Posted on 10/21/2010 6:08:31 PM PDT by dayglored
Microsoft says it has sold 240 million Windows 7 licenses since releasing the operating system to retailers a year ago, making it the fastest-selling OS in the company's history.
Also, as of September, the successor to the much-maligned Windows Vista was running on 93% of new consumer PCs, Microsoft said Thursday. According to Web metrics firm Net Applications, Windows 7 accounted for 17.1% of the global OS market as of the end of September and had surpassed Vista in July.
In the six months after Windows 7 started appearing on store shelves, all of Microsoft's more than 18,000 computer-making partners were selling PCs with the new OS. That compared with 70% during the same period for Vista.
In general, Microsoft software has been getting higher marks from consumers. In 2007, the first full year Vista was available, the company's rating on the American Customer Satisfaction Index was a 70, which is less than the 75 rating for all other software makers. This year's, Microsoft's rating is 76, while other software makers as a group scored 77. (The ACSI scores on a 0-100 scale.)
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(Excerpt) Read more at informationweek.com ...
Drop $45 and get a new 320 GB HDD and do a clean install. Then once it's up and going, mount your old drive and copy the data over.
Impressive, it still allows itself to be exploited. Before you go all wrrrrrrgbbbblllllllllL!, it is a fine OS for casual use and gaming; I'm looking from more the business aspect as to why it's a pain.
Don't get me wrong, my quasi-vaunted linux kernel is sucking wind this past month...Two very nasty exploits that cost me outages for reboots after patching; grrrrrrrrrrr...(don't tell me about ksplice; I can break it with a simple loop in a shell)
That was my only problem going to Win 7 Pro 64 bit as well - drivers. I had everything EXCEPT my old workhorse printer, my Minolta 2300DL color laser. Minolta/QMS hasn't released a 64 bit driver. Thankfully it still prints beautifully from my virtual PC (XP) that runs, and I do very little printing any more, so I print to a PDF, then print that PDF from my virtual PC.
I was shocked at the number of drivers that did come with Win7 x64 however! Just no love for my 10 year old laser...:( (of course, that's Minolta's fault not Microsoft's).
Sorry, but the Macs usually fall first in these competitions. Why? Because there are a lot of unpatched known exploits out there. Security through obscurity doesn't work very well anymore...
Microsoft's built an incredibly solid, stable, and VERY malware-resistant OS, and to see the same old FUD trotted out time and again, well, I'd expect better. Give it a shot, I bet you'll be quite surprised at how stable, configurable, and usable the OS really is.
I think part of the success was the large Release Version testing - they were getting a lot of hardware feedback prior to release. When XP was released, the drivers weren't included for a lot of hardware (like video cards) which made for many bad installs and hard feelings. It was a catch up game for MS.
Hardware manufacturers are not great at writing new drivers for their legacy products.
Win7s security features for enterprise are also quite impressive. Allows a lot of customization of GPOs.
Oh, I know that! I still have some forcemeters and other technical tools that use RS232 and parallel port interfaces, and the companies have been out of business for more than 10 years! At least I was able to get communications protocols way back when and roll my own "driver" code that I can integrate in my own programs.
I think it's a testament to the driver model that Microsoft uses that so many hardware devices "just work" when you plug them in. I can plug in a 7 year old printer, or 12 year old camera or 15 year old GPIB PCI card and it just works.
My 64 bit Windows 7 won’t work with my printer, either.
It’s still a sweet OS. Mix it up with Firefox and.. YAYS!!
The Pwn2Own contents are nothing but crap marketing hype shows for the journalists. They mean NOTHING in the real world. If they did, you’d see OS-X viruses running around in the wild. There are none.
Mac has virus’s just for it, so does Linux. Just not nearly as many folks use macs or linux compared to windows is all.
Since the family wanted to keep their legacy XP profiles, I fresh-installed Win7 Pro 32 on a second hard drive of an older Pentium-4 system. So far, it has been very stable, and has become Dad’s platform of choice. (Ready-Boost w/ USB even works ;)
The one thing I regret is not isolating the 2nd drive during the install — the Boot Manager is stuck on the primary drive, despite my best efforts at trying to figure out BCD to move it to the system drive, and Backup attempts to image both (large) hard drives.
What plagued Windows Vista was that the operating system needed a dual-core CPU and at least 3 GB of RAM to start running decently. Problem: that level of hardware was not generally available at the time of Windows Vista's release. In sharp contrast, at the time of Windows 7 reaching retailers on October 22, 2009, computers with at least dual-core CPU's supporting x86-64 instructions were widely available, and 4 GB of RAM was really cheap. As such, when you buy a new Windows-based desktop computer nowadays, they usually come with 4 GB of RAM installed, which allows for 64-bit memory addressing mode. Also, Windows 7 easily supports 4 to 8 core CPU's, which means very fast operations if you do CPU-intensive work like editing audio and video files and editing high-definition still images.
Name a Mac OS-X virus that's in the wild, spreading from Mac to Mac. A real self-replicating virus that doesn't require user action.
(I'll save you some time. There aren't any.)
Sorry, you're wrong.
” With Microsoft Security Essentials, Win7 does a fine job of trapping and stopping most malware “
I too have MSE / 7 combo ...No problems whatsoever ...Wish I could say the same thing about my HP Touchsmart pc ! Never again .
I still love my XP.
No DRM’s and can download without fear of incompatibility to printers and other apps.
Can you do the same for Windows 7? The term "virus" nowadays refers generically to malware - trojans, worms and classical "viruses". The fact is that both OSX and Windows 7 are about equally exposed and susceptible to malware.
> Can you do the same for Windows 7?
I'll admit to being uncharacteristically ignorant in this regard: Microsoft is doing a great job of providing patches and I'm religious about applying them. So to be honest, I don't pay attention to the details with regard to which holes are being exploited in Win7 because I stay patched up to date. I could look up the names of the bugs, as I have SANS bulletins from years ago to the present, but no, I don't know 'em by heart.
To the best of my knowledge, there have been about a half dozen or so "true" viruses that exploited holes in Win7 successfully -- until the patches were provided. And Microsoft, to their credit, makes it pretty easy to stay patched up to date.
However, many Win7 systems remain unpatched. Out of 200+ million machines, and experience with users in general, I can guarantee at least a few percent... what's that, maybe 5 million? Enough to keep the bugs running loose.
The good news is that as far as I recall, none of the true viruses have gone really crazy on Win7 machines, so they're all pretty limited in number. XP, different story, of course.
I would like to comment again that Win7 is a HUGE improvement over XP. Half a dozen is MARVELOUS compared to the past. It's one reason I'm a happy Win7 user.
> The term "virus" nowadays refers generically to malware - trojans, worms and classical "viruses".
Yeah, but only among those who don't care what they're talking about and hate to learn. You know them: the same folks who call a monitor a "computer", and call Windows "Excel" because it's what they run on it, and who, when you explain that emailing a document is different from copying it to the fileserver, say, "Oh who cares, it's all the same to me".
Those people can't tell one sort of malware from another.
And then there are those unfortunates who have to provide services to such illiterates and so they propagate the problem. For example, MessageLabs in their user interface classifies all malware as "viruses". I would prefer that they call it "malware" which is accurate, but apparently they think it sounds classier to say "viruses".
Sorry to sound gruff, but really, Puget, claiming degeneration of the meaning of words is a poor excuse for an argument. I know you know better, because you indicated that you do.
I will grant you this: the popular usage for different types of malware has indeed become largely worthless, and my fight for accuracy is probably doomed. :)
However in this case Mmogamer brought up a comparison of operating systems, not users. And made a statement about OSes that is true of users but not of OSes. That's why the discussion here -- they conflated two things that are not the same. And you defended the conflation:
> The fact is that both OSX and Windows 7 are about equally exposed and susceptible to malware.
There's always a human between the keyboard and the chair. Or didn't you read what I wrote above in comment #6, and feel the need to make me repeat myself? :) Okay, I'll repeat it.
Yes, of course, human beings are now the primary malware vectors, and that's true of all OSes.
You have a couple years yet to love XP before it becomes a liability. I have an XP VM (virtual machine) that I keep around because I installed a bunch of tools on it years ago that are expensive and licensed and I don't feel like buying new licenses just so that I can run them on Win7. Yet.
But I no longer use XP for regular tasks like surfing the web. I gave up on Win2K a while ago when the security patches stopped, and recommend you plan to do the same with XP in 2014.
Until then, stay patched and healthy, and good luck!
I second Puget's advice. Absolutely.
MSE is a good example of the axiom that Microsoft rarely gets it right the first time, but they do stick with it until they -do- get it right, usually about the third time.
In this case it was the second time. Windows OneCare was vast bloated overkill and they learned that if they want something to be widely deployed among users it has to be simple and invisible. Free doesn't hurt either.
I wish they had made MSE a default part of Win7, but they independent Anti-Virus/Malware vendors would have screamed bloody murder.
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