideally a USB flash drive which could take the updated partitions and slipstreamed directory, copy them to a directory, then mark it read-only so malware cannot tamper with the drive in the future.
Re:The answer is simple: (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny how everyone called Windows XP the Fischer Price OS. Now, it's the most popular thing ever.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Right. Because not coming up with workarounds for your supplier's shitty product means you are a bad person....
Re:to continue the trend? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:to continue the trend? (Score:4, Insightful)
When some patches need to update in-use files, the patcher has no good way to identify that those files are already patched (because they're waiting as temporary files to be renamed over an in-use file).
If Windows had Unix file semantics, the updater could just do the renaming. The next patch along will then see the new contents, while whatever is keeping the file in-use will keep seeing the old contents. Thus it would be fairly trivial to just apply all the patches in sequence and reboot at the end.
Note that e.g. rpm/dpkg cannot work sensibly on a Windows system due to these awkward file semantics. Mandatory locks were introduced to Unix a long time ago, but happily practically no software uses them and you can safely just keep them turned off. In Windows they are used by practically everything (every executable locks its binary when executing).
A workaround is to have a standard placement and naming convention for patched in-use files. That way the next update could check that location first, before checking if the real destination is locked. Locking would be fun of course, and third-party updates better learn about that convention too.
Hmm, traditionally the only places people describe workarounds for Windows misfeatures is in patent documents. Perhaps I am missing an opportunity. It cannot be obvious, because Microsoft surely has a whole team working on Windows Update with at least one member counting as a person of ordinary skill in the art, and they did not seem to think of this fantastic idea.
Re:to continue the trend? (Score:4, Insightful)
They are charging something like $40 for a Xp, Vista,Win7 upgrade to Win 8 Pro. I think they are going the way of Apple, ~$30-40 upgrades every couple years. People are probably more likely to go "oh a little bit of eye candy, okay here's my $40" than a $200 complete generational shift every 5 years and having the whole "Will I still want to use this computer for a long enough timeframe to make it worth it?" kind of discussion. Cheaper than a dinner and movie for one yep why not. Heck I'd pay the $40 to be sure to not have any malware (that doesn't come in the "box" ;)), licensing issues in the future and save me the 20 min spent looking for a good rip and crack code.
Re:to continue the trend? (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:to continue the trend? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell, if they just had an option that automatically does something like check for updates, download and install all available updates, reboot, repeat until there are no more updates that would be a huge improvement. That way I could just start it and let it do its thing overnight and I wouldn't have to babysit the damn thing for hours.