After many requests and company IT departments pushing Microsoft to make Windows 7 available to downgrade not only to Windows Vista, but to Windows XP, Microsoft has finally officially stated that the downgrade will be available if company's or users require a downgrade.
The downgrade will not only allow consumers to downgrade to Microsoft most recent predecessor, Vista, but will allow users to downgrade to Windows XP, and technically allow users to go back to Windows 2000 or even Windows 95.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the rumored April 30, 2010 cut-off date may not be the official cut-off date for the downgrade, while an announcement is yet to be officially made, company's can rest easy that the downgrade will allow for rollbacks on their systems.
The safety guard is primarily in place for volume-license users, the majority of which are owned by large businesses, where upgrade to the newest version of Windows can be a nightmare for compatibility and IT departments.
Come on people, 7 is beyond faster than XP. I do however understand the condition of the economy and how much it will cost to upgrade proprietary business apps to be Vista/7 compatible. Maybe within a year it should all be solved because moving on for businesses WILL cost a lot. So I hope this is temporary for businesses, not as much home users.
This is ****ing ridiculous. XP is faster than Vista, yes. I'm not a Vista hater, I enjoy it, but I realize the benefits XP has over it. 7, however, fixes all of the problems Vista had. Essentially, now we have a "pretty" XP. These companies are screwing themselves. At some point in time when XP is not licensed anymore, they're going to have no choice to upgrade, and will have wished that they migrated sooner.
My company uses XP, but we've already planned on moving to 7 after a year of it's release.
Agreed. XP is nearly 8 years old. When Windows 7 comes out, there will be no need for XP.
You probably missed the part of
Hmm... Why? Even IE 8 is released for XP, so I don't see the web standards argument and that holding anything back either.
This seem to be at any company's loss, sure, but there could be dozens of reasons to why they aren't ready to upgrade yet.
There should only be minor compatibility issues. Vista's been out for almost 2.5 years. Most if not all software has been fixed to work with it. If companies have customized software, then they should have it redesigned to be compatible. This is almost as crazy as my company running a 16-bit program from 1997 (which they do). It randomly stops working, based on nothing. And then works again. It seems that now that PC's are so mainstream, the IT industry needs to dumb everything down for the stupid end users who can't figure out that the Orb is the start button...
Companies will have had 3 years to iron out Vista/W7 compatibility issues. It's not MS's fault if companies have largely ignored Vista. It's always made sense that IT departments test all their Apps with Vista, even if they don't plan to deploy it.
To put this in perspective, the likely cut off is April, "only" 4 months after W7 is out. After that you'll have to have Vista or W7 whether you like it or not.
It's about time. XP should've been retired along time ago. There's really no reason the majority of users should be sticking with XP. A colleague bought a new 3Gb laptop the other day and put XP on it. What on earth does XP need 3Gb for? (outside of Gaming, Photo, SQL etc... work). It's madness, people "still" opt to downgrade.
The compatibility issues many companies are going to face should've been ironed out a long time ago. It's bad IT practise. My company is no better, choosing to pretend Vista doesn't exist and muddling along with XP.
so, this is news? Windows 7 is vista refined, most of us got that a long time ago.
It's a point-release, just like XP was a point release.
It's 6.1 because of compatibility.
Get your facts right please.
Microsoft document:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/C...ndows_Vista.pdf
There is no need to wait for Windows 7. It is a goal of the Windows 7 release to minimize application compatibility for customers who have deployed Windows Vista since there was considerable kernel and device level innovation in Windows Vista. The Windows 7 release is expected to have only minor changes in these areas.
Customers who are still using Windows XP when Windows 7 releases will have a similar application compatibility experience moving to Windows 7 as exists moving to Windows Vista from Windows XP.
Christ almighty, haven't we got past this by now?
Yes, there aren't major architectural changes. Vista did those. This doesn't make it a minor release.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/C...ndows_Vista.pdf
(snipped)
Since when is an OS update considered "significant" solely by its architectural changes?
Last edited by rm20010 on 07 Apr 2009 - 17:26
They tried with longhorn it failed very badly. l2homework.
Last edited by rm20010 on 07 Apr 2009 - 17:26
Windows XP Second Edition? That's essentially what XP SP2 was.
Last edited by rm20010 on 07 Apr 2009 - 17:27
Um... no... They did it TWICE.
Win98
Win98SE
WinMe. (Mistake Edition)
eh? sure they can, but i mean, come on, pre 2xx0 series is OLD.
There will be no FURTHER support. They can still use Vista drivers.
and this is ati's fault, not Microsoft's.
There will be no FURTHER support. They can still use Vista drivers.
and this is ati's fault, not Microsoft's.
i know its ati fault its about time ati move on and stop support of the old card
It's just driver development for DX11 and WDDM 1.1 (Directx 10.x (HD series) hardware current generations +). Old cards are fine with WDDM 1.0 vista drivers...If they don't work then you must have a dinosaur of a gpu and should go buy a cheap upgrade as vista will not support it either, how hard is this to understand ?
its not hard to understand but you know ppl will be crying that stuff does not work and its should and its all MS fault. "get a new computer or dont get windows 7"
Although i'm not sure why. But that's sure to win a lot of the businesses over!
If you have a well stripped down installation of Windows XP, joined to a domain, with the local filesystem locked off and you have an up-to-date enough version of office, and you have all of your security policies and so forth setup, and you have a quick / easy re-imaging process for workstations that fail, why would you have any desire to go through the pain of migrating 100 or even 1000+ workstations over to a new OS with new hardware requirements, etc? New training, new documentation, new hardware, verifying application compatability.. especially at a time when businesses are feeling the pinch and the economy is on its backside and companies are starting to shed staff, there is absolutely no WAY companies are going to be taking gambles.
a lot of people have to remember that the Microsoft's chief market is business/enterprise market.
We do have 2 vista pc's (me and the other IT Tech!) and its not very good on our network!
All the pc's we have purchased in the last year or so (mostly Dell and HP) came with vista and im sure one day we will put it back on, but for now its XP SP3 all the way!! (oh joy!)
Just being a realist here.
They still have Pentium II there?? Because Windows 7 runs fine on Pentium III 800 Mhz.
I'm currently dual booting 7 and XP, both are fantastic OS'
Do you have any idea how real businesses work? It has jack all to do with not keeping up with the times, and having to concentrate on day to day operations rather than un-necessary work such as moving an entire corporation over to a completely new operating system.
Get a sense of perspective for gods sake.
Get a sense of perspective for gods sake.
Plus, of course, this isn't a good time for businesses to be spending extra cash. I'd rather they spent it on employing people than upgrades.
Get a sense of perspective for gods sake.
That's just laziness. I'd agree if this was Vista being released and there was nothing else besides XP that was tried and true and everything would crumble if a reliable OS was not used but unfortunately that isn't the case anymore. It isn't even about upgrading for the sake of it, it's for security purposes, which I'm sure most businesses can appreciate.
Seriously. Are you just trolling to wind me up? I'm willing to bet you don't have any insight in this area. If you had any idea how enterprise wide I.T. worked you know that laziness has NOTHING to do with it.
A small business with like 10 employees maybe.. a large enterprise with 500+ employees with a variety of applications, branch offices, etc - it's a major overhaul.
I would compare XP, Vista and Windows 7 as follows:
Windows XP = Old should not be used now although it has a lot of dependency the upgrade process must start ASAP.
Windows Vista = Windows 7 Alpha,Beta whatever public release.
Windows 7 = The real taste of new OS from Microsoft.
Very good ha ha. Seriously I agree.
I get a O/S released in 2010 and actually wish to downgrade to an O/S from a decade ago. All the talk that XP wil be 8 years old is rubbish, it will be 10 years since Windows 2000.
I've been running the Beta for quite awhile now. It runs smoother and doesn't crash as much as Vista did. Here's the list of systems that I've been testing it on:
Dell Latitude C610 [Pentium III-M @ 1.2GHz, 1GB RAM, ATI Radeon Mobility 16MB, 40GB HDD]
Dell Inspiron 5100 [Pentium 4 @ 2.66GHz, 1GB RAM, ATI Radeon 7500 64MB, 40GB HDD]
IBM Thinkpad R40 [Pentium-M @ 1.6GHz, 2GB RAM, ATI Radeon 7500 32MB, 80GB HDD]
Sure.. They don't get the nice Aero effects, but they run rather good, even the P3. I haven't tested it on a sub-1GHz setup, but I will soon.
I'm tired of people branding Windows 7 as Vista without even testing it. Windows XP is going away eventually since SP3 is the last service pack. Microsoft does need to keep compatibility with XPDM drivers at least until the next OS.
Of course, if people still want to run the latest OS with all the bells and whistles on their old hardware, they should consider Linux.
Exactly.
The amount of people who ran very old hardware and complained Vista didn't cope too well. Same goes for Office, complaining Outlook "2000" isn't really Vista compatible, please.
I certainly it less likely to get software rot.
Damn you Microsoft!!!
Only for those that are incompetent and unable to plan a migration from an obsolete operating system to a newer one. Seriously, it is not that difficult and there are more than enough resources to make the transition an easy one.
Time to take the XP crutch away.
Sigh. So tell me how large your IT department (and enterprise is) - you seem to have a pretty good insight into the requirements of a large scale, major project such as this and must have been through similar deployments in the past?
Last edited by TechGuyPA on 09 Apr 2009 - 03:15
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