If you fish around in the Network and Sharing section of the forum you will find lots of places where I've typed up what it takes to switch 7 from homegroup to workgroup... and there's rather a lot of it with no guarantee of success.
Yes, Microsoft severely ___ed up on that one.
I have read those and that is why I am leaving well enough alone. MS definitely made networking needlessly complicated in Win 7. I cannot figure out what their objective was. It darn sure wasn't to make networking and groups user friendly.If you fish around in the Network and Sharing section of the forum you will find lots of places where I've typed up what it takes to switch 7 from homegroup to workgroup... and there's rather a lot of it with no guarantee of success.
Yes, Microsoft severely ___ed up on that one.
Unless you have normal family use. It gives you a prompt on the desktop that "Dad" wants to know if you want to join a homegroup, you agree and insert "Dad's" password and you are networked according to the functions you tell it you want to share.
I can't see how it would be any simpler unless it did it all for you in the background, which would be unsecure.
Oh that's pretty simple really... they're trying to kill XP which currently still holds the largest market share of any OS by a not exactly insignificant margin...
(As of last week)
I don't know why they want to kill XP... but they do.
By making Win7 nearly impossible to network with XP/2000 etc on their lans and discontinuing production of new XP discs, they are hoping people will elect to upgrade their other systems as well...
Unfortunately for them they made a couple of serious errors in judgement... First they made Win7 so restrictive that it's viewed as intrusive (like Vista was) and then they released it without thorough testing of crucial behaviors such as multimedia and USB access...
Now, the result is that people are beginning to return to XP *again*. BUT... with XP no longer in production that option is available only by piracy and, guess what... people don't care if it's stolen or not... they need their systems to work! When I visit various torrent sites, in the software collections, the most frequently downloaded torrents are almost always Windows XP or Linux.
Win7 is not gaining market share anywhere nearly as fast as they'd hoped and, given my own experiences, I'm just wondering where all this is going...
Tater, I dont' believe they want to kill XP any more than Dodge wants to kill the Dart. There are still many proud owners out there who like to take it out of the garage for a Sunday drive or to pick up the gang to go for bingo.
Sorry, but XPired. Welcome to the future with the greatest invention since the p.c.
I don't thik MS is trying to kill XP. XP will die because it is not compatible with and/or does not take advantage of new hardware technologies.
I still use XP on a netbook and will do so until the netbook dies; but there is no way I will go back to XP on my desktop. XP had its share of problems, too. But you and I figured out how to solve them and we will eventually reach that level with Win 7. Granted, it was easier to solve them in XP; but that came at a price - less security.
Tell you what... I installed XP on my better half's machine yesterday (mine's today's project). When the XP install finished, I re-created her file shares, then hit "My Network Places"... and there was our entire network, all ready to go. I didn't even have sound or video drivers installed at that point and hadn't "tweaked" a single thing...
Not secure? ... C'mon over, bring your laptop... I'd like to see you access anything we don't let you into...
That's just is XP is NOT expired except by Microsoft's own efforts... They could have continued development on XP for another decade and still had market for it. They want to kill it because there are so many copies out there that revuenue is actually falling off because of market saturation... So, rather than introducing paid upgrades "Aero for XP", etc. they decided to kill the most stable OS they've ever produced.Tater, I dont' believe they want to kill XP any more than Dodge wants to kill the Dart. There are still many proud owners out there who like to take it out of the garage for a Sunday drive or to pick up the gang to go for bingo.
Sorry, but XPired. Welcome to the future with the greatest invention since the p.c.
They recently got derailed on one other matter as well. The new "Advanced Format" hard drives, the ones with the 4k sector size, were originally touted as uninstallable on XP. Well, the drive manufacturers (Western Digital, to be exact) must have looked at market share and decided to work out a way to get XP to work with their drives. Now there's a "reprocess" utility that will take a clean install of 2000 or XP and realign the partitions for the new sector size... letting it work on both.
"The greatest invention since the pc"... Naaaa.... It's just a bunch of 1s and 0s part of an overall system... a tool... nothing more.
Notion of Windows 7/Vista is more secure that XP is overly exaggerated... I've wrote in another thread, If only Microsoft would implement proper multi-user usage model for Windows, ANY Windows - Windows will reach another level of secure-ness, all without tacking more cr*p on to it (one of the cr*p = UAC)...
zzz2496
That's not true. ANY operating system can take advantage of any new hardware technology... That's what the whole "drivers" thing is about. The drivers connect devices to the operating system, presenting a common interface the OS understands. New device, new driver... no problem.
Also not true Carl...I still use XP on a netbook and will do so until the netbook dies; but there is no way I will go back to XP on my desktop. XP had its share of problems, too. But you and I figured out how to solve them and we will eventually reach that level with Win 7. Granted, it was easier to solve them in XP; but that came at a price - less security.There are problems with XP I've never been able to solve
Seriously though... XP is not less secure than Win7 ... it merely appears that way because it's less intrusive. Which is more "secure"... an operating system that gets me locked out of my own folders... or one that trusts me to manage my own folder content and backups? I almost had a serious data loss with Win7... never even came close to that on XP or 2000.
Again... let me clarify my postion... I am not suddenly against Win7 ... I still like it and would strongly perfer to use it... if it was stable. But I am not going to deny there are problems or try to struggle against incorrectable issues to the point of personal bankruptcy... I've got to get back to doing what I do and for now XP is the best way to do that.
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