66% of All Windows Users Still Use Windows XP 931
An anonymous reader writes "Almost one year after the introduction of Windows 7 it appears that the hype surrounding it has faded. The overall market share of Windows has turned into a slight decline again. Windows 7 is gaining share, but cannot keep pace with the loss of Windows XP and Vista. Especially Windows XP users seem to be happy with what they have and appear to be rather resistant to Microsoft's pitches that it is time to upgrade to Windows 7."
XL does what is needed (Score:5, Informative)
Poorly-designed Flash ads that hog one core. (Score:2, Informative)
That's why they'll have to upgrade. Get more than one of those on a page and you're screwed.
There's also video decoding via GPU, but even that is being implemented at the low end.
Re:Good Enough (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7 [wikipedia.org]
if you're upgrading from XP, you also get these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista [wikipedia.org]
Vista/7 have LOTS of new stuff under the hood. It's not just the eye candy.
Re:old hardware, probably (Score:5, Informative)
And of those 66% of people running XP, what proportion do you think know what a PSU, CPU, or motherboard are? What proportion do you think will just go "shit, my computer broke"?
Hint, the former is likely 1%
Re:old hardware, probably (Score:5, Informative)
Hard drive, maybe. That can be easily replaced. I haven't seen a full system failure (motherboard, power supply, etc.) in years.
Ever heard of laptops? Some hardware failure stats [electronista.com] for you.
Re:old hardware, probably (Score:4, Informative)
>>>There are few reasons to upgrade hardware
Precisely. I'm typing this on an old 2002 PC compatible. I'm sure the hard drive motors will eventually fail but for now it works just fine.
I wish I could say the same for my 2002 G4 Mac. Due to Apple's process of refusing to support anything older than 10.5, I was left in the cold. I eventually sold it on ebay for ~$30 because it wouldn't run anything newer than IE5 or Safari 2, both of which failed to render the web properly.
Oh look... here comes the -1 mod patrol.
Re:old hardware, probably (Score:4, Informative)
It is? I managed to save quite a bit of money (a few hundred) building my own computer rather than buying a pre-built one with nearly the same specs.
Re:old hardware, probably (Score:2, Informative)
Windows 7 search doesn't work for me. It doesn't find stuff, or makes it hard/impossible to find stuff. I actually resorted to using grep on Win 7. I never had to do that with Win XP. With Windows XP even though the search was slow, if the stuff was there you'd eventually find it. For example: if you have a stuff in a directory that's named "XYZ" and you wanted to find files that had the text "XYZ" in them you could do it with XP, but with Windows 7, you'd get lots of files that didn't contain XYZ but show up because they are in the XYZ directory.
Win 7 works well for "normal" users. But for "advanced" users it really doesn't help, except perhaps the clustering of task buttons (you can uncombine related tasks/windows and still have them clustered together), and individual sound controls for apps, in many cases it actually gets in the way (search being an example).
The 4kb nonaligned stuff is a minus for XP, but "advanced" users can fix that.
I suppose Win 7 does IPv6 better? But IMO since IPv6 is still a mess in _practice_ (DNS, routing etc all have issues because of the ivory tower geniuses or "corporate pet interests") it's not a big advantage.
Desktop Linux? They can't seem to get basic stuff like sound working. Maybe they have recently, but wait a few months and they might break it again
Re:old hardware, probably (Score:5, Informative)
I expected the "saving energy" argument, and wasn't disappointed. The problem is that you have to keep the machine for quite a few years in order for the energy savings to outweigh the price of new hardware. But by forcing upgrades this way, you don't keep the machines for that many years, so you don't realise the savings in the long run.
And for the environment, it's loss too, because of the energy costs of making all the components for the new machine, as well as depletion of resources.
And apart from the PIII-S, these machines don't run 24/7 either, but perhaps an hour a week on average.
And the PIII-S has a 28.7W TPD, which is better than anything made today except for laptop CPUs, especially when you take the less power hungry motherboard and RAM into consideration. In fact, the low power usage is one of the reasons why it runs 24/7 as a server, while the P4 is a cold standby.
XP runs perfectly on my PC. (Score:1, Informative)
But 90% of the time I use Windows 7. Because it's better.
Even on the minimal configuration - P4 3.06HT, 1GB RAM, 128MB Fx5200.
Re:Rounding Error? (Score:3, Informative)
Yup, because an other statistic in The Fine Article puts the usage at 60.03%. Surely 2 digits are more accurate than 0 digits, so you know which one is more accurate...
Re:old hardware, probably (Score:3, Informative)
Purely for factual accuracy: a 2002 G4 running OS X 10.4 (Tiger) can use the latest version of Safari, version 5.02. Many G4s of that year can run Leopard. (The processor cut-off is 867MHz.)
Getting back onto old hardware, my Dad still uses a network of Beige Macs, running OS 9. For him, in his 70s, he's familiar with it, and it does what he wants. He's not into FaceBook and that.
I'd be interested to see some stats on whether newer hardware lasts longer than older technologies. i.e. will a 2006 PC last as long as a 2000 PC, all things being equal.
Re:I'm not changing in Protest (Score:3, Informative)
Yes and no.
There's no doubt that backporting DX10 to XP would have required a substantial effort on Microsoft's part due to the significant changes to Vista's architecture and there's not really any incentive for them to invest the time and money in doing so. This is different, of course, to all the "DX10 Only" games that came out that weren't really DX10 only and just had stupid checks that were all bypassed by warez groups; whether that was a stupid Microsoft idea or a stupid games publisher idea, that *was* nothing more than a marketing ploy.
Re:Good Enough (Score:4, Informative)
The vast majority of those features can be summed up in one sentence from the user POV: "They moved stuff around".
To be fair, from a technical standpoint, yeah, they overhauled it pretty good. On the other hand, the typical user isn't going to care - all they know is that it has eye-candy, some nice widgets, and, well... they moved stuff around.
With Windows 95, 98, and 2000, and even XP, users saw substantial changes (and saw them to be useful). With Vista and 7, users aren't going to see a whole lot that has changed 'under-the-hood' in a way that's apparent and useful to them.
In fact, they're going to see some things that are wrong in their eyes - mostly having to do with application compatibility - users still want to use their old stuff. For instance, try and play Quake III on Windows 7... not going to happen very well (depending on hardware). Being told "Use XP Mode" isn't going to help - they'll likely say 'screw it' and just use the real thing... Windows XP.
Now IMHO, props to Microsoft for at least partially cutting the cord and all WRT legacy apps, but the user isn't going to see it that way.
Re:My Motto (Score:2, Informative)
Umm.. the network settings are identical to the ones in XP. How can you possibly have trouble with that?
http://news.softpedia.com/newsImage/Windows-7-Networking-5.jpg/ [softpedia.com]
Re:If not Program Files, then where? (Score:5, Informative)
There is one "special folder" that is meant for user-independent storage of application data. You can get its name with feeding the value CSIDL_COMMON_APPDATA into the proper API call.
See http://www.mvps.org/access/api/api0054.htm [mvps.org] for an introduction.
The actual path varies with Windows version and language. On my German Win XP Pro, for instance, it is
C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\All Users\Anwendungsdaten
Also note that every user can create files and directories in there, but per default they are only writable to the user who created them. So it may be necessary to change permissions during installation.
Re:old hardware, probably (Score:3, Informative)
A p4 running Windows 98?
The P4 was introduced at the end of 2000, and Windows 98 was already a dinosaur. Windows 2000 and ME were what was shipped with computers at the time. XP came out a few months later. So, unless you bought the first P4's off the rack, it should have come with XP.
Re:old hardware, probably (Score:1, Informative)
The OP is a moron. Windows 7 works fine in VMware without any tweaks and I run it with 256 MB RAM allocated to the VM. Works fine and I do heavy-duty stuff with out (Visual Studio, etc). I use Linux as the host OS with VMware though, I have found that makes a lot of difference with the performance of the VM's (eg. Linux's disk caching makes the Windows swap file seem like RAM which in turn allows me to allocate less RAM to the VM's individually).
Re:My Motto (Score:5, Informative)
Lots of little things that add up.
Start-menu search, means I don't have to go hunting through the "All Programs" menu when it gets big, or remember in which little folder that little applet was, or hunt through the control panel. If I know what I want, I just type a few letters, and boom, there it is. Same with most recently used documents.
In Windows Explorer, there's a new "favorites" section on the left nav. I can add any folder I use regularly to that, and not only can I now instantly get to very buried folder hierarchies, I now have an always-available drop-target for dragging files to them.
Windows 7 also nags me less. I'm not constantly dismissing or being interrupted by "notifications" that I don't care about.
The new task bar, and in particular "jump lists" are amazing productivity enhancers (I was skeptical at first), and there are a ton of new hot-keys and short-cuts for doing just about everything you'd want to do, from moving windows around to launching apps to switching from laptop screen to projector.
The UI just seems snapper and smoother on the same hardware too. It "feels" more reponsive.
Even things like errors... when you try to copy a file but it's locked by an application, it now tells you which application is locking the file. When you're running tons of things, that can be a major time-saver right there. I'm a developer, and I used to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the heck was holding on to that file... now I don't spend ANY time doing that.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. It's just more refined and polished.
Re:old hardware, probably (Score:4, Informative)
To search only for contents and not names, you use the filter "Contents:" so you would say contents:xyz and it will not show filenames with XYZ in them.
Why would think this wasn't possible?
Re:Price (Score:5, Informative)
Moral of the stories: Stay Reasonably Current
Sure, sure, that's the *practical* moral, but how about some *dogmatic* morals:
Re:Pooched my wife's Cannon printer's software wit (Score:2, Informative)
The reason people don't upgrade Microsoft crap is that you never know what's going to suddenly stop working.
Ok, I used to be a Mac user and ... wow!
I'm guessing you missed out on the System 7 fiasco, when something like a third of all older Mac apps stopped working?
I mean, I totally get your argument, but to suggest Apple is *better*! That's ridiculous.
Re:old hardware, probably (Score:3, Informative)
Well it's not documented here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/technicalresources/advquery.mspx [microsoft.com]
or http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Advanced-tips-for-searching-in-Windows#keywords [microsoft.com]
Anyway, even then it doesn't always work because it uses an index which is often out of date and I don't see a way to force it to not use the index. Rebuilding the index seems to require it to scan the whole hard drive, not just current bit I'm interested in.
I'm not the only one having problems: e.g. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproui/thread/ecbecc00-f3e7-429f-87cd-8900fc313add [microsoft.com]
Re:old hardware, probably (Score:1, Informative)
Cheap PSUs die. You can skimp on the CPU, GPU, and memory. Think again before saving money on the MB, PSU, or HDD. A good PSU (read: $$$) will last at least 8 years of constant use, and may never ever fail.
Re:old hardware, probably (Score:2, Informative)
Windows XPs start menu becomes a complete mess. With 7 you just quickly type in the name of the program and it will 90% of the time show up before you're done typing it.
That's slower. See 2) in http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1806850&cid=33777308 [slashdot.org]
The "win 7 start menu search " method is faster for noob users, not for advanced/power users.
For advanced users, my way is faster on XP. And more importantly more predictable - you don't have the risk of launching the wrong thing just because something else happened to match.
When it's not predictable (as in Windows 7), if you don't want to launch/open the wrong thing by mistake, you have to wait to understand what the search really returned before you press enter. That takes at least 250 milliseconds for most people, usually longer.
With my Win XP setup, you already know what will launch so you do not need to counter check.
IMO a move away from predictability is actually a step backwards in terms of UI design (that's why the "personalized menus" crap is crap).
Wen you want to scratch your head, you just set your body parts into motion and do it, you don't have to first counter check to make sure the right appendages are actually reporting for duty before using them.
Re:I still use XP (Score:5, Informative)
The Athlon is the only thing on that list that would even struggle, and even it would technically run Win7. (It meets the minimum specs, which are always a little overstated.) Seriously, Win7 runs just fine on netbooks with 1.6GHz single-core Atoms and 1GB of RAM. A 1GHz Athlon isn't going to be much slower than that. 2.7GHz and 4GB of RAM is vastly overkill to just run the OS and everyday apps, no "probably" about it; my work laptop/tablet is 1.2 GHz (Core2Duo ULV) with 4GB and runs Win7, Visual Studio, Outlook, several instances of Word, and a bunch of internal tools all at once just fine.
Re:My Motto (Score:3, Informative)
The easiest way is to left click the network icon in the lower right cornder and select "Open Network and sharing center" then click the "Local Area Connection" link and the dialog pops up. That's 3 clicks, which is actually shorter than XP. XP requires at least 4 (right click Network dialog click properties, right click interface, choose properties)
Everyone likes to think that 7 buries stuff deeper, but in reality, almost everything is 2 or 3 clicks away from the desktop.
WinXP: Double-click network adapter in systray, double-click TCP/IP, enter an IP address.
/release'->'ipconfig /renew' /release'->'ipconfig /renew' (CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER is the biggest shortcut I can find so I don't have to take my hands off the keyboard, right-click, and pick 'run as administrator' followed by clicking OK.)
Vista: Double-click network adapter in systray...oh...wait, that's not a network adapter, that's the network sharing center or some such bullshit. Um...ok, network sharing center. Uh...where next. Change Adapter Settings. Then right-click on your adapter, properties, TCP/IP, enter an IP address.
It's like the saying "No single raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood". Vista and Windows 7 have tons of very small changes to the way things used to be done. Who wants to re-learn how to change an IP address in Vista? You might think the 'old guys' are stuck in their ways, but it's not just being 'stuck' for stuck sake. What is the *benefit* of doing it the 'new' way?
How about a DHCP release/renew?
WinXP: Win+R->'cmd'->Enter->'ipconfig
Vista: Win+R->'cmd'->CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER->Approve UAC prompt->'ipconfig
Not better.
Plus, Windows XP has had about 7 years where admins could come up with decent scripts, hacks, and tweaks to get what they want. Now that Microsoft has changed that and also shows every sign of releasing a new OS every few years, most admins probably won't be able to keep up with changing their scripts and finding tweaks and fixes for their windows issues.
Anybody want it? (Score:3, Informative)
I actually have a copy of Windows 7 sitting here, intended to upgrade this machine, but have been dragging my feet doing it. There was only ONE single reason for the upgrade (GPT compatibility), that reason stopped being critical, and the "upgrade" will be a time-consuming sift-through-bits-and-pieces process that I despise. Windows XP works well enough.
For that matter, I only upgraded to Windows XP a couple years ago, again for ONE reason: Supreme Commander. A friend was desperate that we try it, and it would not run in Windows 2000 because of some weird dependency. 99.9% of all other Win32 software ran just as well in 2000 as XP. Windows 2000 worked well enough, too.
Re:My Motto (Score:5, Informative)
Everyone likes to think that 7 buries stuff deeper, but in reality, almost everything is 2 or 3 clicks away from the desktop.
Especially if you make yourself a GodMode folder.
Make a new folder
Name (or rename) it
GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
You can of course make shortcuts to this folder for use on Desktop, Start menu, etc..
Oh, it will also run from a thumb drive (a copy of the folder, not a shortcut) plugged into another Win7 machine
Most fun Windows control panel ever.
Re:old hardware, probably (Score:3, Informative)
Hard drive, maybe. That can be easily replaced. I haven't seen a full system failure (motherboard, power supply, etc.) in years.
Ever heard of laptops? Some hardware failure stats for you http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/11/17/reliability.study.has.apple.4th.place/ [electronista.com].
It depends on the laptop. Quite a lot.
The Dell laptops we get at work are replaced every 3 years - if they last even that long. My previous laptop went through 3 hard disks in 3 years. A colleague has already replaced the motherboard on a 1 year old M4400 twice, and another has replaced the motherboard once. My work M4400 has bunches of dead pixels but I'm living with it - the odds of Dell service breaking something else while swapping the display are far too high. In our small work group, I'd say the 1 year malfunction rates we see from Dell are comparable to the 3 year rates in the article you linked.
On the other hand, we have a Sony Vaio VGN-A117S laptop at home, which is used just as heavily as the work laptops, and does a lot of traveling (mostly bumpy road cottage trips). After more than seven years it's still running flawlessly. The only sign of degradation is that the battery life has dropped from 2.5 hours to below 2 hours. I know slashdot likes to give Sony the 2-minutes-hate regularly, but that Vaio is the most reliable laptop I've ever had, and even by today's standards it has one of the best displays (1920x1200, 17" LCD).
New PC with W7 (Score:3, Informative)
So I built myself a new PC and thought that it's time to move on and bought the W7.
Largely disappointed.
Aero is nice and all, but the themes are generally unusable due to semi-transparent title bar. And it is noticeably slower compared to the basic theme and sometimes produces annoying flashing effects when restoring minimized window. Neither colors/fonts can be customized. Huh? Basic theme colors are hard coded - though even XP's Luna came with several color schemes (blue, silver, olive - now only the light blue). UI overall is a let down: Aero is fancy but unusable, Basic theme is too bright, Classic theme conflicts with bunch of applications since they assume "W7 == Aero/Basic." Heck, even Mac OS X has choice of blue vs. graphite themes and the default colors and effects aren't that eye irritating.
They have also f***ed up Control Panel. In XP/before I didn't need the search function there - now I have to use it all the time because CP was apparently designed by some clowns and finding there something is like looking for a tree in forest. The CP's applets also have the nasty habit to open to the whole screen: lots of white space for 2-3 options in the middle look ridiculous.
Explorer (file manager) finally caught up with Mac OS X's Finder - but lost many customizations and flexibility in the process. Folder properties are as buggy as ever and Windows oftentimes decides to forget my folder options and show that it knows better how the folder should be displayed. In XP I used both Explorer and alternative file manager - but in W7 there is little to no choice but to use an alternative file manager exclusively.
Desktop gadgets are great idea executed horribly. Standard gadgets are all show off (orange(!!! ) date gadget?? really???), uncustomizable and barely usable - unless you want to drill a hole in your eyes. Finding a decent unobtrusive gadget for a task is like digging see of sh*t with a tee spoon - hopeless. Gallery on Live is flooded with junk, lacking screenshots or even simple description what gadget actually does.
Keyboard shortcuts for the task bar probably the sole place which I would say has improved. But only because Windows lagged so much behind the Macs and Linux in the department. And Windows in the respect is still behind both Mac OS and Linux.
Looking back at the month I'm on the W7, I frankly can't get what the reviewers were so hyped about. Was Vista really that bad? Or could it be that the free laptop give away [computerworld.com] really helped??
P.S. And tray icons now rearranged in a confusing way...
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Rounding Error? (Score:3, Informative)
It's actually 66.6%
Yup, because an other statistic in The Fine Article puts the usage at 60.03%. Surely 2 digits are more accurate than 0 digits, so you know which one is more accurate...
Or, you could always try getting the "666" joke the AC made.
Re:old hardware, probably (Score:2, Informative)
I have a 2002 Powerbook G4 that runs 10.5 just fine. It runs the latest Safari, and I think you're full of it.
Besides, why not just stick with 10.4? Is there anything wrong with it?
If you apply the same reasoning you did to your Mac, to your 2002 PC, you should sell it for $30 because it won't run Windows 7.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No good reason to upgrade (Score:5, Informative)
I run Windows 7 on my my new Revo box 64-bit 2core, 4GB, Nvidia, 500GB Hard Drive. Runs so slow. I spent £300 on it because of lies like yours.
Alrighty. I run Windows 7 on my old Dell Inspiron 1520 with 64 bit dual core, 4GB (aftermarket), Nvidia and 120GB Hard Drive. Bought it in Feb 08 with XP on it. This was during the reign of Vista and this was the only laptop Dell still sold with XP on it.
Got hit by a virus (damn AVG Free did not protect me; even though I scanned the suspect file thoroughly before trying to use it. Switched to Avira, we'll see how that does ;D) and had to re-install. I had already tried Win7 during RC [blogspot.com] and decided it is marginally better than XP, just not better enough to switch unless you're rolling a new OS anyway.. and now I was. So I switched from 32 bit XP to 64 bit 7.
Now it seems to run every bit as fast as XP did, with Aero turned on. It eats more RAM (900MB used at startup instead of 350MB, overhead appears constant after days of uptime) and this is after applying most of Black Viper's [blackviper.com] recommended service tweaks to both OSen. I find win+tab is handy when you've got a ton of browser windows open (each with tabs; I generally run one window per distinct project) and want to quickly get to one which is visually distinct.
so tuppe, does my counter-example anecdote mean that you're the liar now? Or perhaps we should yeild the predictive power of all of our personal one-off experiences in favor of actual research?
ZDnet's benchmarks [zdnet.com] maintain that Windows 7 is faster than XP for standard use, although XP remains more capable for devices with limited memory and outdated graphics.
Maximum PC's benchmarks [maximumpc.com] claim that Win7 simply feels faster than XP on the hardware they tested.
Tom's Hardware's netbook benchmarks [tomshardware.com] show that Windows 7 does not beat XP on the netbook but that it is quite responsive, and would probably surpass XP with better driver support.
TechRadar's benchmark [techradar.com] includes many plusses and minuses for Windows 7 with a net plus, but clearly states that it provides "better performance than XP can deliver on today's hardware."
I'm not picking up on any benchmarks that have the same trouble you've had, so unfortunately I have no way to confirm you did not just misconfigure your machine.
Re:old hardware, probably (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My Motto (Score:3, Informative)
The reason is that IIS is now modular, and any feature can be turned on or off. This allows you to create a small security footprint. Modularity is a good thing, and it's one of the reasons IIS7+ is so flexible and extensible.
It's amazing that people will complain and find fault with something that such a huge boon and win securitywise, extensibilitywise, and performancewise.
So basically "Waaaaahh.. i hate it cause it's different, and i don't care if the reasons for changing are valid or not".
Re:old hardware, probably (Score:1, Informative)
In case anyone is wondering why this would be done, I work a number of visually impaired people, and this is exactly the technique used to make their most-used applications easily accessible. The Windows 7 way of doing things has completely broken the UI for them. Using the Windows key plus initial character of the menu item in Windows 7 triggers a search which is not guaranteed to bring up the start menu item as the first entry.
There is also a problem that the shortcut key combination (CTRL + ALT + number) is the equivalent to using the AltGr key + number - which is used to access non-US ASCII characters like å, æ, and ø on some keyboards (and in some foreign keyboard layouts the @ sign) - so using the shortcut removes access to needed characters.
The Windows 7 UI has not been well thought out for the visually impaired.