Windows 7 hype that XP users will shun

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 11 February 2009 14:36

IT Industry - Market

After the now acknowledged debacle otherwise known as Vista, Microsoft has made a sterling effort at a recovery with the pending release of Windows 7. The problem for Microsoft is that 8 years ago it created an ugly duckling that grew into a beautiful swan called XP. Redmond now wants to sacrifice the swan on the alter of Windows 7 but hordes of skeptical users say no way.

There really have been some extraordinary things said in IT journals and the blogosphere about why we should be using Vista or Windows 7 when it becomes available instead of XP. Yet I still haven't seen one convincing reason other than the fact that Microsoft will do its darndest to make sure we don't have a choice.

Let's weigh up for a moment the reasons anyone would choose one operating system over another.

One of the first questions they would ask is can the OS run all the applications they want. Then they might ask can it run across a wide range of hardware configurations. Is it stable? Is it fast? Is the GUI familiar?

In the case of XP, the answer a resounding yes in all cases. What about Vista and Windows 7?

Well we know why resource hungry Vista, which can't run on netbooks, has been such flop. Windows 7, still in beta, looks promising but it has a long way way to go before it approaches XP in performance and further still as far as stability is concerned.

Yet we're told that we simply must replace XP because it's 8 years old. It was designed for the hardware of previous generations and can't take advantage of capabilities of the latest configurations, the experts say.

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