Should licensed Vista users get free upgrade to Windows 7?

[zridling]

Seems like this would be money better spent than on hundreds of millions on strange and bad ad campaigns. And it's not unprecedented in the software realm. If nothing else, it might slow the trickle of users who are lured by Linux and OS X.

[Darwin]

Heh, heh - I've been thinking about this of late... It's a thorny issue, though: do they include plebs like me that got my copy from the OEM of my notebook? Smarter to offer free upgrades to people such as yourself who sprung for a boxed version and offer people such as myself a very cheap upgrade to Windows 7 - $50 or so. They'd actually make money off the upgrade. Point being, I can't see paying for fullprice for an upgrade to Windows 7 so soon after buying my notebook (August 2008). Now... if they'd get smart and take a page from Apple's pricing scheme, I'd be delerious ($149 or so for the OSX DVDs, period and $179-199 for a family pack, which covers a bunch - 3,4,5, 8? - of computers in the same household). Do away with having 47 versions of the OS and crippling versions further down the scale.

[zridling]

Yea, they really should give up on all the different versions. Call the server version something else. If they offered a flat price like Apple does (is OS X still $129?), then that would help. It would certainly make advertising easier. But hey, how about a "lousy economy" discount? 

[Darwin]

how about a "lousy economy" discount?

-zridling (November 06, 2008, 02:09 PM)

Works for me!

is OS X still $129?

-zridling (November 06, 2008, 02:09 PM)

Not even... $109 at Amazon, which is the first place I looked. Likely available cheaper if you go looking.

EDIT: Dang! And the 5 user family pack is only $149!

[kartal]

Licenced vista users should just install windows xp.  I just did that this weekend on my wife`s laptop and her laptop runs twice as fast and I do not need to spend another 100 bux to run it smoothly.

[Darwin]

Licenced vista users should just install windows xp.  I just did that this weekend on my wife`s laptop and her laptop runs twice as fast and I do not need to spend another 100 bux to run it smoothly.

-kartal (November 06, 2008, 04:53 PM)

 

[40hz]

Licenced vista users should just install windows xp.  I just did that this weekend on my wife`s laptop and her laptop runs twice as fast and I do not need to spend another 100 bux to run it smoothly.

-kartal (November 06, 2008, 04:53 PM)

Spot on. 

[app103]

I seriously doubt that they are going to give a free upgrade to anyone. (I got a free downgrade with my new PC)

I still think they should have had a massive historic product recall with WinME and given everyone that had a copy (OEM or boxed) a free copy of Win2k.

I am sure a lot of people feel that way about Vista, too, which is probably why Dell is still giving away a lot of free XP downgrades.

[biox]

Licenced vista users should just install windows xp.  I just did that this weekend on my wife`s laptop and her laptop runs twice as fast and I do not need to spend another 100 bux to run it smoothly.

-kartal (November 06, 2008, 04:53 PM)

Although I voted 'no' I guess they do deserve some sort of 'dummy discount' There was quite a bit of talk about Win7 before Vista(Win ME2) hit the market.

Edit: ^ you beat me to it

[Darwin]

[Darwin clears his throat nervously] I still like Vista... [/Darwin clears his throat nervously]

[zridling]

Vista-SP1 is actually quite fine, if you have the hardware to make it sing. After Win 7 comes out, just once I want John Hodgman to kick the Apple schmuck in the onions; commercial ends with him writhing and crying on the ground! 

[Josh]

Honestly, I feel that users should NOT get a free copy. Ever since it's inception, I have enjoyed Vista. The problem is not so much the OS itself, it's the fact that no one wants to update their software to work the RIGHT way and not store information to the program files folder. This is the way *nix has done it for years. No program, minus developer and a few other niche tools, should require administrator rights to run. 95% of software which is on 90% of user computers can run just fine in a reduced privilege mode. That is what is wrong with Vista. The hardware compatibility hasn't been an issue for me either. I use parts whose manufacturers actually release vista compliant drivers. Microsoft increased requirements for WHQL drivers because that is what causes a good majority of crashes (Poorly written drivers).

In the end, I am perfectly happy with my 3 copies of Vista (1x Ultimate, 2x Home premium for $49 each). I find that a majority of people who complain about vista either A. Never used it, B. Used it for 5 minutes, saw a UAC prompt and quit or C. Simply like to tinker and end up breaking something and then blame vista for it.

[biox]

I find that a majority of people who complain about vista either A. Never used it, B. Used it for 5 minutes, saw a UAC prompt and quit or C. Simply like to tinker and end up breaking something and then blame vista for it.

-Josh (November 06, 2008, 11:03 PM)

I haven't really got a problem with Vista, just taking the pee a little

I'd fall into category C-, tinker->yes!!! but blame->myself  , actually 'scorn' would be the better word.

[justice]

I have to agree with Josh, I've never had a good running system longer than my current vista installations. It's more robust, the interface is more responsive, and the best OS i've used. Especially if you install a lot of software, there's definately less breakage over time than any XP install I used. It's just got a bad image. I wouldn't consider putting XP on a machine.

It even runs fine on MSI Wind netbooks, - with a longer battery life and better performance than a XP install (in this case).

[f0dder]

I wouldn't say Vista is more robust than XP, it does have it's quirks... and it certainly is heavier resource-wise. On the other hand, I seriously doubt my laptop would "run faster" if I switched it over to XP; programs would probably load slower due to the lack of the enhanced prefetcher. I'm even almost tempted to give it a whirl on my workstation, to see if it can utilize the resources better than trusty old XP64.

Josh is pretty spot on the sugar, most of the problems you'll see with Vista (heck, with any windows version, but Vistas defaults make it more obvious) are due to retarded 3rd-party programmers, be it applications or drivers. A lot of the changes in the OS are for the better, too bad this wasn't done back in 2000 though - we'd have a better situation now, then.

Anyway, back on topic. I don't see why Vista users should get a free upgrade to Windows 7. Cheaper upgrades, sure, and a reduced number of windows versions (split it into workstation and server editions and let that be it). But free upgrade? Why?

[Carol Haynes]

Maybe everyone should get a free upgrade to Windows 7 to make up for the Vista and Home Server debacles [Carol runs for cover ...] or maybe Apple should challenge MS and release MacOS X for general PC hardware (now that would cause a stir).

Seriously though I cannot believe that Vista runs faster than XP on any hardware. It is so much more resource hungry. I purchased a new laptop with 1Gb of memory and Vista Home Premium pre-installed with a load of crap. It ran like a slug on vallium. I contacted the laptop manufacturer and they sent me an OEM Vista disc (and also an OEM XP Pro disc as compensation for the wrong WiFi card being installed on delivery). I installed both operating systems as a dual boot system. There was just no comparison XP was much, MUCH fast at everything and disc thrashing was reduced from constant in Vista to occasional in XP. I still have both installed an use both for different things but I had to upgrade to 2Gb of memory to make Vista even vaguely tolerable speedwise.

[f0dder]

I should probably add that I ran Vista through vlite and removed a lot of stuff I didn't feel I'd need - including the indexing service. I don't experience disk thrashing, apart from the initial prefetch-loading after a cold boot. Resource-hungry, yes, and I don't know what it'd feel like on 1gig ram. But with 2 gigs, it feels pretty comfortable - including using Visual Studio, java development with Eclipse, lots of open tabs in firefox, etc.

I'm still tempted to nuke the xubuntu install and put XP on that partition instead, though, to see if there's a tangible speed difference.

[Josh]

Carol, look at the time difference between windows xp and windows vista. Of course XP is going to be faster. It's been around 5 years longer. I really dont think you can compare XP on a modern system to Vista on a modern system. XP might be faster but it also does not take advantage of newer hardware like vista does. Thats like saying Windows 3.1 runs faster on my pentium 200 than windows 95 does. You simply can't use a blanket statement because you will be sacrificing a lot when you make the move from one generation of an operating system to another. There is a lot of nice functionality in vista and a lot of new features which are more under the hood which make the user experience that much better.

As far as resource hungry, in this day and age, WHO CARES? I mean really. Unless you are a gamer, which you can then tweak vista to use quite a bit less, why have all of those resources just sitting around doing nothing? Microsoft realized this and now make the OS take advantage of the hardware. Yes, memory light programs are nice but you pay for that in performance unless the program does ONE TASK like utorrent or calculator. I would rather my hardware be put to use than just sit there idly in CASE I might, for one hour, require every bit of power it has.

[Carol Haynes]

Carol, look at the time difference between windows xp and windows vista. Of course XP is going to be faster. It's been around 5 years longer. I really dont think you can compare XP on a modern system to Vista on a modern system. XP might be faster but it also does not take advantage of newer hardware like vista does. Thats like saying Windows 3.1 runs faster on my pentium 200 than windows 95 does. You simply can't use a blanket statement because you will be sacrificing a lot when you make the move from one generation of an operating system to another. There is a lot of nice functionality in vista and a lot of new features which are more under the hood which make the user experience that much better.

-Josh (November 07, 2008, 05:33 AM)

Interesting point of view - precisely what do I get extra with Vista (apart from DirectX 10 which I don't need and has been artificially denied to WinXP users) ?

As far as resource hungry, in this day and age, WHO CARES? I mean really. Unless you are a gamer, which you can then tweak vista to use quite a bit less, why have all of those resources just sitting around doing nothing? Microsoft realized this and now make the OS take advantage of the hardware. Yes, memory light programs are nice but you pay for that in performance unless the program does ONE TASK like utorrent or calculator. I would rather my hardware be put to use than just sit there idly in CASE I might, for one hour, require every bit of power it has.

Sorry I care - why should users buy faster and faster hardware and bigger and bigger hard disks just so that the operating system can suck up the resources like a sponge. Personally I want Windows to get less resource hungry and allow my applications to take advantage of faster CPU and memory and larger faster hard disks rather than have every generation of windows use more and more resources and systematically throttle my applications. This isn't just to do with gaming but if you deal with large video and photo files and want to process them it does make a huge difference.

Having played with Vista over the last few months the only things that seem to have changed between XP and Vista are:

• Huge amount of resources required to install Vista
• Direct X
• Ruined Windows Explorer
• Settings for things like networking made much more difficult to track down
• Clickfest to find or do anything
• AERO interface (so what  - it doesn't add much of interest if anything but demands huge resources)
• A few security features (which many users simply turn off because they drive you nuts)

Have I got something wrong?

At least with Windows 7 they seem to be taking a radical approach to the GUI but I really wish they would be much more radical and provide a transparent VM environment for backward compatibility. Trouble is it will be the worst of both worlds - people will be complaining like mad with Windows 7 as software is broken in the new GUI and yet we will have yet another layer of compatabilty crap to install.

Before long it si going to take a BluRay disk just to provide the installation media!

[Darwin]

I guess the issue here is the difference betweeh "should" and "what I want"... I'm a mercenary bugger and would *love* MS to upgrade me to Windows 7 for free... I am more than satisfied with the Vista experience and wouldn't feel compelled to upgrade, though. That, coupled with the fact that even if 7 came out in December it will have been almost two years since Vista went gold and there isn't any compelling reason for me to feel that MS is owes me or anyone else a free licence. BUT I'd take it if they offered it to me!

[Josh]

Thats just it, you DONT HAVE TO get top end hardware to run vista. Most machines that you get from Dell or any other major manufacturer can run vista fine. The problem is that people dont realize that you SHOULD add more ram. Ram is about the only component which really needs to be beefed up to be able to run Vista. I have been running vista fine on a 3.5 year old machine and have no issues with performance minus a few games not updating or patching to support vista's code base.

You are a minimalist, thats fine, but I know for a fact that I do not want my hardware sitting there idle. Why pay for hardware I am not going to put to use? Vista doesn't use much more than XP. In fact, running Vista leaves me with 2.8GB of ram free out of 4GB (3.5 mappable) compared to XP where I was left with 3.0 out of the box on a fresh install. That extra 200MB hardly impacts my daily work and things seem faster.

Microsoft has been burdened with this backwards compatibility issue which is what really slows down windows. Compatibility with old and out of date hardware/software is what drives down Window's performance. Microsoft needs to do like Apple and cut the cord and say "Sorry, you're applications need to be updated". Apple runs much faster due to this and I feel Microsoft would benefit from a similar standpoint. I guarantee resource usage would go down with removal of support for the creative labs 16-bit sound card or the original audigy series stuff. Support for Rage 128 graphics adapters is no longer needed.

You say explorer is ruined, I say it is far better than it ever has been. Prior to it I was using DOpus but upon switching to Vista DOPus has become unnecessary for me and I can easily run without it. I can do far more in the current explorer than in any other past version of windows. Networking is not hard to track down. They changed it, once you learn how to use it (like the change from 3.1 to 9x and 9x to 2k) it is very easy to remember how to access and heck, you can do it faster using the new start menu system. I can do far more from the new start menu than in the past.

You also say you need a bigger hard disk. Are you really worried about using 4-6GB of space? That is all vista takes for me on a fresh install. People buy bigger and bigger hard disks because of the increasing amount of media they are storing on them, not because vista requires it. If you are that hard up for space that you can't spare the small amount of space Windows requires, I think you need to re-evaluate how you are using your computer.

[Darwin]

As Zaine has obliquely noted, the PR problems that MS has with Vista stem from the pre-Sp1 release, I think. I've detailed elsewhere on this forum my experince with purchasing and returning a Toshiba notebook with Vista pre-Sp1 installed on it. I was pulling my hair out before I even saw the Windows desktop (that machine had 2GB RAM and integrated graphics) because it took almost two hours to install Vista from the partition on the harddrive. When I finally got it set up, I was disappointed with the overall performance/experience of using it and returned it and invested in doubling the RAM on my XP machine. Ten months later, I bought the machine I am typing on now - right out of the box it was, and remains, a joy to use. Much peppier than my XP machine, which is still no slouch and I still love...

[f0dder]

Carol, look at the time difference between windows xp and windows vista. Of course XP is going to be faster.

-Josh (November 07, 2008, 05:33 AM)

Why does it have to be this way, though?

Sure thing, NT requires more than 9x which requires more than win3.x, because a lot of things has happened... both to the GUI and under the hood. The enhanced security of NT + advanced features don't come for free, and I'm OK with that. But I fail to see why things must inevitably become heavier and heavier... It's a shame that all the cool things the kernel developers do (lock-free algorithms, better heap data structures + algorithms, prioritized I/O et cetera) are swallowed up by incompetent usermode developers. If you can't make something new that runs better than the old, don't fscking do it! (yeah, I'm thinking about stuff like WPF.)

XP might be faster but it also does not take advantage of newer hardware like vista does.

-Josh (November 07, 2008, 05:33 AM)

Taking advantage of newer hardware is good, but requiring faster hardware for no good reason is plain stupid. I didn't buy a quadcore CPU to facilitate lazy developers, I bought it because I want to utilize the CPU power for other stuff.

Now, I'm not saying Vista is so bad performance-wise, and my experience with it has been pretty positive so far. But there's no denying it requires more Oomph than XP, and not necessarily for very good reasons.

Compatibility with old and out of date hardware/software is what drives down Window's performance.

-Josh (November 07, 2008, 07:49 AM)

Bullshit

I do agree that Microsoft shouldn't have OS hacks to support broken software and instead require vendors to fix their darn codebases, but backward compatibility doesn't really drag down performance. Takes up disk space, yeah, but that's about it.

Microsoft needs to do like Apple and cut the cord and say "Sorry, you're applications need to be updated".

-Josh (November 07, 2008, 07:49 AM)

In the case of fixing things like Vista incompatibilites (which, really, are issues that have been there since the NT4 (or earlier) days, when running with non-admin privileges), I agree. In the case of "you must update your apps to use the latest dotNET" I couldn't disagree more.

I guarantee resource usage would go down with removal of support for the creative labs 16-bit sound card or the original audigy series stuff. Support for Rage 128 graphics adapters is no longer needed.

-Josh (November 07, 2008, 07:49 AM)

Bullshit. Again, you might save some disk space, but unused drivers aren't loaded, and thus don't take up RAM or CPU resources.

You say explorer is ruined, I say it is far better than it ever has been.

-Josh (November 07, 2008, 07:49 AM)

I'll have to agree with Carol, I find that new explorer sucks++. I'm glad xplorer² works with Vista.

I like the new start menu and a number of other things about Vista (more ramblings here), but I do find that I need more clicks when going through the control panel. Fortunately, it's not something I have to do much, so it's not that much of an issue. But I'd be pissed about if it I had to do a lot of computer support. I don't find UAC to be a problem, though, since you can temporarily disable it while doing a fresh system setup, and then re-enable it afterwards. It could be smarter, though.

You also say you need a bigger hard disk. Are you really worried about using 4-6GB of space? That is all vista takes for me on a fresh install.

-Josh (November 07, 2008, 07:49 AM)

Weird, x64 Vista Business version took up 12 gigabyte on a fresh install. Excluding page- and hibernation files... and that's, imho, too much for a base OS, excluding applications. "Buy a larger harddrive", yaddayadda. Nope. I want to use my disk space for my needs, not for Microsofts sloppyness. They need to make the OS more modular and give users some choice of freedom. And do keep solid-state disks in mind, 6 gigabytes of extra OS consumption is a lot on a 64gig disk.

[Darwin]

I don't mind the new explorer in Vista. Of course, I spend 99% of my time using Dopus 9, so haven't really *had* to use it in earnest and thus perhaps my perspecitve might be different...

[f0dder]

I don't mind the new explorer in Vista. Of course, I spend 99% of my time using Dopus 9, so haven't really *had* to use it in earnest and thus perhaps my perspecitve might be different...

-Darwin (November 07, 2008, 10:22 AM)

I'm not sure exactly what it is about the new explorer that ticks me off, but it does annoy me. Probably would be very annoying if I didn't use x². Oh, I also hate the new folder icons in Vista, they're ugly.