Windows 7 Back?

Really? I think it's only going to be supported until April.

Can I get XP?

Well I hear windows 8.1 is better than 8, but win7 still dominates....so yeah maybe....XP is still hanging in there....but nobody's pitching that...

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/173804-windows-8s-market-share-finally-reaches-10-but-is-overshadowed-by-linuxs-big-gain-and-xps-decline

Last year I needed to buy a new PC and I wanted a Win7 machine since I have some applications that run on the XP OS, and Win7 can be configured to run them. I went to 'Best Buy' and none of the PCs they were selling were Win7; all were Win8 which was useless for me.

I ended up buying my PC online.

So it would not surprise me at all if this story is true. Nor does it surprise me that 'Best Buy' is in serious trouble.

I got the same e-mail today.

http://links.hp.com/YesConnect/HtmlMessagePreview?a=bi2rFeuP1xrQbt4tqgBI_csx&msgVersion=web

Could be that Windows 7 fans have gotten enough clout to tell HP what they want and not HP telling them what they will get!

Good Luck, Old Salt

Considering how much Microsoft screwed up 2000 and Vista, will they also screw up 7 as it is reintroduced? The more they keep their hands off it the better off we, as the users, and they will be.

In 48 years with computers, starting with Fortran 2 & 4 on an IBM 1130, I have never experienced as much frustration with programs as I have with Windows 2000 and Vista. Bring back Lotus 1, 2, 3; Harvard Graphics; Paradox; Word Perfect and Basic!

Good Luck, Old Salt

All great programs. I used them all quite a bit.

Paradox - what a nice friendly database that was. Fond memories of a really useful piece of software.

I was sorry when we moved on from DOS, I seemed to have an intuitive understanding of it, most of the time I would successfully guess at any command I didn't know, it was quicker than looking it up.

I think it's genuine. I heard that 8 is very unpopular and will soon be replaced by 9. I am keeping XP as long as I can.

It's true. They have downgrade offers as well as pre-installs for 7. Nobody wants 8 so they can't sell PCs if all they have is 8.

I recently switched from XP to 7. At that time, I was surprised to find that Microsoft was selling 7 from their Web site.

XP support is disappearing in April, not 7.

The popular switch is XP over to Win7. Microsoft are starting to distance themselves from Windows 8. In my opinion its another Vista. Personally I would take the Win7 over 8 every time and as has been said this seems to be the opinion of many of the punters.

I am using Windows 8. It sounds like a good marketing strategy to me.

It is XP that will cease to be supported in April, 7 will be OK for a while yet. I tried to get 7 with this laptop but it came bundled with 8 and the dealer would not budge without me paying full price for 7. I may have made the wrong decision not to fork out the extra.

I have XP, 7 and 8,

the worst is 8, but thats on my daughters lap top so I dont have to use it,
Its the most frustating system, but as others have said, its hard to buy a pc without it.

I may put the copy of windows 7 on it

Microsoft must have got some customer feed back at some point in the development, I cant believe any one said its rearly great and better than 7, so why would they proceed with it ?

they proceed with it because there are lot of 'yes men' within MSoft telling them its a good product. There are a lot of project managers who see hitting the target date as a success rather than whether the product actually works. A lot of upgrades are done because its the new system. There is no reason to trash an operating system that is set up and working. MSoft have paid dearly for their past misdemeanors with fixes, patches and glitches.

Personally I've just moved over to Apple and although not without some issues the operating system is light years ahead of lumbering old Windows. Boot up time is minutes faster than the Windows desk top I have. As they say the proof of the pudding is in the eating and in my opinion MSoft have made some bad puddings!

Succinct, not worth adding anything else except to say if 8 is abysmal then 8.1 is abysmal plus one. I still can't figure out how to do the most mundane of tasks on it. Microsoft also came out with an online version of Office which works terrible compared to the original or vs. Google Docs, which is free. As someone who has been computer savy for 30 years a lot of people deserve to be publicly fired over these giant technogical steps backward.

My major gripe with 8 is MSoft telling consumers what they will get, not asking what they want.

Ask yourself how long it took to boot up a DOS machine with its 8086 processor and get a document typed and away on a printer. Did the finsihed product look much different to the Office 2010 or whatever product?

The operating system needs to be as simple as possible and as transparent as possible. MSoft can't grasp this.

How much easier was DBase and Paradox to use when compared with Access. One step forward and many steps backwards. I take my hat off to any company that can successfully squash good products and replace it with products of questionable quality and make money.

Yep my old Packard-Bell 386SX-16 with the 387 math co-processor to run MathCAD 4.0 would boot up in less than 20 seconds. I had Word 2.0 for Windows, Turbo Pascal, dBASEIV, . . . .

I can hear Mary Hopkins now, "Those were the . . ."

What? New operating software?

I just buy a new computer and save the old one.

Still have an E-machine running Win98 2nd edition, Gateway and an HP laptop running XP, a HP Pavillion running Vista, a HP Pavillion and an Acer laptop running Win 7.

Every now and then I have a need to regress back in technology to run my antiquitated hardware!! You just can't have enough computers!!!

I keep an old machine running that still has ISA slots in it just in case I need to use one of the old cards for legacy test systems here at work. It has DOS 6.22, WFWG 3.11 and another drive with Win95 on it. I can't put it on the network so it has to run as a stand-alone machine.

My old WinXP laptop collapsed some months ago and I decided to look around for a more modern one with a beefy CPU, secondhand off ebay.

I managed to buy a really top Toshiba machine with a 4 processor main CPU and turbo mode for a very reasonable €381,- or around US$516-00, a snip.

It was 6 months old,still had 18 months of a 2 year guarantee. The seller advertised it badly and paid the price!! It should have achieved at least €650,- or US$ 880-00.

It came with a 750GB hard drive, 16GB memory (worth at least €200,- or US$ 270-00) and Win7 32/64 bit.

I had planned to install WinXP, but decided to try Win7 first as in 64 bit it could drive the whole memory, I believe in 32 bit mode (XP), only 4GB would be available and that seemed such a waste!

So I tried it out!! Win7 is really good and I am staying with it and with my CPU, really fast and great to handle!! All my old 32 progs work FAST and load as though it was XP......Nothing to moan about and even USB3.0 Ports for faster backups to external disks....

Win7 ROCKS!!!

They can't sell Windows 8 because anyone who made the mistake once has told anyone who will listen how bad it is. Why a company with as many intelligent people working for it as MicroSoft doesn't realize that people only carry smart phones around because a workstation won't fit in the pocket, not because they prefer the dumbed-down interface, is beyond me. People buy workstations for full functionality and nothing in the way, not because they want to be treated like consumers looking to make online purchases on a cell phone. If stuck with Windows 8, there is a $5 program called Start 8, that brings the start menu back, similar to Windows 7, that makes it somewhat bearable to use Windows 8. Sad that it takes a third party add-on to make the leading software giant's operating system functional, but there you have it. I am going to use the April discontinuation of support for XP my excuse to finally give Linux a try.

When have you ever got support from Microshaft? Where I used to work they still use Win 3.1 on one machine because it's the only way they can use a particular product. An upgrade to XP was offered for $1000, but management declined. Now that option has passed. Instead they waited about 7 years and now will replace the unit for $100,000.

Never in the 20 or more years of using it did we need to call Microshaft for support for Win 3.1. We did install it once or twice using the floppy disks. Linux is good, but your printer and other devices have to be compatible. Don't throw XP away just because Microshaft won't answer their phone.