It was fast as hell!

here

Reference is right here.

So appearently I was half wrong. You have EFI partitions on your WIndows 7 unit to have more than 2 TB. On my Bios based AMD which preceding my 8.1 system I could not do more than 2 TB as MBR limits the disk

I worked for a client who made everyone a local admin because they switched to laptops and didn't want to get inundated iwth calls with setting up printers at home or hotels ... oh and they get rid of half their local IT staff at the same time.

Oh soo much fine with Angry pigs trojans showing up and all day was a job with putting out fires. Grrr

FOr the record I had to update to WIndows 8.1 due to needing Hyper-V for some MCSE exams yada yada laugh all you want. I had to say goodbye to WIndows 7 which was my favorite OS from MS :-(

WIth that said WIndows 10 and even 8.1 offer:
1. Much faster boot startup
2. WIth CSM bios disabled and all EFI the system loads in seconds from an SSD
3. Data and image redundancy with EFI GPT partitions (recovery partition allows you to restore image without app re-install)
4. Disk partitions more than 2 TB again EFI GPT over MBR partitions
5. Dism command for the local IT shop to fix corruption without a re-image. I fixed with dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth where under WIndows 7 it would be a re-image. Again thanks to UEFI which is so hated for some reason here
6. Secure boot. Yes outside of slashdot it is a feature and I do not have to worry about rootkits. FreeBSD and Ubuntu support secureboot keys. Add your own even
7.No nasty bios. You really need to disable CSM to get the benefits of the really fast bootup and less problems. Bios is from 1981 and has many limitations
8. Supperior battery life. As in a big boost as 8.0 and later use a tickless kernel and other power optimization options have been added
9. NFC printing
10. Desktop cloud synchronization. IE favorities, desktop settings, store apps, and even the add-ons like Adblockplus.
11. Tablet and mobile app support. The surface is starting to sell and it is nice to walk around my site to do network testing with a usb to ethernet adapter. WIndows 7 with no touch would be a pain
12. Future IOS and Android compatibility. 80% of phone apps code do not have to be rewriten with MS porting tools for universal apps which will support objective-C and Davilek. VS 2015 even installs Chrome and Clang :-)
13. DirectX 12

I bought stardocks start8 and classic shell and put on aero8 and my system looks fine now.

I bought a surface for work and all my apps like netflix, kindle ebook, wallpaper, and my Onedrive files were all synced together. Grandma who has to have her grandkids wallpaper would like to have all of this on another system.

The only 2 things I give Windows 7 credit for today in 2015 is it is rock stable and has a more consistent prettier UI. On my VM lab I can tell the difference night and day between Windows 7/2008 R2 and 8.1/2012 R2 images. They boot 1/4th the time and are light. If you own a laptop you are doing a diservice to stick with WIndows 7.

Easy for you to say. You do not have to stay liable for breaks and security fixes yet have an exponential increase in complexity mathematically related to number of update combinations which grows as your OS ages.

You are supposed to stay updated. The fact is MS let some bad updates in and we see an even more mind boggling "Yeah we froze time on March 11 2010 with updates because as Exchange doesn't work after this time in history! Your job is to put out viruses and fires all day as a result and get write ups if is not secure etc."

I lucked out and never had a problem with an update. These are rare but do occasionally occur. Updates should be considered a normal and necessary process and if done right with QA SHOULDN'T be an issue.

FYI Enterprise has 2 - 3 year life cycles and professional it is 8 months of deferred updates. ... with that said it is more mind boggling if you run WIndows to NEVER update?! I had a coworker who said that with pride that all updates do is break things ... yada yada. Well he was 0wned and his bank account got compromised.

Yep I can do a .msi, push gpos, use .pac files, etc.

And for several years it is just as secure as chrome and is w3c compliant and can render pages properly

The CFO decides what is a priority for IT like most non tech companies. She doesn't want to spend $400 on buying a new version of Premier and HR has more important things to anyway than to redo it and will raise a stink to high heaven to the CFO why it's a bad idea. No IT will tell them what to do. We all should be thankful we have a job etc.

We use IE 8 and keep IE 6 in Citrix.

Wait you don't use flash or old java at work? Wow, no cisco or vsphere at all. :-) They all rely on security exploits like self signed certificates to work so you need old to get job done. Welcome to life

Remember the goal of business is to raise the share price. Best way is to raise revenue and cutting expenses. Hiring more sales guys and commercials will win everytime

You're going to pay to hire a PM and replace an app which still works just fine that is the life and blood of the company with an untested one where users have to be retrained and may not work as good .... and why?? Oh because some geek thinks IE 6 and flash are uncool? HA

I am in Houston and the energy crash created many unemployed IT guys who would be thrilled to have my job if I can't handle legacy and work with the cost accountants.

Look just put a heavily DMZ vlan in a vm container with no Web Access in a citrix box and call it a day?

Many slashdotters who never worked in non IT or .com companies are flabbergasted at posts like mine :-)

For the rest of us it's business as usual in a focus on sales and cutting IT costs by not changing what has always worked

So many processes have dependancies that are so ingrained in corporate apps it will be impossible to get rid of. We still use IE 6 at work and even xp eol couldn't kill it due to 2 must have apps which are impossible to ever replace. Our training only works with ancient insecure flash 11 at work due to a 10 year old version of premier which created our slides. Lock the browser out of flash and we will stick with obsolete version

SSH too will be SWEET and a must have too in any enterprise environment with security needs. To have powershell, remote desktop, and perhaps even AD SMB communication encrypted will prevent devices any hacker can plug into an electrical socket and 0wn the network or put in ransom where at the AD schema level.

Server 2012 is a hefty upgrade too with schema deletion restoration, WinRM, compression of AD/SMB traffic for slow WAn links, Powershell Desired state configuration templates SSD tier to raids for caching, no gui installs, make that one a much bigger upgrade from 2008 than 2008 was to 2003.

2016 with more containers with docks and encryption might just get those on 2008 R2 forests the reasons for upgrading

My hunch is MS does not want piracy.

Since I am grandfathered in with the insider program I can download. I am doing this now so I have a free VM image for my labs as MS made it clear it is a free upgrade for registered as well as beta fresh installs as a thank you for the insider program.

I can't wait until it updates to RTM and I can finally get RSAT tools to make it useful as a virtual joined computer. In the meantime I am stuck with time bombed versions of 8.1 for the labs. 10 being light and EFI means very light resources and fast boot times :-)

Uh yes we people did not get in before the fed jerked up the prices thanks to government debt.

There is no where you can afford an hour in every direction in New York, Seattle, LA, DC, etc unless you already got in years ago at the right time or you make $70,000 a year or more. That is not the median income by far yet that is supposed to be the median price for a home. That doesn't add up.

That is a bad thing as it means a coming crash for you home owners as that is unsustainable.

Wait ... it was .coms expanding right?

I thought you meant Indians in King Country