# IT Press bored... makes up story about Windows 7



## LarryFlowers (Sep 22, 2006)

Bill Gate's in response to a reporter's question uttered the following words:

"Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version"

It was all he said.

CNET Headline: Gates: Windows 7 may come 'in the next year'

The Internet news and Blogosphere went nuts.

Gates wasn't even talking about the next version of Windows currently referred to as Windows 7, but in fact was discussing the next version of Vista (most likely when the long awaited major revision to the Vista Media Center occurs.

Windows 7 is and has always been targeted for late 2010... don't expect to see a replacement for Vista before then... and we all know the Microsoft is a little loosey goosey about completion dates.


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## OverThereTooMuch (Aug 19, 2006)

I can't imagine what it would be like to have every word of every sentence I utter analyzed by thousands of different sites (and probably interpreted in thousands of different ways). I'd NEVER make it as a politician 



LarryFlowers said:


> Gates wasn't even talking about the next version of Windows currently referred to as Windows 7, but in fact was discussing the next version of Vista (most likely when the long awaited major revision to the Vista Media Center occurs.


According to this article, it had nothing to do with any next version of Vista.


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## LarryFlowers (Sep 22, 2006)

The interesting thing here is not even Microsoft seems to know what Mr. Gates was talking about....

Wouldn't it be simpler to ask Mr. Gates what he meant and end all the hub bub? If you made it through the Vista release saga.. you know dam well there wont be a new OS anytime soon.


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## Steve (Aug 22, 2006)

I still don't "get" Vista.

The XP performance advantage over Vista has widened, thanks to the recent release of XP SP3, RC3. Microsoft also recently announced they will provide security fixes for XP through 2012.

So why would corporate IT managers voluntarily put themselves in a position where they now needs to upgrade all the company's hardware, just to run Vista in some fashion comparable to the way XP runs now? What's the compelling reason? Especially since there is no "killer app" that only Vista can run. E.g., Windows Search 4.0 runs on both OS's.

IMHO, even if it means shedding legacy application support, Microsoft needs to _dramatically revamp_ the Windows OS in Version 7, similar to the way Apple moved users and application developers from Mac OS to OS X, or at least as much as Win2k/XP was a quantum leap over Win 98/ME, from a performance and reliability standpoint. Win2k made existing PC's run better, not worse.

If they don't, I believe they run the risk of US corporate IT managers taking a hard look at enterprise Linux desktops running Open Office, as many government agencies and European countries have done.

Just my .02. /steve


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## Slip Jigs (Oct 20, 2006)

If it was the same article I'm thinking about, Gates was actually alluding to this:

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Whether it's going to be a standalone OS, Vista replacement, or both - who knows?


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## deltafowler (Aug 28, 2007)

Steve said:


> So why would corporate IT managers voluntarily put themselves in a position where they now needs to upgrade all the company's hardware, just to run Vista in some fashion comparable to the way XP runs now? What's the compelling reason?


Easy one.
Job security.


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## Steve (Aug 22, 2006)

deltafowler said:


> Easy one.
> Job security.


Ya, but spending the company's $$ unjustifiably? Companies I worked for insisted on a reasonable ROI for any major capital expenditure. Since S-O, I'm not sure too many publicly-held companies can expense major PC acquisitions as freely as they did in the past. /steve


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## Sharkie_Fan (Sep 26, 2006)

Steve said:


> Especially since there is no "killer app" that only Vista can run. E.g., Windows Search 4.0 runs on both OS's.


Depends on what you do.

We were forced to upgrade to Vista because our accounting/estimating software no longer runs on XP. We also had to build a 2003 server because the "server" portion of the software no longer runs on 2000 Server.

For us, that is a "killer' app. We're a small business (my dad & I and 7 employees). We spend thousands of dollars on this estimating package, and it really is one of the "premier" packages in the printing industry. Simple enough to apply to a 9 person operation, but at the same time powerful enough to work in a plant much, much larger than ours.

Also... I don't have actual benchmark numbers, because I've never done that kind of testing. However, I can tell you that in "real world operation", in my office, Vista absolutely outperforms XP. We use the Adobe CS3 Suite everyday opening files that are hundreds of megs (sometimes even gigabytes), and Vista is definatley faster. Not as stable, but faster. And not horribly unstable - just some little minor hiccups with CS3 which can be annoying from time to time.

Anyway... I think that XP's "performance advantage" over Vista seems to depend largely upon the equipment & environment....

Though, admittedly we would never have gone out and bought Vista if not for the software requirements of our accounting package. We were happy with XPs performance... we're just happier with Vista now that we took the leap.


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## JM Anthony (Nov 16, 2003)

Steve said:


> ... So why would corporate IT managers voluntarily put themselves in a position where they now needs to upgrade all the company's hardware, just to run Vista in some fashion comparable to the way XP runs now? What's the compelling reason? Especially since there is no "killer app" that only Vista can run. E.g., Windows Search 4.0 runs on both OS's.
> 
> ....


Large corporate IT managers won't. They will almost always run in a mixed OS environment. Upgrading the OS on existing hardware makes no sense so the logical thing to do is to run with the OS you get when you buy your gear. A lot of smart managers are skipping every other version of Office as there's no compelling reason to upgrade it every cycle either.

MSFT got a lot of people sucked into various forms of enterprise licensing, trying to make it look attractive to stay current. They kind of screwed up when XP came out late and folks who were on enterprise agreements paid for an upgrade that came after their agreements expired!

John


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## LarryFlowers (Sep 22, 2006)

Trout out all the so called expert test you want... I run Windows Vista all day every day and it outperforms XP on every level.

It's called "real world use". I manage networks... not huge by some standards but networks with over 200 PC's and multiple servers. Running Vista in the domain is a snap compared to XP. I have never had a Vista machine stubbornly refuse to join the domain. Group policy management is also easier with Vista.

All new machines are ordered as Vista. Some older machines are upgraded, others are allowed to run their course with XP.

Vista security is so superior to XP's. 

No OS is perfect, and Vista is no exception. The trick is to look at it dispassionately. The world runs on Windows platforms. Say what you will but Unix servers are steadily fading in favor of Windows Enterprise Servers (and yes some are going to Linux). Linux as it stands will never be a workstation replacement in any environment. It remains in workstation use as a tool of the Microsoft haters and techno geeks who like the challenge. The abandonment of Linux based machines by Walmart points out its most basic flaw... it is too hard to use for John Doe, and John Doe wants to use the same thing at work and at home.

As for Mac and OS X, great OS.. but Apple made the classic Sony Beta mistake...
Sony wanted total control over manufacturing and wouldn't license the Beta tech to others to build (later, too late, they did). This resulted in JVC digging up their older VHS technology and licensing it to everyone.

Had Apple licensed everyone at the front, we would probably live and work in a Mac world today... and IT folks like me would be unnecessary.

But as a user from day one of Vista, and a network administrator who has the experience with Vista to back it up, moving from XP to Vista is a no brainer...


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## Steve (Aug 22, 2006)

Perhaps for a large network admin, there's some bang for the buck as far as Vista making his life easier. But it appears to me his good fortune may come at the expense of the individual user experience. This is just one of several comparisons I've read that show that XP clearly outperforms Vista on almost every application tested.

As someone who now mostly works from home with a modest 3 PC network and who is normally an "early adopter" and typically the first guy on the block with any new technology, I'm still trying to justify a move to Vista, and frankly I'm unable to. That's because on principle, I refuse to take a step backwards in terms of performance. That's just me, tho.

/steve


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## deltafowler (Aug 28, 2007)

LarryFlowers said:


> Vista security is so superior to XP's.


How so?


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## Sharkie_Fan (Sep 26, 2006)

Steve said:


> Perhaps for a large network admin, there's some bang for the buck as far as Vista making his life easier. But it appears to me his good fortune may come at the expense of the individual user experience. This is just one of several comparisons I've read that show that XP clearly outperforms Vista on almost every application tested.
> 
> As someone who now mostly works from home with a modest 3 PC network and who is normally an "early adopter" and typically the first guy on the block with any new technology, I'm still trying to justify a move to Vista, and frankly I'm unable to. That's because on principle, I refuse to take a step backwards in terms of performance. That's just me, tho.
> 
> /steve


Here's a tester whose setup resulted in Vista being faster almost across the board....

More interesting to me, though were a couple of points he makes:

First, with "benchmarking" a system... Your mileage may vary. He and another ZDNet contributor had vastly different results in their testing.

Second.. "Can any stopwatch-based measurement of isolated tasks as performed by individual hardware and software components really measure the worth of a technology investment?"

That's the crux of the argument for me. Benchmarks are great and all, but in real life use, with the set of applications *we* use... Vista is far and away faster than XP. The stopwatch benchmarks of a few of our components may or may not show the same - I don't know, I've never benchmarked. We did, however, have XP and Vista running in the office for a while, so we had some side by side comparison, and Vista was faster in almost every process.

We didn't upgrade hardware to upgrade to Vista - our PCs were less than 6 months old, and our hand was "forced", as I mentioned earlier.... So my comparisons are all of the exact same machine running Vista and running XP.

All that to say... XP may in fact be faster in some situations. It is not, however, universally faster across the board... I will say though, that I don't think the performance edge that I've experienced with Vista would justify upgrading the OS if there wasn't a "killer app" that required it, like we experienced.


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## smiddy (Apr 5, 2006)

I think this thread morphed into an XP versus Vista thread.

I just upgraded a Windows XP Pro to Windows Vista Home Premium. For everything I do with it it runs far faster. I have never had to wait on a mouse click, in fact it is almost eerie, in that is almost goes before I hit the mouse button (that can't be I know, but it seems that way). My CPU useage is way lower and I have several things running that I couldn't run under XP, like Commview (a network sniffer), Zune library, and Google Gadgets. The three of those in XP would slow down my machine, in Vista I max out at 7% CPU utilization. One big difference currently is I have yet to install Microsoft Office. I will need word and likely Outlook, and Excel. But, with the email client that came with Vista working ok, I wonder if I need all the bells and whistles with Outlook. So it may come down to Word and Excel only. Once those are installed I would suspect that there will be a CPU hit, but don't know. I'm holding out a bit longer.


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## Steve (Aug 22, 2006)

Sharkie_Fan said:


> Here's a tester whose setup resulted in Vista being faster almost across the board....
> 
> More interesting to me, though were a couple of points he makes:
> 
> ...


I agree that if you have to upgrade because your application vendor is only supporting Vista, that's a very compelling reason to switch! 

Regarding that tester's results... he compared Vista SP1 to XP SP2, not SP3. So claiming he was trying to explain the difference between his tests and Kingsley-Hughes's tests is kind of funny, since Kingsley-Hughes tested against an early release of XP SP3. How did he miss that?

Even against XP SP2, all he basically measured were 4 different file copy operations and one app (zipping), so I'm not sure that declaring "across the board" superiority is applicable in that context. Not only that, but he first had to shut down 3 Vista core processes to make sure no disk cycles were being used outside the test. And in these limited tests, Vista SP1 was no faster than XP SP2 for the large file copy test, and was 14% slower than XP SP2 in the file zipping test.

I can tell you that for my own tests with video file transcoding that XP SP3 is about 20% faster than XP SP2 on my Dual Core 2.66 desktop, with 2 gigs of RAM. And the Vista "responsiveness" noted in the test is now the same in XP, SP3. My apps all open quicker and the whole UI seems snappier.

Bottom line is, I'm not trying to bash Vista. As a guy who loves to live on the bleeding edge, I'm dying for an excuse to move to a new OS. Just trying to justify it, tho.  /steve


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## Sharkie_Fan (Sep 26, 2006)

Steve said:


> Bottom line is, I'm not trying to bash Vista. As a guy who loves to live on the bleeding edge, I'm dying for an excuse to move to a new OS. Just trying to justify it, tho.  /steve


I didn't have SP3 on my XP machines, so I can't speak to that at all...

As to trying to justify the move... I couldn't have if not for the software package we had.

If we took that particular piece of software out of the picture... the difference between XP and Vista, for me, doesn't justify the money one has to spend. And we only had 4 machines to upgrade.

For me... there are only two reasons to upgrade an OS... A significant performance boost, or, an app that requires it.

We fell into the latter. The fact that we're even debating the former, for me, says that the upgrade is really hard to justify. ESPECIALLY if it requires new hardware (we were fortunate that all our hardware was pretty new and is very, very happy in Vista).


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## Steve (Aug 22, 2006)

Sharkie_Fan said:


> For me... there are only two reasons to upgrade an OS... A significant performance boost, or, an app that requires it.


A couple of heavy-hitters from Gartner who spoke at a technology conference earlier this week seem to agree with you.

http://www.betanews.com/article/Is_Vista_dead_in_the_water/1207942903

They're speculating that it might worth it to sit Vista out and wait for Window's 7, which promises to be a major departure from the current Vista architecture that is burdened by maintaining backwards compatibility. I honestly hadn't read their comments when I posted the following above. 


Steve said:


> IMHO, even if it means shedding legacy application support, Microsoft needs to _dramatically revamp_ the Windows OS in Version 7, similar to the way Apple moved users and application developers from Mac OS to OS X, or at least as much as Win2k/XP was a quantum leap over Win 98/ME, from a performance and reliability standpoint. Win2k made existing PC's run better, not worse.


/steve


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## deltafowler (Aug 28, 2007)

Looks like Larry isn't responding, so I'll present the question to any takers.
How is Vista more secure than a similarly configured XP machine?


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## phat78boy (Sep 12, 2007)

If your current setup works better with XP then with Vista, you are most likely running on older hardware. Drivers make all the difference and 2 year old hardware, for the most part, just wasn't supported well.

I know people love to use their old stuff, but when upgrading a OS, you need hardware that is current too. Most the complaints I hear are from users trying to use old software and hardware. Stuff that was made for XP, not Vista. 

If your not up for the total investment now, then wait for the next major release. Either way, you will need current hardware for the performance hit, Vista or Windows 7.


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## phat78boy (Sep 12, 2007)

deltafowler said:


> Looks like Larry isn't responding, so I'll present the question to any takers.
> How is Vista more secure than a similarly configured XP machine?


Vista is more secure in a few different ways. First, it has had less security fixes for bugs and holes then XP over the year. So more bug fixes for XP means more security loopholes. Yes, patching your machine would fix this, but thats not something everyone keeps up to date on.

Two, UAC in Vista. Say what you will, but UAC in Vista provides a much better security layer for those who do not have high computer knowledge. This layer keeps many viruses and spyware applications from gaining admin rights and prompts the user when anything trys to do a silent install. XP has nothing like this built in.

Three, policy lockdown and user control. For those who have not setup Vista on a domain, its 10 times better then the control you have over XP. For those using Vista just for home purposes, the parental controls are also 10 times better then XP. Both these options give you much better security for machines that are used by more then one person. Domain wise you can lock the machine down much better and therefore makes it more secure. Personal wise, you can again lock the machine down much better once again makes it more secure.

There are more reasons, but these are my main 3.


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## Steve (Aug 22, 2006)

phat78boy said:


> If your current setup works better with XP then with Vista, you are most likely running on older hardware. Drivers make all the difference and 2 year old hardware, for the most part, just wasn't supported well.


 For those on the fence about upgrading h/w, I recently installed XP SP3, RC 2 "refresh" on an old T41 laptop with 512 Meg RAM and a single core Pentium M processor running at 1.6 ghz. I use that laptop for Office apps, web browsing, e-mail and multimedia playback. Post-install, I feel like I just upgraded to a newer, more powerful piece of hardware! The difference in quickness with which applications now open and generally respond is very noticeable.

I'm pretty sure XP users have Vista to thank for this, because some of the performance tweaks that were made by the Vista developers have apparently been "backed-in" to XP, SP3, along with Windows Search 4.0, which is now available as an update for both OS's. /steve


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## deltafowler (Aug 28, 2007)

One of, if not the biggest problems with early Vista machines was with system manufacturers.
They either were taking MS at their word for minimum hardware requirements (always a mistake) or they were assuming Vista was just a different looking version of XP.

HP/Compaq to a large degree and Dell to a lesser degree flooded the big box stores and tv ads and print with Vista machines that were literally choking on their operating systems. 
On-board graphics, 512 RAM, Celeron CPU's, and the usual junk software pre-loaded on these machines had them so severely hobbled that I've seen brand new PC's take as long as 12-15 minutes to get up and running.

I had customers bringing me brand new machines and asking me why it was so slow. With their authorization and approval I was downgrading them to XP and the differences were like night and day.

UAC is a bad implementation of a good idea.
If a user is so clueless as to require the protection of UAC, the last thing they need is a button to go ahead an authorize the drive off the cliff anyway.

I was dead set against Vista early on, because all I was seeing were the grossly underpowered machines.
While I'm not thrilled that a PC now needs 2GB of RAM to run efficiently at idle, it does seem to do fairly well with enough under the hood.
SP1 seems to be good for the machines I've installed it on.

I still believe a properly updated and configured XP machine can be just as secure and run as well or better with less investment in hardware upgrades, but I will now setup a machine in Vista if a customer really wants it.


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## Steve (Aug 22, 2006)

deltafowler said:


> UAC is a bad implementation of a good idea.


 I found these comments by Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich interesting. He was speaking at a recent CanSecWest security conference:

_Russinovich said that UAC is "a best effort to raise the bar and stop malware from making changes to the operating system, but it's not a security boundary." He explained that "there is no guarantee that malware can't hijack the elevation process or compromise an elevated application." _

/steve


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## phat78boy (Sep 12, 2007)

I personally don't blame the system folks for thier "Vista capable" stickers. The fact is, Vista home/basic is very much the same as XP home. The majority of people who run XP at home, are running XP home edition.

The problem is people, of course, wanted all the goodies that were advertised with Vista. None of these are included in Vista home edition.


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## glennb (Sep 21, 2006)

I just love to read about all the "experts" that rip on a new WINDOWS OS and defend how wonderful the previous version is.


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## LarryFlowers (Sep 22, 2006)

glennb said:


> I just love to read about all the "experts" that rip on a new WINDOWS OS and defend how wonderful the previous version is.


Amazing isn't it, and predictable as rain!!

XP sucked until Vista came out, at least according to the IT press and professional Microsoft Bashers.

Now Vista is out and it sucks and bring back XP!!!!

I wouldn't go back to XP with a gun to my head. Everyone complained about all the security holes in XP and how vulnerable it was. Microsoft comes out with Vista, which has 65% FEWER security problems in it's first year than XP in it's first year and Vista still sucks!!

Microsft has been roundly criticized for years about how vulnerable their OS are. Vista addressed those issues. Addressing them meant tightening up the OS core, which made it tough on other software vendors (you could hear Norton and McAfee screaming thru the roof) who had to rewrite their software to comply with the new tighter Vista core. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Loud mouths all over the internet screamed holy hell over User Account Control. Too Bad. if you are enough of an expert to do without User Account Control, then turn it off and shut up. Tell it to "Dad" who spent $300 repairing his XP machine when Jr downloaded that cute little free emoticon program that added 40 trojans and hundreds of pop-ups to his PC. User Account Control would have forced Jr to ask for Dad's permission... and the same goes for that idiot in Accounting who thought the cute little eBay addon for his browser tool bar was harmless.

The IT press is like most of the journalistic community today... largely ignorant, regurgitating parrots who don't even do any original research.


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