Windows 7

[ttoc48]

sorry ,but win 7 is another load of use bilge from microsoft,supposed to be able to upgrade this crappy vista but after several hours with it going in a continuous loop i have had to set my laptop yet again to factory settings as i couldnt do a damn thing with it,so back to using my solidly dependable desktop with xp,runs a treat doesnt make me go back to factory settings every 5 minutes and usable as i can find everything ,like add remove software,know how long it took to find in vista,no you dont,why change something so simple and obvious as add remove programs,it says what it does!! and easy to find,vista crap,win7 crap,not spending any more money on bill gates hype,next machine is gonna be linux or mac

[heatemyfather]

Market share does come for a reason. Today Microsoft annouces 50 million Retail Box copies of Windows 7 Sold within 1 month all over the world. It is not only best Windows among all Windows but also best OS among all PC OS (Linux, Mac OS).

That is just marketing drivel! Are you reading this from a Microsoft brochure?

Microsoft Windows comes with almost every PC sold, unless buyers go out of their way to look for something that doesn't come with Windows, they don't have a choice in the matter. Like 100% of Apple Mac computers come with Mac OS, so 99% of PCs come with Windows, the difference being that Apple make the hardware and throw in the software for free. It is the cheapness of PC hardware that drives the sales of Windows, not the quality (hardware or software, both are typically of the minimum quality possible to keep costs down).

Microsoft have systematically bought out and shut down their PC OS competition, the only reason they have not been able to do this to linux is that it cannot be bought out. Mac OS is not a PC OS, as Mac OS only runs on Apple Mac hardware; there is a difference, although some might argue the point now that Apple Mac hardware can now run Windows so it must be a PC too, but Mac OS cannot be run (legally) on anything but Apple Mac hardware so that, for me, makes the Apple Mac unique among desktop computers.

Windows 7 may have tightened up areas that were a complete botch before (especially in Vista), but pretty much everything from XP is still there but with a different veneer. I don't see the kind of progress in Windows that Mac OS has made with Snow Leopard, which leaves Windows sadly lagging behind yet again. I suggest you really go and read up on what Snow Leopard is capable of, view some benchmark tests and take look at the new quad-core iMac hardware specs.

Many Windows owners are too forgiving IMO, if I was a PC user I could not forgive them for Vista, I would've been down that linux or Mac road long before Windows 7 finally arrived. I actually made this decision before Windows XP appeared, and when XP did appear it was full of problems similar to Vista's.

If PCs did not come with an OS at all, and this was an extra purchase the customer had to make, then I think Windows' market share would tumble. If Microsoft made their own computer line, as Apple do, I think the result would probably be the same - most people would opt for the cheapest, and that would be a computer with free downloadable linux. Only hard-core PC gamers and business users would remain IMO.

Can't wait to see what Google OS is like! They are aiming to wipe the floor with Windows 7 and give users a new alternative in the PC OS market. Only time will tell, but it's certainly something the industry needs.

[heatemyfather]

I'm wondering whether to put a Windows 7 VM into Virtualbox as well, since the one I'm using with XP is excellent.

XP is a completely different beast when it's only running one programme, my VM is faster than the machine I have at work, and Access is running better in it than I've managed anywhere else. It's been a revelation.

I have just tried Windows 7 (32-bit) in a VM (Parallels) and found that it ran quite happily, very similar speed to XP from a user perspective. I read somewhere that Windows 7 was designed to be easier to run in a VM, but I suppose if they were using Vista as a benchmark it wouldn't be hard to achieve this.