Will You Buy Windows 7???

[wilsky]

You can talk about what people should or shouldn't do until you are blue in the face. The fact remains that irritating a million plus probable customers is not very bright.

Those million plus people are not very bright if they installed without reading about what exactly they was letting themselves in for. Or are we talking about the kind of people who cause companies to put CAUTION: HOT on the side of coffee cups.

They should provide an upgrade path. Not doing so is stupid from a business perspective, Stupid from a PR perspective. And stupid from a common sense perspective.

They do provide an upgrade path, in the States but not in Europe.

They don't provide an upgrade path for a pre-release version. They told you this before you installed it how come they are stupid and not you? You did read the instructions? If not, no sympathy. If you did, why are you moaning? Why didn't you just wait until the full version was out? Or test in on a separate machine. You know, do the things they advised you to do.

Even if I spent all my days 'testing' this operating system, I would still want whatever the hell I was testing to simply be upgraded. And not wiped out. That is dumb.

Why? When you 'test' something properly the idea is to push the boundaries of the product outside the comfort zone. If you used it as though it was production release and now have critical files on there, that means you're dumb not Microsoft. Again, they did tell you. You know that fire burns right?

The price isn't the problem for me. The lack of an upgrade path is. That is stealing my time for no good reason, and will confuse the hell out of many people who downloaded the RC to see whether it was annoying like vista, or good enough to be useable. Liked it, but are now faced with having to figure out backing up their entire system prior to an upgrade, and trying to replicate whatever changes they made maybe 6 months ago.

Like I said, coffee is hot. Fire burns. You read the instructions before you installed right?

 

[Ninja Please!]

Actually I studied Liebeck v. McDonalds and the hot caution on the cup has nothing to do with any lawsuit, or demand from any lawyer or court. They did it on their own after the fact, without any push or demand to do so. I'm a law student. That is one of the most misconstrued cases of all time. Everyone thinks they know about it, and they think it was frivolous. Quite the opposite really. You should look up the case, it's very interesting.

McDonalds served their coffee 50 degrees hotter than anywhere on the face of the earth basically (including your home), and several doctors testified at those temperatures 3rd degree burns would occur in 2 seconds on average. McDonalds tried to fight and just looked like idiots because their own research proved their arguments to be wrong. long story short, It was an elderly woman who had over %20 of her body with 3rd degree burns (on her crotch) and all she wanted was the 20k in medical bills (for her hospital stays and skin grafts) payed for, and rightfully so (if you read the case). The jury and judge awarded her the huge lump of money, she nor her lawyers ever asked for it. There's a lot more but I'll leave that for you to look up.

Off topic sorry, but wilsky made the reference to the coffee cup.

 

[TheVoice]

You can talk about what people should or shouldn't do until you are blue in the face. The fact remains that irritating a million plus probable customers is not very bright.

I highly doubt a million people are really that bothered, and if they are, they really have no right to be. Sure, it'd be convenient if 7 had the ability to upgrade the RC to full release, but they've never said that would be possible. MS have maintained the entire time that 7RC is a preview, not to be used as your primary OS, not to be used by people who don't know what they're doing, and not to be relied upon for mission-critical applications. It's been crystal clear from the start that there would be no way to upgrade. MS can't seem to do anything right, even selling their new OS at £45 is leaving people with room for complaint it seems.

The price isn't the problem for me. The lack of an upgrade path is. That is stealing my time for no good reason, and will confuse the hell out of many people who downloaded the RC to see whether it was annoying like vista, or good enough to be useable. Liked it, but are now faced with having to figure out backing up their entire system prior to an upgrade, and trying to replicate whatever changes they made maybe 6 months ago.

MS aren't stealing your time at all. They haven't only just sprung this on everyone, it's been common knowledge from the start, as well as common sense. If you use pre-release software, you accept the risks. Simple.

If people are confused by re-installing a new operating system, perhaps they shouldn't have installed the RC in the first place. They'd have had to back everything up anyway when installing the RC, unless they were foolish enough to just install the RC over their previous OS (if that's even possible). If that's the case, is it really a good idea to then install yet another OS over the top of that? It'll be an absolute mess.

I installed the 7 beta and RC to a separate hard-drive for this very reason; it was pre-release, it was potentially not going to be as stable as Vista, not as well-supported as Vista, and I didn't want to put all my trust into an (at the time) unproven OS. This means I've had adequate time playing with 7 and seeing what it's like, whilst still having Vista intact as my main OS without having to get everything back to how I like it in 7RC. When 7 is released later this year, I can wipe the Vista partition safe in the knowledge that all my personal data is on other partitions. No loss, no hassle. That's common sense for you.

As I've said, the fact that you and others are using 7RC as a primary OS is credit to MS that they've done something right. It doesn't change the fact that MS have advised you not to do it though.

 

[stoofa]

Actually Microsoft are being extremely sensible not offering an upgrade path.
Microsoft have got to support a lot of users - and I mean a lot of users.

I notice somebody here said "Well I've never had to call Microsoft".
No, but hundreds of thousands of people do and they are from all levels.
Now I'm an IT Manager and my team and I call Microsoft for support - if users with our level of experience have the need to speak with MS now and again I am sure "general users" do too.

So the reason for no upgrade - cleanliness.
There is absolutely no chance of old, beta code being left on a machine if there is no way to do an upgrade.
What you get on the machine is the final release/gold code and that is the ONLY configuration Microsoft have to support.

It would be a technical nightmare attempting to support upgrades from RC - there are so many different variables in place.
How was the RC installed, which pre-release code was used, which build.
Make it so the only configuration support is a clean install and you cut out a lot of the support issues.

The Release Candidate of Windows 7 is purely a way of seeing the OS before release - nothing more.
Microsoft made it quite clear it was not intended for full-time use and that there would be no upgrade path to the final release.
There really isn't anything else they can do.

 

[_Jimlad_]

why anyone would do an upgrade is crazy to me, yeah its a pain, but nothing beats a clean install - time consuming yes but i swear you get a mega performance increase!

 

[Stuarts]

As I said. Some people take a legal approach to these things about what people (including me) should or should not do.

I take a business view.

If I have a million people who like my trial product, then it is dumb to make it difficult for them to upgrade to the real one (that gives me money).

All the EU stops them from doing is including Windows Explorer.

There is nothing stopping them from having an upgrade that doesn't include it. Or that strips it out.

They have had years to work on it.

They are worth $50 billion. Perhaps they should hire a few extra programmers from India? They are not expensive.

Anyhow, whatever. Its their company, and if they want to be stupid then hey ho.

Normal folk make up the vast bulk of customers. Not the tech heads who partition hard drives and ruminate about this stuff.

Here is an interesting little quote from someone at Microsoft:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10214325-56.html

"We know many people (including tens of thousands at Microsoft) are relying on the pre-release builds of Windows 7 for mission critical and daily work, making this step less than convenient," the company acknowledged in its blog. "We're working hard to provide the highest quality release we can and so we'd like to make sure for this final phase of testing we're supporting the most real world scenarios possible, which incremental build to build upgrades are not. At the same time everyone on the beta has been so great we wanted to make sure we at least offered an opportunity to make your own expert and informed choice about how to handle the upgrade."

The company also cautioned that the same hassles will apply for those moving from the release candidate to the final version of Windows 7.

So, they acknowledge that people, even tens of thousands at Microsoft itself, were using as far back as the Beta Releases of Windows 7 for "mission critical and daily work".

And yet, they expect the same problems with the Release Candidate!

How dumb is that. They acknowledge the problem, and then choose to do nothing straightforward about it.

Not much common sense in that from Microsoft.

 

[ps3ud0]

Stuarts - you really need to realise that you arent that qualified to certify Microsoft as 'stupid' or having 'no common sense' and the diatribe you posted as your business case is laughable even at GCSE level...

The cost of supporting numerous types of upgrade from every possible iteration of beta/release candidate would be very expensive, let alone a logistical nightmare, especially ensuring that all future drivers, service packs and applications (third party included) dont fall foul of a beta niggle. Its much easier for them (and therefore a better experience for the end user) to strike a line regards how their OS should be deployed.

RCs and Betas (they were never 'trials') should only be used by people happy to agree and fully understand the T&Cs - if you arent, perhaps, like you should have done, they should wait until its officially released (i.e. like most 'normal folk')...

Unfortunately within this forum you are unlikely to find someone who shares the same identical viewpoint as you - perhaps a letter to Daily Mails editorial section may be in order to garner support?

ps3ud0

 

[C64]

There's so much wrong with that comment that I don't care to put it right. If you still think that Vista is XP with a new shell after the best efforts of this forum to inform you over the last two years, you're probably beyond educating. Enjoy XP.

Oh really ? such as then ? I never used superfetch as I couldn't stand the constant hard drive thrashing and as far as I am aware 99% of software still couldn't utilize much over 2gb of ram.
Gave me no benefit what so ever over xp pro as far as i could tell even my games run better on xp pro far smoother even though I'm only 3.25 gig ram now.
I couldn't use some of my favourite software on vista64 such as broadcast studio pro and had to dual boot.
I am not knocking win7 I will move to it but what I'd like to say though is that there is going to be a lot of ironing out and fixes and patches that will be needed so I don't view win7 as a day to day OS just yet like any new OS wasn't.

"Educating" ? how patronizing lol, oh and btw I have been here since 1998 I just forgot my old username and couldn't retrieve it.
My games run faster all my favourite apps work I can alt tab and multitask as fast as vista yep I will enjoy xp thanks I'll get win7 when it's needed.

The thing is that everyone was saying "vista is great I am totally happy with it " and you don't know what your talking about" now cant wait to ditch it and swap to win7

 

[TheVoice]

Normal folk make up the vast bulk of customers. Not the tech heads who partition hard drives and ruminate about this stuff.

In that case, normal folk should learn to read first and recognise that installing a free release candidate of an OS doesn't allow you to upgrade it to the full release. Either that, or the normal folk can stay away from preview software altogether and leave it to the people who do know what they're doing.

I'm sure that everyone on the Windows team is working very hard on 7. I imagine the last thing they need is to have to cater for yet another upgrade route.

Presumably you did a clean install to install 7RC, consider it as practice for when the the full release is available.

 

[theheyes]

If people are confused by re-installing a new operating system, perhaps they shouldn't have installed the RC in the first place. They'd have had to back everything up anyway when installing the RC, unless they were foolish enough to just install the RC over their previous OS (if that's even possible).

This. It was quite clear from the beginning that there was no upgrade path. I don't even know how this has turned into a lengthy discussion.

Anyway...

Again, we know many people (including tens of thousands at Microsoft) are relying on the pre-release builds of Windows 7 for mission critical and daily work, making this step less than convenient.

I can't believe I just read that. If any of those "mission critical" systems fell over because I was using pre-release software I'd expect to be out of a job pretty quick.

 

[NickM]

All the EU stops them from doing is including Windows Explorer.

lol

Normal folk make up the vast bulk of customers. Not the tech heads who partition hard drives and ruminate about this stuff.

Then as other people have pointed out normal folk shouldn't be installing a Beta/RC.

 

[Totality]

Me personlly love Vista, yes there was some problems on first release but thats always been the case with all Windows systems and its to be expected.
a lot of people see Vista as an ME 2(which I dont agree it is) due to bad press and not trying for themselves,others trying to run it on their ageing Celeron 800mhz PCs with 512mb ram or people who simply do not like change.

Windows 7 would work on their old Celeron 800mhz PCs and yet has more features and an upgraded UI compared to Vista. Surely that means you've failed at your own argument showing that Vista wasn't optimised to the level that 7 has been and was released too early... I use both OS daily and Windows 7 is vastly more polished. My work laptop is dual core with 4gb of ram yet runs like a dog with vista constantly thrashing the hard disk. The other laptop running Win 7 with the exact same spec works absolutely fine.

I don't get why people keep defending Vista claiming it was bad press that made it a poor product?

 

[molar]

Just seen the hype on this and pre-ordered a copy. Not sure where I've been for the last few days (weeks/months?) but I missed out on the cheaper version and got a copy of Pro for £90.

Now I just need to buy a computer fast enough to run it. Lol.

 

[Hades]

Damn, it now seems to be more expensive everywhere. Missed out on that one

 

[Hades]

Thankyou



Right, now to decide whether I should get Home or Professional? Not idea really. Leaning towards Pro simply because it's relatively cheap.

 

[TheVoice]

Wikipedia has a pretty good comparison table of the different versions on the Windows 7 page, take a look at that. Personally there's nothing in Pro that I really need, so HP will do fine. Used Vista HP and XP Home in the past so see no reason to change now!

 

[Faustus]

Disaster has struck and I’m sure many of you will find this most amusing. My youngest daughter has phoned me up this evening (now grown up and moved away). She said Dad I know it’s not your birthday just yet but I thought I better tell you that I have already bought you your present just in case you were going to buy the same thing. I replied oh ok what is it then – she said I have ordered you a copy of Windows 7 at a discounted price.

Well I could have dropped I can tell you and what’s worse I had to sound very pleased. I know I probably sound ungrateful but I really do like Vista and wanted to keep with it. Before anyone suggests it, no I can’t sell it the wife’s already given me the hard word on that one.

What’s just as bad as the thought of reinstalling all my programmes is making a decision whether to install the 32 bit or 64 bit version as my Intel Quad core supports 64 bit. However, I doubt if a lot of my programmes will work with 64 bit which means even more expense if I take that route. Talk about good intentions and all that. I hope she doesn’t look on this forum at my posts concerning W7

 

[Alex74]

weeell might as well install it...you can even make it look just like vista just with some added UI stuff...

 

[Hades]

Wikipedia has a pretty good comparison table of the different versions on the Windows 7 page, take a look at that. Personally there's nothing in Pro that I really need, so HP will do fine. Used Vista HP and XP Home in the past so see no reason to change now!

Yup, can see what you mean. But the 16Gb memory limit concerns me slightly. That may seem massive now but probably won't in a few years.

 

[Fire Wizard]

Disaster has struck and I’m sure many of you will find this most amusing. My youngest daughter has phoned me up this evening (now grown up and moved away). She said Dad I know it’s not your birthday just yet but I thought I better tell you that I have already bought you your present just in case you were going to buy the same thing. I replied oh ok what is it then – she said I have ordered you a copy of Windows 7 at a discounted price.

Hehe, that made me chuckle.

What’s just as bad as the thought of reinstalling all my programmes is making a decision whether to install the 32 bit or 64 bit version as my Intel Quad core supports 64 bit. However, I doubt if a lot of my programmes will work with 64 bit which means even more expense if I take that route. Talk about good intentions and all that. I hope she doesn’t look on this forum at my posts concerning W7

Ideally you will want to install the 64-bit version. The majority of 32-bit applications will work fine under a 64-bit operating system. What sort of programmes are you referring to though?