Windows 8

[russell]

That'll be Windows-for-Dildos then, eh?

I thought that was the name of the company you got your double glazing from?

[TykeMerc]

I like windows 7. I liked 2000 and XP/Server 2003 as well. Vista was cack. I like linux and solaris too, less so as a desktop OS although some linux distros are very usable as such now.

I still don't want fingerprints on my screen though.

I completely agree on the fingerprint issue and I'm not interested in touch screens on desktops or laptops under normal circumstances.

For all that I've slagged Microshaft off over many years their only really rancid O/S offerings that I've had to tolerate are Vista, ME, NT3.51 pre SP2 and DOS4.0.
The rest were/are reasonably ok if a bit limited in their network abilities and requirement for reboots rather than unloading/reloading a bit of the O/S.

[VectraMan]

Windows' biggest strength is all those years worth of legacy apps that it can still run, but now they're doing an ARM version for tablets, it won't have that. Which makes me wonder why people really want their tablet running "Windows" if it can't do all the things that Windows on their PC does.

I'm never quite sure why people hate Vista so much. I used it for a while on my laptop, and whilst it's certainly true that W7 on the same hardware is noticeably faster and generally better in lots of respects, Vista was okay (once they fixed the networking speed anyway). I think the real issue is that by the time W7 came along, people (and software developers) had got to grips with UAC, and hardware had generally moved on as well.

XP was "good enough", which is why 10 years later many businesses are still using it. Windows 7 could well last 10 years as well; I can't imagine people will line up to buy the upgrade to 8, we'll all get it gradually as we upgrade to new hardware.

[dav]

am I the only person who really hates touchscreen for my home pc? I am laid in bed at the moment with a wireless keyboard and using a large lcd tv to view this site on. It might sound more like a childs bedroom or some game consolse setup but on a weekend I dont want to be sat in an office chair 2 foot from a screen.

[Sysman]

What ever Microsoft do will, in some peoples eye's, be the wrong thing to do purely because it is Microsoft.

Bill Gates can't even give his billions away to helping the third world without attracting criticism!

I've no idea who this chap is, vut he has a point:

"I don't care if Bill Gates is the world's biggest philanthropist. The pain he has inflicted on the world in the past 20 years through lousy products easily outweighs any good he has done.... Apple is as arrogant as Microsoft but at least its stuff works as advertised"
-- Graem Philipson

We haven't seen the last of him either. Warren Buffet is set to leave most of his wealth to charity. His intention was to put it in his wife's hands, but when she died he had to look elsewhere. Who already has a charitable foundation already set up to cope with large amounts`Ah, here comes the Melissa and Bill Gates Foundation.

In effect, Bill Gates could become the largest block shareholder on Berkshire Hathaway's board.

We will now resume normal programming.

[Sysman]

Kernel should be the same - bundled software may be different as well as default params.

My real issue with Microsoft is their greed when it to servers - Win Server 2008 Standard supports only 32 GB of RAM, FFS!!! You have to go to Enterprise level to support more, where as Win 7 supports 192 GB, WTF was responsible for that there?

This goes back a long time and is part of the corporate culture. When MS first adopted TCP/IP it was reported that they wanted to charge for the number of network connections. They got told where to go on that one and very firmly too.

What you complain about on server pricing applies lower down the line too. Last summer I picked up a cheap 'n' cheerful tower which came with Windows 7 Home Premium.. Special offer so I couldn't change the specs. I naively thought that I could get by with that, but quickly got chucked off with it telling me that I wasn't allowed to do various things (all sorts of stuff creeps out of the woodwork here, but probably the most restrictive is the choice of downloads from microsoft.com). I felt like a victim of extortion having to upgrade to Ultimate (could have stopped at Professional, but the price difference wasn't so great). There was no way I was going to pay the full retail on that.

Guess what? That Ultimate upgrade brought me to within a whisker of what a Mac Mini would have cost. If I'd paid full retail, no contest, the Windows solution was more expensive.

If the rumours about the upcoming version of OS X, Lion, are correct, much of the server functionality will be moved into the normal edition. With that it could be very attractive, though I'll wait and see rather than relying on rumours.

I wouldn't recommend you to use Win7 rather than Server 2008 for your data munching, Having run both side by side on the same box, Server 2008 is definitely more reliable. I have no hard figures to prove this, but my subjective feeling is that I/O is faster on 2008 server. The 2008 Server scheduler also wins hands down under heavy I/O over the desktop variants of Linux that I tried (I was surprised by that).

[Sysman]

Windows' biggest strength is all those years worth of legacy apps that it can still run, but now they're doing an ARM version for tablets, it won't have that. Which makes me wonder why people really want their tablet running "Windows" if it can't do all the things that Windows on their PC does.

That's certainly true. I can remember the pain going from Win 95 to NT. This wasn't helped by various large players (BT and Intuit, the Quicken/QuickBooks folks come to mind) who stuck their heads in the sand and yelled "We only support Windows 95".

Having only recently started using Windows again after a break of several years (I don't count email and timesheets on client systems real experience), I was pretty disappointed with Windows 7. Having experienced the plug and play capabilities of OS X and Linux. what lead there that Windows may have had isn't so compelling any more.

There are loads of little annoyances that add up too. Someone mentioned "keyhole surgery" in another thread. I'm sick of resizing windows. It's absurd that with a 22" screen, the largest I have ever had, I find myself horizontal scrolling to read stuff which could with a little thought be made readable as is. This isn't rocket science: one of the first things that the tutorial which came with VB 3 did was to teach you how to remember windows sizes and postions from the last session.

The annoying message about not letting Windows Update do its own thing is a daily reminder that Microsoft thinks they know better than I do. Hint to Microsoft:- Look at the Starter Group Policy Object files you offer for download and see what they recommend

And a backup system which works reliably please. OS X has backup for the masses sorted.

I have come to the conclusion that what is required is a better "out of the box experience", by which I mean consumers just want to turn it on and start using it. They don't want a question and answer session the first time they run IE, nor the first time they play any media files. They just want to switch on and be up and running. No incomprehensibly long EULAs shouting at you either on consumer devices.

Oh, those EULAs you are so fond of (not just Microsoft). If you are going to supply these as .TXT files, please format them so that they will print properly from Notepad. We don't put Office onto server systems, do we?

I'm never quite sure why people hate Vista so much. I used it for a while on my laptop, and whilst it's certainly true that W7 on the same hardware is noticeably faster and generally better in lots of respects, Vista was okay (once they fixed the networking speed anyway). I think the real issue is that by the time W7 came along, people (and software developers) had got to grips with UAC, and hardware had generally moved on as well.

There was always going to be pain while developers unlearned bad habits. I only got a glimpse of it once, when setting up a mate's broadband connection, so didn't really get a chance to get a feel for it.

XP was "good enough", which is why 10 years later many businesses are still using it. Windows 7 could well last 10 years as well; I can't imagine people will line up to buy the upgrade to 8, we'll all get it gradually as we upgrade to new hardware.

I can certainly see the point of upgrading to Windows 7 for businesses. Apparently Microsoft have put a lot of effort in here and it's a lot easier to deploy and maintain than XP. I don't see businesses rushing to upgrade to Windows 8 if 7 will last 10 years.

For what it's worth, my favourite Windows interface at the moment is Server 2008. It feels a lot more solid than Windows 7 and does its job with no fuss. I'm not a games player, so fancy graphics capabilities aren't the top of my list. Perhaps Windows Home Server would be more appropriate for someone like myself (is anyone here using it?), though I'm pretty sure the price tag would be pushing me back to OS X or Linux territory.