Same topic, different source -

Steve Ballmer, Windows 8 Will Be Riskiest Product | Windows 8 News

Maybe they will offer free upgrades to Windows 8 for those who are still on Windows XP
Vista and 7 users will still need the normal upgrade route

I don't think the 3 year cycle is bad itself. This ensures less dramatic changes with each iteration. Like with vista it was so far away from XP that the changes were so big that MS (and hardware manufacturers) couldn't handle them till SP1/2.

IT departments not wanting to switch frequently can skip one iteration and be on a 6-year cycle. (not that I agree with using outdated software......). Dang, it is 2010 and people still using XP are on a 9+ years cycle...

We won't get W7 at work before 2010 if at all then. Probably right before W8 comes out (we got Office 2007 right before 2010 came out). But how much money does it save to switch so late? The change must happen one way or another. It is better to make it as quick and painless as possible and not to extend the suffering needlessly. Since W 7 will lose all support in 2019 switching to W7 now would have given us 9 years of service at the same cost. since we get W7 next year or 2012 we have the same cost of change, but only 7 or 8 years of use.
Edit: when we purchase new laptops and desktops they come with a W7 license. Our IT department then installs XP since we "can't handle" such new software like W7. so we pay for W7, but don't even use it.

Of course there is a cost to upgrade. But there is a cost to not upgrade as well. that cost isn't seen easily, but exists and can be huge.

Windows 7 is fine but so is XP. I have Windows 7 on my new HP laptop because it came preinstalled/OEM. I have four older PCs all running XP and until it comes time to replace the hardware, there's just no reason for me to upgrade the OS on these machines.

I deliberately waited to buy a new laptop until Windows 7 was out and had been out for a while, skipping over Vista when I heard about the negative feedback.

The main applications in our family are word processing + web browsing. My son has started gaming but on the Xbox360 platform.

One thing I have to say that also might be relevant is that some of the Linux live distros seem to have finally gotten to the point where they actually run reasonably well for ordinary Joe consumer. I tried a few a couple of years back and could never get them to work right. Now however I've got Ubuntu 10.10 and a couple of other distros and they seem to be able to set up a desktop which allows basic/standard apps like web browsing, file copying and word processing to occur in the event of some horrible unrecoverable MS OS crash (which actually has never happened to me anyway).

I have one of the Linux distros running live off a USB flash drive and at this point, although I'm certainly not an Open Source fanatic, if Microsoft pushed too hard trying to sell me an OS that I really don't need, I feel reasonably confident that I could run everything I need (i.e. software apps) off one or the other Linux distros. I haven't actually installed any Linux distros primarily because when I first got the new laptop I messed around with the recovery partition (curses you HP recovery partition!) and ended up creating a few dynamic drives on the C: drive.

I've idly thought about trying to create a dual boot with a Linux distro and Windows 7 but just don't feel like messing around with wubi or doing anything that might make me need to do a clean install or mess around with bcd or restoring MBR or anything like that. (If I need to I would just check out the tutorials here of course.) I have an external USB hard drive and have been using Windows 7 backup including imaging to backup the hard drive, but I also have been using Clonezilla for redundancy which seems to work fine.

MSE also seems to be a pretty big improvement and with its availability lessens the need for a new OS just for security purposes.

In terms of my web browser I have to say I use IE virtually not at all. At some point a while back I started using Firefox and it generally works fine.

All this stuff is really just commoditized (is that a word?) and unless someone needs really cutting edge/high performance it doesn't seem apparent that thee year changes every year to the average user's OS is really necessary.

That is not to say Windows 8 won't be a great product and an improvement on Windows 7 but there has to be something pretty clear that I need that exists in Windows 8 but not in 7 or XP for lay down the cash for it. Otherwise I guess I will get it the next time I need to buy hardward, assuming I don't buy a used 7 or XP system on E-bay.

By the way I just wanted to say this is a GREAT forum.

Marco100:

you are correct in that for your applications XP is fine and probably W2000 would do too. Same for the Linux OS you have. But the same I could say about a 1975 car which did the same as today's cars, bring me from A to B. But you probably find 1000 more reason here why W7 is useful and why updates (whether as new OS or SP) are needed.
- W7 (and vista) have better Taskamanger taking advantage of multi-core CPUs, even in single-threaded software. for some of my software thsi is 20% faster than in XP due to using multicore better. You need to consider, XP was designed in a single core 32-bit world.
- 64 bit really works well
- driver install automatically (for the most part)
- with new wide screen monitors aero snap makes working on multiple documents more productive, almost like dual-monitors
- inherently safer (yes, even if XP uses MSE, W7 with MSE still is safer)
- better with SSD (TRIM)

So you see with the progress in technology there is a good reason to upgrade. Of course, the competition of Apple and Linux forces MS to upgrade as well. Again, when you have an old existing system and are happy with it, XP is not a wrong choice. but for newer hardware, sophisticated productivity applications, W7 is much better.
When you buy a new PC with OS, you pay for the OS either way. Then you might as well get the most up to date one It costs the OEM $ 30 to buy the XP license, to buy a Vista license or to buy a W7 license (I'm making up the amount, but $ 30 s a good guess)