Windows XP Drops Below 40% Market Share While Windows 8 Passes 1% 310
An anonymous reader writes "Just three months ago, we reported how Windows 7 had finally overtaken Windows XP in terms of market share. Now it's time to see how long it takes Windows 8 to succeed its predecessors. Between October to November, Windows XP fell to 39.82 percent while Windows 8 jumped to 1.09 percent."
Re:I Wonder? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh boy, I sure can't wait to install an OS with a phone interface on my desktop/laptop, that makes so much sense!
Re:I Wonder? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh boy, I sure can't wait to install an OS with a phone interface on my desktop/laptop, that makes so much sense!
Don't forget that it is a phone OS from a company that nobody buys phones from.
CAPTCHA: horrible
Re:I Wonder? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's biggest competitor has always been itself. This is an effect of having the software pre-installed and aiming for the unwashed masses who don't go beyond what they got with the machines.
As a side note, for shits and giggles I just ran the Windows 8 upgrade assistant and it informs me I will have to dump almost a quarter of the applications I use daily and that my screen resolution was too low for snap (whatever that is). It also informs me the touchscreen I have (HP Tx2Z) isn't compatible and that gestures won't work right. Now the question is why I should update and lose perfectly good software I purchased and is working right now as well as system functionality that is working right now just to have the "latest" version of an OS? Why should I go through the pain of the update when I don't need to? That will always be the Microsoft fight and why XP is hanging in there for so long.
Re:I really don't like Windows 8 (Score:2, Insightful)
Then why buy an overpriced turd machine with Win8? A $199 Chromebook will be better for them.
Re:I Wonder? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh boy, I sure can't wait to install an OS with a phone interface on my desktop/laptop, that makes so much sense!
So use the desktop interface then. It's still there.
No point. I'll stick with Windows 7 myself. It works just great, no point in upgrading.
Re:I Wonder? (Score:2, Insightful)
You mean downgrading.
As opposed to one WHICH NEEDS THEM? (Score:2, Insightful)
As opposed to running the latest OS with all the holes waiting to be discovered? All that new code, yet to be field tested, all those new holes to be tested out in the wild LIVE, with YOUR production system?
Patches are failure you know. They have unwanted side effects that break production systems. The best thing you can get is a system so thoroughly attacked that it no longer has new vulnerabilities against it that are viable. Then don't upgrade.
Re:You've never tried Windows 8 then (Score:4, Insightful)
Set it to 512MB minimum and a plenty high max. Fire it up, watch it drop to 512MB used.
I did try Win8 on a VM. The simple fact is, it's slow as shit. I did as you said, and tried setting it to a 512MB minimum. The only time it ran at 512MB was when I wasn't using it, when I had switched to something outside the VM with nothing running under 8. As soon as I even moused over something in the Win 8 VM the RAM usage skyrocketed to about 800MB. Then, when I launched Notepad, it went over a gig.
Not sure how that is as efficient, considering on XP I can open a web browser and still sit under 400MB while using it.
Re:I Wonder? (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Nokia is not a subsidiary of Microsoft yet.
FTFY.
Current strategy seems to be to make Nokia as a company lose a lot of value so they're easier to buy out later.
Re:I Wonder? (Score:5, Insightful)
other than the *many* shills, most people seem to be saying Win8 is fine if:
1) you ignore "Metro/Modern/whatever UI and the associated apps and only use the desktop
2) you install a start menu replacement
In other words, if you change Win8 to work the same way as XP/Win7 it is ok. So why again do I want Win8 on my desktop?
(Of course this is ignoring touch, which is a whole other conversation)
Re:I Wonder? (Score:4, Insightful)
The start screen is just like a start menu, but instead of it taking up a very small part of your screen, it now expands to fill your entire screen, which makes sense.
That's precisely the part that doesn't make sense. It's very distracting to have your entire screen flash in front of you and be obscured by something else.