It has been some time since we last posted news about Microsoft’s upcoming operating system Windows 7. Microsoft has made some important announcements in the past few days. The first big news which hit the online news sites today is that Microsoft will provide the options to upgrade Windows XP to Windows 7. The term upgrade might cause some confusion as it refers to the possibility for XP users to purchase Windows 7 at reduced prices rather than allowing them to upgrade their operating system to Windows 7 which is apparently not possible. So, legit Windows XP users will be able to purchase Windows 7 at a reduced price but need to do a clean install to actually use the operating system.
The second interesting news story is that Microsoft decided to reduce the editions that Windows 7 will ship in when compared to Windows Vista. The so called edition chaos was one of the major reasons for confusion for prospective Windows Vista customers.
Windows 7 will basically be distributed as Windows 7 Home Premium, Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate. There are other versions but those are designed for different markets. Windows 7 Home Premium will be the equivalent of the Windows Vista Home Premium featuring a solid set of features. Windows 7 Professional will be the successor of Windows Vista Business which includes all features of Windows 7 Home Premium plus some business features like group policy based management tools, Remote Desktop host capabilities or network-based backup features.
Windows 7 Ultimate will include all features of Windows 7 Professional plus all supported language packs (something that the other editions miss and users have to pay for), BitLocker whole-drive encryption and capabilities to boot from vhd.
It basically comes down to three Windows 7 editions. It should also be noted that there are no talks yet about Windows 7 Ultimate extras, something that did not work as intended in Windows Vista as well as several users felt cheated by the lack of and quality of the extras.
Most of these information have been taken from our own Windows 7 blog which covers all the latest news about the upcoming operating system. A well visited Windows 7 Forum is available on the same site.
Do you think that those two strategic decisions by Microsoft are good ones? Will they convince Windows XP users to switch to Windows 7?
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I’ve never been a fan of actual upgrades for the operating system, they always just seemed a bit buggy to me as compared to a full clean install. So the idea of a reduced upgrade pricing from XP with the ability to do clean installs is welcomed.
As for the fewer editions, I like that as well. Vista Basic was a joke when compared to the features of the other editions, but some older computers required it or Home Premium with all the extras and eye candy turned off just to get them to run Vista. Hopefully Win7 will be able to come through on the better use of system resources.
What Microsoft did still not learned was to allow to customize deeply Windows like a linux distribution does.
For instance, there are no Windows version that can do the same config as the ubuntu on my laptop-server (no GUI except terminal, minimal installation for LAMPP/emule as service, firewall, minimal cpu usage, minimal power consumption).
Windows still lacks modularity.
There are supposed to be 6 variations of Window7 but only two (Home and Professional) will be available retail. The other versions can be accessed thought some sort of downloadable upgrade.
With 6 different versions, it doesn’t seem much different from the scheme that MS created for Vista. Windows 7 seems to be merely Vista SP2 with little in the way of major new functions or internal design.
But I’ll probably have to upgrade from XP since XP is getting a bit old now.
Will they convince Windows XP users to switch to Windows 7?
this depends on whether or not XP users get a chance to use windows 7. as an (ex) XP fanboy, i installed the win7 beta, and was skeptical at first. i never used vista, not for two minutes on any machine, so i started fresh.
but that was over a month ago, and it’s been weeks since i booted to my XP partition. i’m officially converted!
win7 has a lot going for it. once it hits the shelves and people start using it, i think there will be a lot of upgrades…
Windows7 is slower then XP so why would any XP user want to upgrade to Windows7, Windows7 is only a little faster then Vista and a lot slower then XP, well thats what my benchmark tools tell me.
Windows 7 should fail miserably. No company worth their salt is running Vista and they won’t choose 7 either. A new GUI and taskbar and a revised UAC that’s it. This may impress the kiddies and mommies but isn’t that what Apple is for?
Twice the memory requirements (stressing 32 bit architecture) and ~15% slower accross the board compared to XP. No new file system, the registry is still crap and UAC can be substituted with DropMyRights. All that is bad in XP still exists and Vista/7 just adds more bad. Any “computer professional” who runs Vista/7 as their primary OS is not someone I’d hire.
Windows is scared to drop XP as Linux is truly coming of age and they know it. Many Governments are making the switch. Mark my words XP will be around longer than 2012.
Windows 7 is actually faster than Windows XP. Try downloading the latest Beta from demonoid. I am very satisfied with it. In fact I am using the OS now while typing this comment. I never had any crashes and I get to use all the features of Windows 7 Ultimate i.e. aeropeek, super taskbar, etc
I use both Ubuntu and Windows 7… i will agree with the user that say that Ubuntu is more customizable that Windows 7. I will also agree that Microsoft better watch themselves when it comes to Linux cause they are emering as a viable option to Windows. Let me say this though. I test OS’s from beta to RC to release… I did this with Windows 7. It runs 10X’s better than my XP ever thought of doing without any errors. XP and Windows 7 were pretty close in performance… not sure whether the guys above was making a guess on how he thought it would perform, but Win7 moves significantly better than XP did for me anyway. Ubuntu is always my first choice in OS’s just because I love Linux… but becuase I work from home on a VPN that requires windows… I always have to have a windows box up and going, but Win7 is a great OS reagardless and if you have decent equipment (on the machine i run it on.. sinle processor, 2.8 HT with 2 Gig of RAM) then it should run really easily for you… setup isn’t that bad either… and there is not that much different between XP and Win7 that I have noticed.