Windows 8.1 finally takes off -- shows staggering market share growth

My experience with Vista was different to yours. Some systems ran terribly with major slow down issues when running Vista with no service packs installed, but ran fine with SP1 and 2 installed.

One of my Thinkpads had no issues with Vista with no service packs installed.

I'm sure there were issues still on some computers with both service packs installed, but there were none for me that I can recall.

 

Well, I had all the service packs installed, and so did all of the people (AFAIK) I knew personally who ran Vista. All of them had virtually exactly the same bugs/problems as I did and their hardware included HP, Sony, Toshiba, Hitachi and Dell.

All I can say is that you were very lucky. Those who I know personally, who upgraded to 7, ceased having the bugs/problems their computers exhibited with Vista. Furthermore, many people I have communicated with online consistently reported the same problems with Vista. Principally, start up problems, systems tray repeatedly not loading correctly often causing WiFi connectivity difficulties needing multiple reboots to cure, general crashing, and others. There is a familiarity with them all. This cannot all be explained away by hardware incompatibility.

Vista was an unfinished half-baked operating system released too early. Thankfully Win 7 was released and proved to be as reliable and even more stable than XP. Why Microsoft couldn't have finished Vista properly in the first place is a mystery, especially as Win 7 was so good.

 

Dave I get that you had a bad experience, but not everyone did. I don't know what the official stats are, but there is always some (hopefully small) percentage of people who have a bad experience with a particular OS, or hardware brand, whatever. Was Windows 7 better then Vista? Yes, absolutely! But it was an evolution of Vista, not something brand new. Vista broke a lot of new ground, especially with regard to security, so I forgave the bumps along the way.

I completely agree with you on this one If I had to choose I would go back to Vista for sure

 

Well, I stand by what I said, Vista was a good idea badly realised. I'd prefer it to Win 8 though! LOL

 

zactly... and although Win7 is a much better OS than 8 (IMO), the same could be said about it in comparison to XP. In fact I'd wager that if XP were still being supported, and available as an option for new computers, it would still lead the market share. Considering it still has about a 20% share this long past it's EOL that's not much of a leap of faith.

But if I were to upgrade for whatever reason it would be to 7 Pro or Ultimate 32-bit, not to 8.

 

I personally would not consider these one off figures but look at the annual trend.

 

With Layer-7 UTM's starting to block XP connections, XP won't be an option all that much longer for connecting to a lot of websites/companies. I know we activate blocking rules by default for it. Fortinet engineers are starting to deploy using this method as best practice because it's considered a substantial security risk to allow XP connections.

So the number of XP systems should plummet even more.

 

@Mayahana wow that's news to me. I'd say it's mostly good news, but there are probably a lot of people stuck with XP (and malware) in the developing world.

 

Some of the UTM's now have rules built in to do this. If they do not then engineers are using application control and policy filters to deny XP connections. Anything XP connecting to internal networks isn't acceptable any longer, so this is a core policy we deploy. So if someone brings an XP machine in and tries to connect it will be denied. It's considered a serious security risk now. Some IPS signatures are starting to push out XP blocking identifiers.

http://docs.fortinet.com/d/fortigate-blocking-web-traffic-based-on-operating-system

The fact is, as time goes on XP will become almost unusable unless you want to deal with significant incompatibilities, site breaking, and gateway denials. Also as an MSP we won't warranty, repair, or service any XP machine any longer, and have contract exclusions for XP machines. Server 2003 EOL is this month as well, same situation there - companies have no choice but to move off of 2003.

 

@Mayahana Eh? MS website says the EOL for 2003 Server is July of next year.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/windows-server-2003/

 

That's right, I was thinking of the EOL for several products running on 2003 has arrived this month. Labtech, Forticlient, etc. Unofficially we need all of our 2003 clients migrated off of 2003 6 months before the official EOL as best practice anyway, so it might as well be this month. Interestingly, mainstream support for 2008 reaches EOL on the same or relatively same date as 2003. Deployment choices now are 2012 or Virtualization/Hosted solutions.

 

I've been using Win 8.1 with Classic Shell, and it runs and looks like Win 7. I read, though, that many improvements were made in the internals, including disk optimization.

 

Here are some security improvements: http://www.howtogeek.com/128182/6-ways-windows-8-is-more-secure-than-windows-7/

 

I started using Vista with SP1, and the "upgrade" to 7 was nothing short of a disappointment. Between Vista SP2 and 7, I hardly observed any performance differences, and features wise the differences were minimal at the time. I considered 7 to be essentially a reskin and tuneup of Vista and I see that over time many users have come to accept that as the opinion. Windows 7 was the upgrade that felt more like a ripoff to me, though it is a perfectly good OS to be honest. Windows 8 was an "upgrade" in that it at least brought some really new things to the table, and I did not have issues using Windows 8 at all (start menu aside, but I got used to it pretty fast). Windows 8.1 is a very good OS and the updates have tuned it well - I have, in fact, installed 8.1 on several machines in my neighbourhood and most have found it perfectly usable and convenient to use (coming from XP).

 

Which is exactly why I thought it should be a free upgrade.

 

Don't forget the error handling. Windows 8.1 handles errors much better, and crashes far less. I always found Win7 to be buggy, and crash prone. Statistics from error logs that companies have studied bear this out.

 

I think that this result was inevitable with the demise of XP. Win 7 is still the most used OS in the world though.

 

Not for long, with sales of Windows 7 discontinued, and no lingering Win 8X compatibility issues, and Win 10 on the horizon.. 7 will drop significantly over the next 12-18 months.

 

Yep, you can still get Win 7 machines, and Win 7 will be supported till 2020 I believe also. It'll be around for a long time, especially in the corporate world.

 

I already said it before but I think M$ did a bad job with Win 8, even though it's a good OS overall. I bought a new desktop for the third time this year (first 2 machines were flops), but it ones again took me hours to tweak and make stuff work like on Win XP. There are just so many annoyances:

- Windows don't remember their size
- UAC is pure crap, lots of apps need admin rights or they won't run correctly.
- A useless Metro screen
- All kinds of services running in the background
- Weird shutdown problems

I don't know what the hell is wrong with the developers.

 

Probably. Although I could have recently purchased a new Samsung laptop with Win 7, I decided to buy a laptop preinstalled with Ubuntu instead. Either option was better than Win 8.

 

People obviously still have stock of Win7 but they can't order a new supply.

I am unsure why anyone would bother ordering a new PC with Win7, especially with Win10 so close, and free upgrades starting to be offered.

http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/152902/microsoft-msft-ends-windows-7-windows-8-retail-sales