I'm with you vRSLen. I just got a new netbook this week courtesy of Vodafone's customer retention dept & have just wiped the Windows 7 Starter it came with & replaced with a pain-free install of Linux Mint & all it's associated applications. Even the wireless & mobile broadband were set up without hitch. Smooth, fast, more fully featured & secure.

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.

That statements not strictly true, I have worked on 6 large scale migrations this year, 2 from E-Directory to AD and Server 2008 R2, and the others 2003 to 2008 R2, all of them are switching to Windows 7, 1 clients has 14,500 PC's. Microsoft have some very attractive offers on with Software Assurance in certain circumstances and Windows 7 makes sense to any large organisation that is deploying W2K8 R2 so that they can make the fullest use of Group Policy, Preferences and deploying the OS at an enterprise level through SCCM or WDS/MDT is child's play. Add OS Activation and Product ID servicing by KMS and it all makes sense. If you are a University or School they will practically throw software at you for the price of peanuts, one of the Universities I worked at this year paid £325 for SCCM 2007 R3 with SQL and Management Licenses :-)

The only large scale Vista deployment that I have ever worked on is for the US Army, and that is still ongoing at the moment, I never saw a true enterprise deployment of Vista other than that.

The developer release of Windows 8 is quite neat, Metro is quite smart so will work well for tablets and smart phones because the general idea is to unify the client OS over multiple platforms, Desktop / Laptop / Smart Phone / Tablet. Having played with it for just over a week now, it's nice and easy to use, all the Windows 7 device drivers worked with it, but there does not seem to be a lot of difference to Windows 7 once it's in Desktop mode. I don't think I would be rushing out to part with my cash just yet over and above Windows 7.

To the end user, you could suggest that that Windows 8 is in many ways similar to OSX's recent update to Lion. There's a bit more going on under the surface, but the concepts are similar.

If you have a spare machine, or are happy running VMware / Virtual Box or similar, go and grab the preview and have a play with it.

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

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!

7 and 2008 R2 share the same Kernel, so that's where it get's it's stability from

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

I'm with you too Len. I don't hate Windows, but the only reason I still run it is for my games PC, my Mac does everything else.

Mac's are for Gayboys and Linux is for soap dodgers with a penchant for argyll socks and open toed sandals :-)

Typing this from my iMac ...... oooops :-)

Mac's are for Gayboys and Linux is for soap dodgers with a penchant for argyll socks and open toed sandals :-)

Typing this from my iMac ...... oooops :-)

:rofl:

The socks bit isn't fair.

I actually have XP & 7 on Virtualbox but with a few more plug-ins for The Gimp &..... I think I'll shut up now.

Mac's are for Gayboys and Linux is for soap dodgers with a penchant for argyll socks and open toed sandals :-)

Typing this from my iMac ...... oooops :-)

i agree! typing this from my macbook

If you have a spare machine, or are happy running VMware / Virtual Box or similar, go and grab the preview and have a play with it.

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

Have you got it to work on anything? I have tried it on boot camp, a Lenovo laptop, a couple of VM's (virtual PC and virtual box) and keep getting the same 'unhandled exception' error. Someone at work has it working on a Lenovo desktop but everyone else at work is having the same issue as me!

I'm running it on my Lenovo X61 12" lappie, and have it running in a VM on Hyper-V

Why won't it work on my T420 then with i5 and 8GB of RAM!