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rb2d2 · Sep 25, 2004

The problem with XP ...

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 10:02 am

Why are there so many entrenched XP users? Why are people clinging onto an OS that was released in 2001? Why, despite throwing a lot of ad dollars at trying to convince people to switch to Vista, does over 60% of the market share belong to XP?

The other day I wrote a piece asking those entrenched users if they were ready to leave XP behind and move to Windows 7. This post generated nearly 600 TalkBacks and almost an equal number of emails hitting my Hardware 2.0 inbox. This feedback made for very interesting reading and gave me an interesting insight into why some users are fiercely attached to XP.

binky

rb2d2 · Sep 25, 2004

This says it all!

Selling Windows 7 to Vista users is going to be easy for Microsoft. The hard part will be selling the new OS to XP users.

Nightrider · Sep 25, 2004

It doesn't sound like he understands the problem any better than M$ does. People aren't sticking to XP simply because it took M$ too long to develop Vista and people grew attached to XP. People are sticking to XP because Vista and now W7 are an absolute mess which makes things which were very simple to very difficult or impossible things to accomplish. XP was easily customizable while Vista and W7 are forcing one method of doing things, which may not be the way most people like to do them. Vista and now W7 are too controlling and intrusive. M$ has taken the Docs and Settings folder, which contained all the personal information in one spot, and spread everything apart. It made a lot more sense to keep everything together. Now if you want to know where everything went, you have to know the various Junction Points which maps where things used to be to where they are hidden now. It is a mess and I doubt M$ is going to find it easy to convince people to give up something like XP that is solid and functional to something that is troublesome and dysfunctional...

M$ took the mess they made in Vista and cleaned it up a bit and is repackaging it as W7. But W7 is still Vista in disguise. Those who hated Vista will hate W7 for most of the same reasons...

munky2

Katy · Sep 28, 2004

Are you using W7 NR??

rb2d2 · Sep 25, 2004

Using? I would use the word "butchering". hysterical2

Sounds like he is cutting it up in little pieces and putting it back together in a more suitable form. LOL He has more patience than I do. I've made a few tweaks and I'm done with it.

Judging from what he wrote up above I'm betting you couldn't pay NR to "use" it.

hysterical2

Katy · Sep 28, 2004

I was just wondering how NR. came up with his conclusions. He does seem to know a lot about it...

fishead · Feb 09, 2005

Well I have used vista and am using it right now and you all know what I think about it. It's only good for light internet use, everything else is pretty much broke. Its like riding a bike without handle bars. I do not trust w7 after being tortured with vista. I picture it being inbetween xp and vista, so it's still partly broken.

Nightrider · Sep 25, 2004

Ok, after jumping through numerous hoops and digging in deep trying to figure out how to do this, I now have W7 up and running to a point where it is almost useful. There are a few programs that will not install correctly or at all, including Norton Anti-virus and there are a lot of annoying M$ messages that regularly come up all the time to harrass me for no good reason. But this is how it looks now. Please understand that it took several weeks to get it to this point because almost EVERYTHING is harder to do now than it is in W2K or XP...

If you're planning to eventually "upgrade" to W7, you will probably need to get used to messages like this:

or this:

and many other messages that it won't allow me to capture using Gadwin, Fastone Capture, or the default Printscreen option...

Also note on the Desktop, there are 2 desktop.ini files, both of which are system files that really don't want to be deleted. I can't even begin to guess why they need to be there, especially not two of them...

munky2

Nightrider · Sep 25, 2004

This is what my W7 Start menu looks like. In XP, you can switch it to Classic view so that you can remove the items that you don't want and really tailor it to your needs. There is no such option in W7, so when you remove items from the menu that you don't want, the menu becomes empty, but still displays as if it is full of options. I doubt that this issue has gotten a lot of attention by the M$ developers:

I really don't consider this progress...

This is what the Start menu looks like when I click on the All Programs option. It lists the programs like it would in the right side of explore, but if you want to do something like send the shortcut to desktop, that option is not available any longer. You can only run the option, nothing more...

Nightrider · Sep 25, 2004

I just took a glance at W7 Explore and found that it is currently having trouble displaying the Text for all the folders and drives. The text should be easier to display than the graphics. I don't remember ever seeing this problem in any prior version of M$ Windows:

Ok, a reboot corrected that problem...

Brick wall