Microsoft Extends XP To May 2009 For OEMs 605
beuges writes "Microsoft has announced over the weekend that it would allow computer manufacturers to receive copies of XP until the end of May 2009, shortly before Windows 7 is expected to hit the market. This should allow users to skip Vista entirely and move straight to 7, which has been receiving cautiously favorable reviews of pre-release and leaked alphas."
Hahahaaa 7 before vista isnt cold dead yet (Score:5, Insightful)
it would take a butt the size of mount everest for any company to take the plunge and trust anything from microsoft again, after the stunt they pulled with vista.
and what happens to the poor sods who DID trust microsoft and upgraded their entire office to vista, again ?
Re:Hahahaaa 7 before vista isnt cold dead yet (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft had failures before. And it didn't kill them. MSDOS 4.0. Windows v1, v2, ME, Bob, their bout into making Anti-Virus software, Web TV...
Peoples memory are actually quite small. Yea Vista stunk, however if they can get Windows 7 up to spec and running smooth and quick then they will switch again. Vista was all visual, any of the technical improvements didn't really get recognized with the world. Besides Vista took so long to develop that in order for it to succeed it needed to be light-years ahead of XP. For Windows 7 it just needs to be an approvment on Vista, if it can be released by the End of 2009 anything longer (people will start expecting more from it)
Re:Hahahaaa 7 before vista isnt cold dead yet (Score:5, Insightful)
As an OS X and Ubuntu fan - I like Vista. I don't do the hardest core computing on it, but coming from XP Home (I know, I know, XP Pro is better) it has UAC in every version AFAIK. This makes it much nicer security wise. Also, file browsing is nicer - no more .db files in directories but a centralized database where it should be. The ability to rotate pictures with a right click (to really rotate, not just in the thumbnail preview) is also nice. This may be a rather superficial overview, but those are the features I use and like.
That said: I had one computer inexplicably crash completely with Vista and the OS never start up again (not the harddrive, it reinstalled flawlessly). And Microsoft underplayed it's hardware requirements, Aero is turned on to max on too many systems that can't handle it, and the bloatware many OEMs tend to install on it suck the rest of the life out of it.
I would like to see MS lose marketshare for the simple reason of getting binary compatibility from developers with several major platforms instead of being forced into windows - but Vista isn't the biggest no-value flop, that would have been Windows Me. Instead, Vista is just a mediocre update when MS promised the world.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally I wonder why they want to abandon Windows XP support at all, Windows XP looks like a perfect cash cow for me, no need for further investments, most of the bugs are fixed and you can even skin it to look like Vista.
I don't understand why they want to abandon XP. I other word, they want to leave the Netbook market to Linux. Fine with me as long it is not Xandros. If you take LXDE [lxde.org] instead of GNOME [gnome.org] and KDE [kde.org] it still provides you with all you need. The Desktop is mature. It doesn't matter which operati
Microsoft might actually care (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows 7 which there has only been a pre-beta release of. your signing off as copy of the last one.
Excuse me if I wait for a final or near final version before passing judgement.
I'll ignore it for the obvious hate post it is.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You might want to take another look at the meaning of this "ignore" word.
Re:Microsoft might actually care (Score:5, Interesting)
It took two service packs for it to be decent.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Skip (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not uncommon for companies to skip OS's , so this works out great for our 40,000 users. So we can go from XP sp3 direct to Win7 , but we will probably wait for SP1 of Win7.
As long as people still pay MS for _something_ (Score:2)
What do they care. Wonderful thing about still being a virtual desktop monopoly. Am I wrong?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I thought Windows didn't have virtual desktops?
Meet the new version, same as the old version. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not old enough to remember all the promises of '95/'98, etc (More like I didn't care). But I'm already seeing the same XP/Vista/7 cycle start over..
Microsoft is setting themselves up for another round of the same old shit. Vista had favorable reviews from pre-releases and leaked alphas.... and then features started to drop to meet the continually moving release date.
Microsoft is going to have to sever all backwards compatibility at some point if they want a fresh start. Microsoft BOUGHT an Emulator/Virtualizer (Virtual PC), how hard would it be to make a seamless sandboxed XP install?
Not to sound to fanboyish, but Apple has done this TWICE in the last 10 years. First OS 9 -> OS X. Sandboxed everything in Classic. Not everything worked perfect, but it bridged the gap. Then again with the release on Intel If you already had your Apps in XCode all it took was 1 checkmark in a config. That's it. Complete new binary for a new architecture. And if that didn't work you still had Rosetta, which like classic, wasn't perfect but it works. On my laptop I seamlessly run PPC code on an Intel machine with less problems than most people have had with just trying to run Vista.
Not just GUI apps either. I can compile something like coreutils on a PPC machine and run it on an Intel machine, not ideal but it works.
Microsoft is supposedly the 800# gorilla in the corner but it can't figure out how to cut all ties to the past and move on.
Re:Meet the new version, same as the old version. (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, Apple did it twice, but guess what? That's why Apple isn't very populer within enterprise-level companies.
Re:Meet the new version, same as the old version. (Score:5, Informative)
apple isn't very popular with enterprise for several reasons.
- price: no competition means higher price. with the PC, the cutthroat competition between hardware makers is what keeps price down.
- openess: the PC is an open architecture, you can choose your box from any manufacturer. even apple recognized this as an advantage and moved to intel/PC arch.
- relationship with developers: say what you want, but working in a large IT shop i know several programers who all agree that MS treats developers a whole lot better than apple. see the strangle hold they keep over that iPhone store.
- availability of software: the PC was created by IBM with a focus on business. the Mac wasn't. a huge library of corporate software made the diference on DOS days. the previous item does it today.
and you didn't get GP's point. emulation and virtualization, either in hardware or software helps a lot. and MS is not a newbie on this. in the early days of the transition from DOS to windows 3.0, the version for 80286 PC/ATs couldn't multitaks DOS apps. if you opened more than one DOS app, the one in the background would freeze, but in a 80386 you could multitask DOS apps because the 386 introduced hardware based "real mode" VMs. heck, you can run a binary compiled on an S/360 on a current version of Z/OS running in the latest state-of-the-art IBM mainframe.
apple's several transitions, m68k -> PPC -> intel (hardware) and Mac OS classic -> Mac OS X pretty much afected some few specialized (read: badly written) software. nothing that caused widespread problems.
it can be done, and is only the stuborness of the redmond guys that prevents them from doing it.
Re:Meet the new version, same as the old version. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing that caused widespread problems because Apple isn't used widespread.
Though I didn't mean to indicate that backwards compatability is the only reason why Apple isn't very popular in the enterprise, but it is one of them
Re:Meet the new version, same as the old version. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That is not really accurate. When the transition to OS X started, for instance, all new Macs came with a version of OS 9 called "Mac Classic", which could be installed to run all your old applications on the new machine. There was also an interim development framework that allowed developers to easily port their programs to the new OS, until they were able to re-write them in native code.
As far as I remember, this was adequate for most users, and it helped make the transition virtually seamless.
Moreover,
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft is the 800# gorilla in the room because it doesn't break backward compatibility.
This is not precisely accurate, at least in my case. I have a lot of 16 bit programs that date back 10 years or more, and with every MS OS "upgrade" fewer and fewer of them work.
Also, a lot of new stuff is written in .NET 2.0 which only installs on XPSP1 and newer. There is no reason for MS to make it not work with for instane 2000, except to force OS upgrades.
It is why I will not proceed past XP. If I have to buy/writ
Re:Meet the new version, same as the old version. (Score:5, Interesting)
Serious suggestion: try them in Wine on Linux. Wine is frequently a better Windows than Vista.
It's still beta-quality, but we use it on production machinery at work (one app which we didn't want to run a whole Windows box for, so it runs on CentOS in Wine). So it's "enterprise quality," whatever that is.
It's a good way to get rid of that one last Windows box you have running because of one legacy app you can't even find the developer for, let alone ask them to port or open source it.
Wine doesn't work well under Cygwin as yet, unfortunately, so Wine on Windows is not so good yet. More development eyes needed ;-)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But let's face it, virtualization is only becoming fully capable as of the last year or so.
I was running Virtual PC on a PowerPC Mac 5 years ago. I disagree that virtualization is only now feasible.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft, however, owns 90% (i'm guessing 98%+) of
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft is going to have to sever all backwards compatibility at some point if they want a fresh start. Microsoft BOUGHT an Emulator/Virtualizer (Virtual PC), how hard would it be to make a seamless sandboxed XP install?
We don't really want all our XP malware and viruses to run seamlessly in a virtual layer.
Microsoft wants (needs) running really legacy stuff to be a least a bit of a hassle.
A guy I know runs XP in parallels on the Mac with some key windows apps he uses, and got it all infected with malware
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
New security process (Score:4, Informative)
If they use the same security prompts/process as Vista then Windows 7 will be another one to skip. I have found it inconsistent and incomplete.
* If your account is a local admin then should you be prompted to do some things? Probably, but not more than once. I swear there is a minimum of two prompts by default.
* Why does an admin need to choose "Run as admin" for some things?
* If the system is going to prompt me then make sure I will see it. Sometimes the security prompts pop-under. If I go off to another program while waiting for something to finish only to later find the unanswered prompt still waiting for my response.
* If a program requires admin access or "Run as admin" then clearly give the user direction to do so. Try pathping for instance and you get "0 No resources". Launch cmd "as admin" and it works fine.
The Vista security model is horrible IMHO. We are just getting started with Windows 2008 and it looks like it is going to be more of the same. If I am logged in as admin on a server I sure hope I don't get the same incomplete and inconsistent experience. If so, Windows 2008 will be the Server OS to skip from MS. (I'm sure some slashdotters will say they should all be skipped. :-) )
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
* If your account is a local admin then should you be prompted to do some things?
Yes, because being an "admin" just means you can elevate your privileges, it doesn't make them (much) higher by default.
* Why does an admin need to choose "Run as admin" for some things?
See above.
* If the system is going to prompt me then make sure I will see it. Sometimes the security prompts pop-under. If I go off to another program while waiting for something to finish only to later find the unanswered prompt still wa
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, but in Linux or OS X, whenever I try to perform an action to which I have no privileges, by mere fact that I am in the Adminstrators group (or sudoers file), I get prompted for my password immediately. I do not have to ask special permission to "run as admin"; if it requires to be "admin" to run, then run the damn thing as admin already and demand authentication or confirmation from the user, and then abort if they fail to respond accordingly.
-dZ.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's what all those Cancel or Allow prompts are. They just don't ask for your password again like linux and OSX does.
The "run as admin" is for one thing: programs which can be used as a with OR without elevated privileges and be useful. For example, if you don't "run as admin" an installer or application that writes to Program Files that doesn't properly elevate privileges (which results in a Cancel/Allow prompt), it will virtualize the Program Files to your profile directory. This can be useful or it
Re:New security process (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:New security process (Score:5, Informative)
You're a Unix guy, you should get this instantly. The "Administrator" account in Windows Vista is the equivalent of being in the sudoers file on Unix for a normal account. Basically, you don't have any administrative privileges on the system until you need to do something that requires. As in a Unix system (where you would type out sudo or a kdesu window would pop up), Vista prompts you for your password before granting you time limited and application limited elevated privileges. This is the Unix way basically.
Even Mac OS X does this, with the locks on the system preferences and for installing software. Bashing Microsoft on this, but not OpenSolaris, HP-UX, Mac OS X, Ubuntu or any other Unix type system is fanboyish. Some don't even offer a root account by default anymore, you need to explicitly activate it.
Re:New security process (Score:4, Informative)
You were mostly correct, except for this line. Vista doesn't prompt an admin ("sudoer") for his password on elevation - it just pops up that infamous "Allow/Deny" prompt. There is a reason for that; sudo asks user for password, because otherwise any app running under his account (e.g. an exploited web browser) could get elevation by execing sudo and piping "yes" (or whatever confirmation there is) into it. Requiring to enter the password ensures that it's user who consciously does the elevation, and not an app doing it under cover.
Now as to why Vista doesn't do it: the way they display that "Allow/Deny" prompt is specifically implemented so that no other running app can interact with it (and, for example, imitate a mouse click on "Allow", or send a window message simulating the activation of the button, etc). I don't know the details of this thing, but MS refers to that as "notification running on a separate desktop", and apparently that's what causes that screen flashing briefly when it pops up. They also disable all interaction for all other windows, so that a malicious app cannot trick the user into clicking "Allow" by overlaying its own window with deceiving labels which is transparent for mouse events on top of the notification window. It is claimed that all these measures, when combined together, achieve the same security as the simple trick used by sudo. I do not know whether the claim is true, but I haven't heard of anyone describing a working hack/workaround, so I have to assume that it is.
Its the monopoly stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the problem: Microsoft has used illegal tactics to maintain its monopoly gained from unethical practices.
Microsoft's monopoly is so entrenched, that the proto-typical "Sun Oil" case can't even compare.
In a real competitive environment, customers would have long ago abandoned Microsoft. The best analogy is WordStar vs WordPerfect. WordStar was first, but WordPerfect was better. Naturally WordStar lost and is now, no more.
Microsoft is so entrenched, and so anti-standards, that your data and business operations are held hostage. You can't escape the Widows lock-in without paying a lot of money and abandoning some of your core applications.
Furthermore, the monopoly level of Microsoft means that it is unrealistic for ISVs to develop for other platforms because Windows represents 80+% of the market and who can justify an the cost of development unless you can really identify a market. Virtually every notebook and P.C. sold at the consumer and "system" level has Windows installed.
In a real competitive environment, Windows ME, Microsoft BOB, Microsoft Dogs, or Vista would have killed any other company and we would be glad to see them go. But no, it is so bad that users CAN'T escape windows, so they are settling for an 8 year old operating system instead of modern alternatives.
If there was ever a time where clear proof existed that Microsoft needs to be broken up, this is it. Its insane.
Re:Its the monopoly stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really. MS isn't imposing any monopoly. First of all there are alternatives - some pay some free. So if MS had a true monopoly there would be no alternatives. The problem is that businesses are not willing to move from MS to another software platform. They are not 100% to blame - businesses need to stay competative and part of that is to play well with everyone else. Can't do that if your systems platforms are completely different. Also by going with a less used product you are more limited in your IT staff (more people know windows based products then linx or mac). Lastly if you use a less used product you have to spend extra money training your staff. Overall it is expensive to switch technologies.
MS doesn't have to work to maintain the customer base....if Linux and Mac want to become the defacto business product then they need to adjust themselves to look/feel/work (at least on the front-end) more like MS products -and then offer just as many (e.g. Exchange, Office, compatibility with 95% of the software out there, etc).
You may not like that reality, but it is reality.
Re:Its the monopoly stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Er, and then Word was easier to use and so better for most people, and so WordPerfect lost, and is now, no more.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, Word was dirt cheap/'free' with PC and only good enough.
For a significant number of people, Word was substantially superior. Not needing a keyboard overlay cheat-sheet to perform basic tasks and WYSIWYG (in Word for Windows) were two fairly high-profile advantages to the average end user.
Microsoft put a *massive* amount of effort into making Word better than Wordperfect by talking to end users and asking them what they wanted. It's a textbook example of a product winning because more people
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I have seen the way out.
It is virtualization.
Upgrade all your existing workstations to a secure OS (Linux, Mac, whatever you think is appropriate) and create a Windows VM that runs the old applications. Now you can keep access to all that old stuff in a more controlled fashion, while still locking down the host OS.
Windows Bailout (Score:5, Funny)
if Windows 7 tanks, they can always ask for bailout money like all the other companies that make crappy products.
M$ feels the pain. (Score:3, Informative)
If we refer to the table here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_desktop_operating_systems [wikipedia.org] you can see how much of the market has started to diversify since Vista came out. I think it would be safe to assume that the market share of Vista is somewhat inflated due to the fact that Microsoft made it very difficult to get anything but Vista on a regular consumer machine for quite some time, and now most major builders charge a fee ($150 at some!) to "downgrade" Vista to XP.
Since Q1 of 2007, Microsoft has seen both of their largest competitors in the desktop operating system market (Apple & Linux) double their penetration. Will this possibly drive them to bring us a better product? On a side note, Microsoft Server 2008 as a workstation is definitely worth taking a look at. You can download and use it free for 60 days, and a quick look at http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/ [win2008workstation.com] will give you some pointers on setting it up. There are definitely some things lacking, but it might give you hope that M$ will do something right in their next major release.
tiny step in right direction (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, what Microsoft needs to do is:
(1) Offer free DOWNGRADES for anyone with a Vista license.
(2) Offer free UPGRADES to Windows Seven for anyone who buys a machine loaded with Vista.
Today I shall be installing a replacement IDE hard drive in a 6 year old system, a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4, which I'd much rather upgrade but won't simply because anything I bought today would be running Vista.
Windows 7's most important feature (Score:4, Interesting)
...will be the name. By not being called "Vista", users won't associate it with all the horror stories they've heard about Vista, so they'll be willing to give it a chance.
It will have a handful of minor improvements, but otherwise I expect it to be mostly identical. Vista's biggest problem is third-party compatibility, which should mostly be worked out by the time Windows 7 ships.
Personally, I hate Vista a lot less than I hate XP. Most people can't understand how I would say that, but that's because they actually like XP. Blech.
I *want* Windows 7 to suck (Score:3, Interesting)
I really like the benefits of Linux, and I think that given a little more time to mature, it could really take off with less-technical users. I wouldn't mind Windows 7 sucking just to give Linux a bit more of an incubation period.
(And, given the things MS has pulled in the past, I still think it's got a big karma deficit to work off. I'm still overwhelmed with a sense of schadenfreude against MS.)
Trying to lock users again (Score:3, Interesting)
As usual, after Vista's debacle, Microsoft communicates about their next generation OS, trying to keep the users focused on their software, to prevent them for looking for competition.
What has changed recently is that the economy crisis will force most of the companies to reduce their cost.
This will be done in two phases:
- the first one is reducing the number of employees.
- the second phase will be about reducing the cost of software.
Microsoft is as always very expensive, even though the cost of their development has been largely returned.
I think they will need to reduce the price of their software, or the next years will be difficult for them, especially when competing with free software.
It better be fast and sleek. (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows XP is all the 32 bit OS anyone should ever need. It's fast, and pretty much scales as far as 32 bit will go. Windows 7 better have an option to be as sleek and unobtrusive as Windows XP. They lost me 2 years ago when I switched to Linux, but I spent 5 years learning the ins and outs of XP so it's almost as comfortable as my custom Fluxbox configuration (which took me all of a week to get to a reasonably functional level.)
Anyway, even if it does, $150+ is way to much to pay for an OS that has regressions in functionality (whether coming from XP or Linux, this is definitely the case on Vista, and I'd expect it for 7.)
An OS is worth about $50. Don't get me wrong, I understand the energy that goes into optimizing it. But it's unnecessary. I've used new Macs running quad cores, I've run new Fedora machines running the same, I've used Vista... sparingly, and I have to say, the performance gains of the past 4 years over my single-core integrated graphics machine are negligible. If I'm paying, I'm paying for security fixes and continued driver support plain and simple. I have yet to see anyone give me something that so blows away Windows XP that it really sounds like it's worth more than $50.
$150 isn't Wonderful, unless you MS (Score:4, Insightful)
Good news for OEMs (Score:5, Insightful)
These days, it's pretty much guaranteed that any PC you buy at retail will have Vista on it. Microsoft has done a pretty good job of addressing Vista performance concerns. I hear the newest service pack is pretty good.
However, how many IT people out there are dealing with a large number of older systems? For us, it really comes down to this -- we can potentially run Vista on a fair number of our systems. Others are right in the middle of the XP system requirements (P4, 512 MB RAM.) So which do we choose?
We're just small enough to not really have a formal hardware refresh cycle, so this is a major concern for us. Windows 7 will probably have the same problems regarding hardware resources. Do you put up with lousy performance on some of your machines, or stick with good performance overall?
So it seems that Windows is like Star Trek Movies (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I wish I would have skipped Vista entirely. Hell, I would have taken Win2k over Vista if I had really known how much I was going to dislike Vista.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
The optimistic view would be that Vista is more like Windows ME, which would make Windows 7 more like XP. If that's the case, maybe Windows 7 will actually be fairly stable and we can try to pretend Vista never happened, sort of like how we try to forget Windows ME.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
The optimistic view would be that Vista is more like Windows ME, which would make Windows 7 more like XP. If that's the case, maybe Windows 7 will actually be fairly stable and we can try to pretend Vista never happened, sort of like how we try to forget Windows ME.
Win ME is not nearly half as disastrous as most people will tell you, provided that you configure it correctly. Most of the out-of-the-box default settings glitchy at best and system crashing at worst, though going menu by menu and rearranging everything manually will fix most of its glaring problems (notably the RAM management and ballooning system restore folder). I've had Win ME installed on a system at home since 2001 and it's been running as close as it will get to flawlessly. When I mention how it will leap through hoops of fire if I ask it nicely, however, people always seem to recoil in fear and reach for their bible and holy water...
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
If I wanted to go through my system and customize all the settings manually, I'd install Linux. In a Windows OS, given its target market, having to go through it "menu by menu" and reconfigure it is disastrous.
In fact, as I recall, when WinME was out I did have Linux installed, and the default settings were mostly good enough, with only some tweaking required for one or two components (I think the audio cards weren't supported properly then). Clearly, ME was (for most users) a disaster.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, the ME disaster was a plus for MS.
They couldn't get people off the 9x platform.
Windows ME forced people to go to Windows 2000.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows 95/98/ME were just graphical shells running on DOS.
Will that myth never die? Just because you booted to DOS doesn't mean Win95 was a DOS app. Win95 was a 32-bit OS with a protected memory model. It was also the most amazing piece of backwards compatibility I've seen: it could run 16-bit drivers that expected a shared memory model.
Of course, this backwards compatibility made it Hell for those stuck supporting it, as it had all the unreliability of the old crap drivers, but it was certainly the right business decision for MS, and a heck of an engineering feat.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
The change from Vista to 7 is more like 2000 to XP. There is very little being changed under the hood. For example (assuming version numbers still mean anything at MS) the kernel is going from 6.0 to 6.1. 2000 was kernel 5.0 and XP was 5.1. XP 64 and 2003 are kernel version 5.2.
All that aside, I'm trying to be optimistic that 7 will be what Vista promised to be.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Interesting)
All that aside, I'm trying to be optimistic that 7 will be what Vista promised to be.
Except it won't be. None of the features that were promised to be in Vista but were dropped to keep from sliding the release even further will be in Windows 7. As far as I can tell, there aren't really any new important features in Windows 7. It's a new OS in name only (and bit of spit polish and debugging) and unfortunately that might just be enough.
And that's on top of Vista having few new important features. They did of course manage to cram in all the protected path DRM crap. Guess we know their priorities.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of really interesting new Vista features are under the hood and only visible for developers. For example, how about a true transacted file system & registry [microsoft.com] - so you can start a transaction, create directories and move files around, write into those files, maybe delete some - and then just roll it all back with a single API call or on a system crash, with guaranteed atomicity, while no other process in the system sees any of your changes until you commit them? I'm not aware of anything even remotely similar in previous versions of Windows (or any Linux-supported FS, for that matter). And the utility of this feature should be pretty obvious to most developers - finally, you won't need a full-featured journalled database (on top of an already journalled FS) for small-scale data storage just because you happen to need atomic updates!
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
If that's the case, maybe Windows 7 will actually be fairly stable and we can try to pretend Vista never happened
Except Vista already is stable. Maybe it's because I only use my PC for games and the Internet, but Vista (SP1) has been nearly flawless.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Informative)
@echo off
echo Starting Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS)...
net start bits
echo Registering DLLs...
REGSVR32 WUAUENG.DLL
REGSVR32 WUAUENG1.DLL
REGSVR32 ATL.DLL
REGSVR32 WUCLTUI.DLL
REGSVR32 WUPS.DLL
REGSVR32 WUPS2.DLL
REGSVR32 WUWEB.DLL
REGSVR32 WUAPI.DLL
echo Killing Windows Automatic Updater Service...
net stop wuauserv
echo Destroying Update Cache...
rmdir
echo Re-enabling Windows Automatic Updater Service...
net start wuauserv
echo Magic!
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
More like Windows ME 2, do they really think people will buy it when they haven't sorted out the problems with vista.
Do you actually use Vista? Or is this typical ignorant slashdot drivel? I use Vista at home, I use Vista at work. I have had absolutely no issue with it. Let me qualify this by saying until a couple months ago I also used OS X 10.4 at home, and I also currently dual boot into Ubuntu. Vista has been far more stable than both of these, and the support is no contest.
Now let me ask again, do you actually *use* Vista? Or are you regurgitating tired old perceptions because of a fanboyish allegiance to a free operating system?
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
This may sound like a petty rant, but I run across issues like this *all* the time! The mass storage driver is also flaky for my motherboard (I can't use any mass storage devices!) but that's more Asus's fault than MS.
All in all, Vista isn't terrible, and definitely usable but suffers from some very poor design decisions.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Good interface design is not synonymous with "The user is stupid, make the interface for stupid people."
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
There's lots to hate about Vista, sure, but renaming Add/Remove Programs to Programs and Features isn't one of them. It'll take an old user all of 30 seconds to find it, and after a couple of times, you've retrained yourself easily. It's not about being friendly to utterly non technical users, it's about being friendly to new users. You know, there are new babies born, and kids grow up to use computers. What's wrong with making sure things make sense?
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
As a new user, if I go to control panel and know I want to do something with programs,
Really? All the new users I've ever worked with think that the logical thing to do with a program you don't want any more is to delete it, same as you might delete a file.
You'd be amazed how many Windows users have deleted the icon from their desktop (and maybe even their start menu) and consider the application is therefore gone.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What about the hiding of the file menu in IE making people think that IE doesn't support things like bookmarks and all the features they had before?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I basically agree with your point, but simply renaming 20 year old cruft to something a little less nerdy is not an improvement, it's a very cheap and ultimately damaging hack.
What really ticks me off is the way options relating to one thing have been broken up and cluttered across a myriad of places. Think display settings and desktop themes. It's even worse than GNOME.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
My gripes about it are typically more about unneeded UI changes which hurt usability.
But what about KDE? Dude, they scrapped a desktop that was popular, flexible, and working. KDE 3.5 was already better than even Vista's shell in some ways, as is gnomes. You can do a lot with the doc bars/task bars, and in KDE you could change even the clock type to one of 40 different types, and instead of just polishing that up, they went and junked it.
Unbelievable! Really, what was in KDE 3.5 that was so terrible that the whole thing needed to be junked, from an end user perspective. Plasma might wind up being cool, but its gonna need some time to gel up a bit. And, in the meantime, I'd like gnome to just do -something-.
And, along the way, I've actually got Vista growing on me. The only thing I really don't like about it is that the start bar doesn't have "run" on it the way XP does, but other than that, Vista is better.
As bad as Vista might be to some people, Microsoft won this round, again. This time, it was because while MS made mistakes with Vista, the KDE and Gnome teams made some big ones too.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Have you tried KDE 4.2? Give it a go, I was pleasantly surprised. 4.0 and 4.1 were still a disappointment, but it's definitely better (my configuration is back!)
Re:Windows 7 (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe because it was still using Qt3? If you are that upset about it then just use KDE 3.5.x still and wait for the 4.x line to mature as much.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Informative)
[windows key] + R
The "R" is for Run.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Interesting)
The justification? simple.
To require all MCSE's to re certify. Oh and to get the millions of employees using windows out there to take new training courses in windows. The test users here we switched to Vista were non productive for 1 week. WORSE than the linux trials we did last year, and they required more training.
that is the ONLY reason they pull that crap.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The justification? [...] To require all MCSE's to re certify. Oh and to get the millions of employees using windows out there to take new training courses in windows.
The thing is, that doesn't make sense. Microsoft make almost all of their money on exactly two product lines: Windows and Office. Everything else is just window dressing (no pun intended) to try to boost sales of Windows and Office. For example, Microsoft's developer tools are quite decent, but did you notice that they've started giving them away in recent years? That's because they don't make any serious money on them, but if they can get people using their tools then those people are going to target their
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Then you explain the Incredibly stupid task of renaming and rearranging everything.
It started with XP, oh let's move things HERE, let's change it HERE, etc...
it's like some interior designer got on the programming team and said, "users is too angry of a word, let's call it 'experience prefrences' as that has more fung-schway in it."
you say it does not make any sense, then you tell us WHY they do the stupid move of rearranging and renaming things in the UI?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For one thing, MS certainly isn't gi
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, I'ved used vista...
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
My experiences with Vista are similar to yours. But when I hear about Windows 7, those aren't the things they seem to be addressing. What I read is about it being cooler, having new features, etc. It doesn't sound like they are addressing the big issue: stability.
Fix the broken mixer, the performance and memory problems, the crashes in explorer, the video playback bugs, the unnecessary UAC messages, the driver installation issues... I haven't heard Microsoft even admit those problems exist, so I'm not sure they will fix them.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You weren't at PDC then. One of the keynote demos of W7 showed off the fact that it is blisteringly fast on a 1ghz, 1gb RAM netbook; UAC is fixed/gone, and hardware compatibility is top priority early-game, instead of after the fact.
But have marketing got at it yet?
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Informative)
That's irrelevant though, my point is, we were CLONING good installs onto identical hardware and were experiencing all manner of rarely reproducible errors.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
I like Vista a lot actually. (Score:3, Interesting)
I have both Ubuntu and Vista and I prefer dual booting into Vista... I actually like the apps more on Ubuntu (kdevelop/bash), but, Vista's start bar, control panel, and user interface just nails it for me. Makes ubuntu feel old fashioned.
Unix people can complain about Vista as much as the want, but the fact is, they screwed up as bad as MS did. Microsoft doesn't hand out opportunities to attack its desktop and certainly with some of the bad Vista buzz, they did. But, the linux community blew it.
Gnome is m
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
KDE delivered a real upgrade with real features that could run on real hardware that real people have, they did it on time, with total transparency about what potential pain the upgrade may bring users.
Microsoft delivered a steaming shitpile with zero compelling new features for users, they lied about what hardware could run it, and they delivered it six fucking years late. Fail, and fail, and fail.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
At my office we have Vista, XP, OS X, and Linux. Anyone can use whatever OS they prefer, but all are needed for testing. All but one person uses OS X on their desktop. One uses Linux. No one uses Vista because no one likes it.
The desktops we have set up for testing with Vista are nothing but trouble from the second you sit down. Many things need to be constantly installed to get anything done; things that come native with OS X and Linux. Distracting windows and notifications pop up constantly requirin
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, because people bought windows 2000 when they did not sort out the problems with windows ME.
W2K turned out to be their Best OS ever. (Yes even now compared to XP it's still better.)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What are the unsorted problems with Vista?
I mean, it's not the greatest OS in the world, but it's not horrendous. Yeah, there was the crap with the 'Vista ready' BS when it came out, but at this point, most new PCs should have no problem running it with Aero.
There were tons of driver issues when it came out too (Just like when Win 2k was new, god that was a nightmare), but again, it's been a few years and the driver support seams pretty top notch at this point.
The UAV system is annoying, but easily disabled
you're still buying vista even if you skip it (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if they will let you buy the windows 7 upgrade for xp though? Or will you have to buy the full retail for 7, in which case they've as good as sold you a vista upgrade (plus a windows 7 upgrade) even though you didn't want anything to do with vista?
I personally find it hilarious that they keep extending xp as the consumer mass keeps threatening to make a "true" upgrade to another os...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I wonder if they will let you buy the windows 7 upgrade for xp though?
From what I've seen over the years, Microsoft generally allows "upgrade" versions to work on at least the two previous versions. Upgrade versions of Vista work on Windows XP and Windows 2000 [microsoft.com]. Upgrade versions of XP work on Windows 2000, NT 4, ME, and 98 [windowsreinstall.com]. Upgrade versions of Office 2007 work on Office 2000, XP, and 2003 [microsoft.com].
Re:Windows 7 (Score:5, Interesting)
if MS just dumped XP and FORCE-FED Vista on Business
Then we'd move to full volume licensing for all machines that require Windows, and use our downgrade rights for XP (unless Windows Seven is actually worth using).
I've been running Ubuntu at work partially as a test to see how easy it would be to move people over to it if necessary. Things are working pretty nicely so far, I'm thinking everyone but our engineering design department could do their jobs fine with free software. In fact our Fabrication department would probably be better off with free software than the OmniForm crap that they're using at the moment. Sure, Evolution's Exchange integration isn't perfect - the unread messages number for each folder isn't updating like it should - but apart from that it works great. If MS try to force any shit onto us I'd be happy to move all our general office workers over to Linux, and yes I'd provide full support for them - it's part of what I get paid for after all ;)
Honest company (Score:5, Funny)
.. In fact our Fabrication department would probably be better off with free software ..
It's nice to see companies, such as yours, naming their departments correctly and honestly. Most other companies would call it "Legal department".
Re:Honest company (Score:4, Funny)
Legal? I was thinking Marketing
Re:Isn't Windows 7 just Vista R2? (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess I'll really care when they have a new OS that will run on an Atom based netbook.
Windows Embedded Standard 2009. You can actually download the trial and play with it. Build some various loadouts of the operating system. You can included exactly what you want and do some fairly cool things with how it accesses the HDD and loads.
It costs too much, so you won't actually be able to afford more than the trial as individual end user, but you will at least get to see what windows would be if Microsoft would just let us use it how we want.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
2) You can buy XP - here [newegg.com]