Posted on 06/26/2010 5:58:57 PM PDT by PugetSoundSoldier
I have a couple of things to tell you about today. First off, we are excited to announce that Windows 7 has sold 150 million licenses to-date. As I’ve said before, Windows 7 is the fastest selling operating system in history with 7 copies of Windows 7 sold every second. Earlier this month, I published a post about Tami Reller’s keynote at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch U.S. Technology Conference. One of the points that stood out for me was her comment that between companies actively deploying and evaluating it, approximately 75% of enterprises are looking at Windows 7 for their organization. That’s amazing! And of course people continue to be excited about the features and benefits of Windows 7, and the PCs that our partners are delivering for Windows 7. You can read about many of the awesome Windows 7 PCs from my colleague Ben Rudolph (Ben the PC Guy) over on the Windows Experience Blog.
(Excerpt) Read more at windowsteamblog.com ...
One of our engineers does architecture on the side and he went from XP to 7. He would not even mess with Vista though his wife did and she hated it. He says 7 is the best OS he's seen come out of Microsoft since XP and he loves it to death. My daughter uses 7 at her job at Purdue University. They also made the jump from XP to 7 without investing in Vista. She also loves it.
I thought about putting it on my computer but I'm still running a P4 3.4 GHz with only 2GB of memory, not enough to run 7 effectively.
Try Win7; it’ll run fine on your computer. You might not get all the cool Aero effects if your graphics aren’t up to speed, but it’ll run fine otherwise, you have enough horsepower there.
Depends on what you want to do with it. If you're only running a few applications at a time, 2GB is plenty. I run Win7 on a 2.0GHz Core2 Duo with 2GB of RAM and it does a decent job.
A 3.4GHz P4 oughta do a decent job also, as long as it's got plenty of cache. Won't be a speed demon, but IMO it's worth trying.
That's about it. I have to wait to replace my video card before I can try it (I'm running a very old Quadro 64 MB card since my GeForce went belly up).
My processor has 512KB L2 Cache. What do you think?
I think it's worth a try. My suggestion is to close apps that you're not currently using, rather than keep them open in the background. That will improve things a lot on a P4 with 2GB of RAM. I'd use Win7-32bit, not 64bit.
Half a MB of L2 is small these days, but not unreasonable. By way of comparison, my system is Core2 Duo T5600, 1.83 GHz, 2MB L2, 2GB RAM.
There's also a function in Win7 (under Computer -> Properties) that rates the quality of the user experience based on the hardware it sees. It would be interesting to see what it says.
Actually, I could care less if the vendor supports the OS. As long as firewalls and anti-virus software stays up to date, I can put up with known problems. Heck, I still run Windows 2000 on one of my computers and see no need to upgrade. Only when other software outruns the operating system will upgrades be considered.
I just want a fast and reliable operating system as a single user. Of course business’s are different altogether...
Any software that you now run that XP chokes on will also choke on Windows 7. Actually, it mostly depends upon your processor and memory available unless it is graphics intensive, then it depends upon your graphics card.
I run W2K when I just need another offline copy of Windows for a while -- no license requirements. And I have a 10-yr old 800MHz Pentium-3 laptop with 256MB RAM that runs W2K perfectly well, and I use it from time to time to this day for light websurfing while exercising (it's strapped to the stationary bike).
But for serious online work I use Win7 or XP.
For serious work? I find no difference between Win2000 and Windows XP or Windows 7 for that matter as to getting work done. Now maybe some of your programs actually specify a more modern Windows operating system, but I have not seen that (Win 2000 or later). After all, they try to insure that Windows programs need a particular operating system (for their benefit) but does it really? Most programs work just fine with older systems.
I can understand security as a precaution for using a more modern operating system, but really, unless your connected to the internet (with no firewalls or anti-virus programs), does it matter?
Most user programs require specific processor capabilities and ram, not the latest operating system. They just do not test on older systems...
I just don't have any compelling need to run on W2K, so any amount of overhead to make my stuff work on it is rather pointless. OTOH, having W2K around for temporary use is handy, typically it's in a VM and takes all of 5 minutes to gin up a new copy. And since W2K is all that runs on my old laptop, it does just fine for websurfing and such.
It's also worth noting that the first thing I do with a new XP or Win7 installation, is brain-damage the GUI back into basic/classic mode, so that it looks like the default W2K interface. It's still the best one out there, and I include OS-X, Linux, and any other versions of Windows in that assessment. W2K got a lot of things right.
Sounds right... Most things still work from Win2000 days. If others require it, then upgrade. It is as simple as that.
Like your brain damaged comment... I do the same...heh.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.