Windows 8 coming already!

[justinbarrow]

So windows 8 is to be released in 2012 next year only 3 years after the release of windows 7, I wonder if there will be any major changes as being honest I think windows 7 is very stable. I just hope they dont mess windows 8 up like they did with Vista.

I think I wont be upgrading right away unless there is a really good introductory pre order offer on like they did with windows 7 (think i paid £45 for 7) on pre order back in 2009.

Just wondered if anyone thinks it will be a massive leap, cant keep up with stuff these days everything moves on so fast. I was talking to someone the other day and they were saying a lot of companies and goverment departments are still running XP systems and not changed over to 7 yet, maybe they are waiting for windows 8 to come along before switching over as I think support stops for windows xp from next year.

[djswivel]

AFAIK, the first Win 8 releases are going to be for tablets. The OS looks very much like a large Win Phone 7. Beyond that, I don't know.

[Mike Wrightson]

Companies are still running XP because it's proven, reliable and it works. They don't see why they should switch to 7 when it won't make any difference. A big company could be looking at tens, or hundreds of thousands of pounds to upgrade all systems to a new OS, is anyone surprised that they don't want to spend that money every 3 years when their current systems work just fine?

Microsoft always wonders why companies resist upgrading. It's mostly because of the extortionate price of Windows.

MS: "You should upgrade to Windows 7"

Co: "Why?"

MS: "It's better and more secure"

Co: "How is it better?"

MS: "It runs faster"

Co: "It'll make all my computers faster?"

MS: "Err, no, you'll need to upgrade their RAM too"

Co: "Get stuffed"

I don't know if I'll upgrade to Win 8. If I can get it cheap, maybe.

[SnailUK]

Windows 8 looks like a huge change for Microsoft.

From everything im reading, its trying to unite all Microsoft products, so PC, Tablets, Phone and xbox will all essentially be running Windows 8, all in different profiles.

Theres been a lot of work on speed, tablets, and devices with SSDs are supposed to be starting quicker than an ipad reboot. Being that W8 is designed to run on phones and tablets, it sounds like even really old PCs should be able to upgrade.

Everything im reading is very interesting, although the WP7-esque GUI is certainly dividing opinion.

[justinbarrow]

Windows 8 looks like a huge change for Microsoft.

Lets hope its not another Vista bearing in mind what a huge change Vista was compared to XP. Maybe im a bit older and wiser so will probally use windows 7 for a couple more years yet then I will probably be building a new PC then.

Im got getting much into these touch screen computers (give me a mouse and keyboard anyday)

[2SkodaFamily]

I guess this means that someone at Microsoft has discovered that W7 is such a f*** up that the only way to fix it is to come out with a completely new version of Windows.

[jrw]

Companies are still running XP because it's proven, reliable and it works. They don't see why they should switch to 7 when it won't make any difference. A big company could be looking at tens, or hundreds of thousands of pounds to upgrade all systems to a new OS, is anyone surprised that they don't want to spend that money every 3 years when their current systems work just fine?

Microsoft always wonders why companies resist upgrading. It's mostly because of the extortionate price of Windows.

MS: "You should upgrade to Windows 7"

Co: "Why?"

MS: "It's better and more secure"

Co: "How is it better?"

MS: "It runs faster"

Co: "It'll make all my computers faster?"

MS: "Err, no, you'll need to upgrade their RAM too"

Co: "Get stuffed"

I don't know if I'll upgrade to Win 8. If I can get it cheap, maybe.

Windows 7 is much better in a network environment. You don't need more RAM to run it. 2GB is sufficient, if you haven't got that already then you really should be upgrading the hardware anyway.

Windows 8 looks like a huge change for Microsoft.

From everything im reading, its trying to unite all Microsoft products, so PC, Tablets, Phone and xbox will all essentially be running Windows 8, all in different profiles.

Theres been a lot of work on speed, tablets, and devices with SSDs are supposed to be starting quicker than an ipad reboot. Being that W8 is designed to run on phones and tablets, it sounds like even really old PCs should be able to upgrade.

Everything im reading is very interesting, although the WP7-esque GUI is certainly dividing opinion.

It is really just a fancy front end - everything back end runs the same as 7.

I guess this means that someone at Microsoft has discovered that W7 is such a f*** up that the only way to fix it is to come out with a completely new version of Windows.

Windows 7 is the best OS MS have ever come out with. As i said above it isn't a totally new version, it is a new front end specifically designed for touch screen devices and i suspect it will be mainly seen on phones in the beginning.

Try it for yourself:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/br229516

I would like to try it but can't actually install it on any system i have tried (only downloaded the 32bit version atm)!

Edited 22 September, 2011 by jrw

[Octoplus]

I guess this means that someone at Microsoft has discovered that W7 is such a f*** up that the only way to fix it is to come out with a completely new version of Windows.

Windows7 is an extremely reliable and stable OS, I have it on multiple devices and have never once seen a problem of any kind. I would hate to have to use XP again.

[gadgetman]

That'll be handy for a cheap W7 laptop.

Whens launch day?

[David 8]

Windows7 is an extremely reliable and stable OS, I have it on multiple devices and have never once seen a problem of any kind. I would hate to have to use XP again.

This

[mannyo]

Companies are still running XP because it's proven, reliable and it works. They don't see why they should switch to 7 when it won't make any difference. A big company could be looking at tens, or hundreds of thousands of pounds to upgrade all systems to a new OS, is anyone surprised that they don't want to spend that money every 3 years when their current systems work just fine?

We are just coming to the end of a major rollout, we have now dumped XP and gone with Windows 7 for the whole PC estate. The number of companies running XP has shrunk dramatically over the last 12 months. Less than 50% of PCs are now running XP, Windows 7 is now at 30% or so, OSX is at 6% and poor old Vista has truely suffered and now has 9% of PC's. The remainder are other various OS's.

XP has had its day, its 10 years old now and showing its age. 7 is much faster in the work place, loads quicker, and allows businesses to apply better security settings via group policy to the whole estate.

With my employer switching from XP to 7, thats another shed load of PC's no longer running XP.

[justinbarrow]

That'll be handy for a cheap W7 laptop.

Whens launch day?

Reading the user agreement (as you do) for the pre beta version it states that the expiry of the licence will be March 8th 2012

I wonder if this will be the launch date windows 8 launches on the (8th) day of the chosen month. Just been looking at some oficial microsoft talks on windows 8 and it seems to be based mainly for touch interfaces, hope you can stick a keyboard onto it.

My dad was asking if he will need it at 68 he has only just sussed out how to get around xp

[gadgetman]

Personally I'm happy with Vista over W7.

Sure W7 is more stable, but I dont like the UI tweeks.

[H Bomb]

As a network engineer, I have very few issues with Win 7 Pro - XP is still good, but its starting to get a bit ropey with some of the corporate networks I work on. I'm agreeing with jrw re network environments - and with Server 2008 and 2011 based networks I find it much easier to deploy and maintain kit on Win7 than the old stager XP! XP still has a place in businesses, a few of our custs have bespoke software packages that haven't been rewritten for 7 for instance. HP can still provide us with XP downgrade disks for the business desktops we sell, but the number of requests for this has dropped dramatically in the last year. Hopefully Win 8 won't mess up the huge improvements 7 saw from Vista, but you never know with Microsoft!

Edited 30 September, 2011 by H Bomb

[Mike Wrightson]

Wonder who's going to be the first manufacturer to put Win8 on their tablet? I'll keep an eye on it for my games machine, but unless there's a very compelling reason to upgrade, I will probably stick with Win7

[jrw]

ill be sticking to Windows 7 for the foreseeable.....particularly as i can't actually install it on any of my machines due to an unhandled exception error!

[gac]

If you want an idea of the changes, think back a few years. Windows XP came out 2 years after Windows 2000, and was the same kernel with a slightly different UI.

Vista was based on a new kernel and took much longer to develop (5 years rather than 2). And then Windows 7 was essentially the Vista kernel with a new UI and again only took a couple of years to release. So an educated guess is that 8 is just 7 with a new interface and probably no need to upgrade. As many other places are, we're only just getting into our Windows 7 rollout and I can see us skipping 8 altogether like we did with Vista.

[jrw]

Windows 7 was entirely different to vista.

[gac]

I would disagree. If nothing else you have to admit that 7 and Vista are more similar than Vista and XP were. Even Microsoft imply that with their version numbering (2000 being NT 5.0, XP being 5.1, Vista being 6.0 and 7 being 6.1).

[Royston]

Our 'firm' finally upgraded from windows 2000 last year.....

To XP! Talk about behind the times. We have also just been supplied with IE8. It's like living in the 1980's vision of the future.

It'll be another decade before we'll see win7 never mind win8. Lol

[jrw]

I would disagree. If nothing else you have to admit that 7 and Vista are more similar than Vista and XP were. Even Microsoft imply that with their version numbering (2000 being NT 5.0, XP being 5.1, Vista being 6.0 and 7 being 6.1).

It is built on the same architecture - but that is about where the similarities end! Windows 7 works!

I don't know of any company that rolled out Vista!

[jrw]

Our 'firm' finally upgraded from windows 2000 last year.....

To XP! Talk about behind the times. We have also just been supplied with IE8. It's like living in the 1980's vision of the future.

It'll be another decade before we'll see win7 never mind win8. Lol

Seriously?!

We still have IE6 over a lot of workstations but thats mainly on the education side.....and we needed IE6 to run with a bespoke app we had (which we don't anymore)!.

We are now slowly rolling out 7 on a school by school basis with Office 2010 and IE9 (tip, don't install IE9 - its rubbish!). Only about another 20,000 machines to go!

[gac]

I don't know of any company that rolled out Vista!

Me neither. But I put that down to a combination of things:

1) a big company never upgrades straight away, they wait for SP1 or a milestone before even thinking about upgrading

2) while they were waiting, people were buying cheap machines with Vista pre-installed and finding a variety of problems, either performance (due to cheap, slow machines), UI confusion, not knowing what features came with it (XP had Home/Pro which were pretty similar if you use them at home anyway, Vista had 6 editions at launch)

3) due to that bad press, MS leapt forwards to Windows 7 meaning that Vista instantly became a non-event for corporate IT

I believe that if we had rolled out Vista like we'd planned to before MS gave a very quick launch date for 7, we'd have been absolutely fine with it. It's only because all the bad press spurred MS onto the next version prematurely and Vista then became a bit of a dead duck that we canned our Vista rollout (although we'd already spent time on it) as it seemed silly to not target the latest version that we could.

I never had a problem with Vista on either my work or home machines, and I maintain to this day that a lot of people who slag Vista off just weren't running it on reasonable hardware. Single vs dual core, the need for multiple gigs of RAM, etc. Nowadays you can hardly buy a PC with less than 4 gigs, but a few years back people were rocking half a gig unless they were serious geeks IMO. I've got a Toshiba laptop from Dec 2006 (so just before Vista came out) which cost us well over a grand. Dual core CPU with 512MB of RAM. That sort of thing was a common theme IMO so when OEMs switched to Vista, it became apparent that less than 2 gigs wouldn't cut it, and it was a big jump. Whereas when Windows 7 came out, everyone and his dog had 2 gigs, and most people were already on 3 and 4.

[jrw]

I have to agree to a certain point. I have had Vista for a few years on 3GB of RAM and it runs fine.....but i know in the back of my mind that 7 would run a hell of a lot quicker.

The upgrade path actually works rather well too as i have now done it on a few machines now for people, as it saves me a whole heap of time trying to get their PC back to how it was with all the settings and software!

[vRSLen]

I hate Windows and will stick with my Mac, or all my other Linux based computers