Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Thursday 18 June 2009, 6:54 AM
Bizarre Windows 7 Downgrade/Upgrade Policies Coming
My take on it is this. Besides their obvious determination to stamp out the XP holdouts, this new policy might actually coax some corporate installations to change to Vista. That would then artificially inflate the overall sales numbers for Vista (similar to selling Vista Business with an XP "downgrade" included, then booking the sale as Vista regardless of which version the customer actually uses), and thus makes Vista look like a bit less of a disaster in the end.
Here's my question. While it is obvious why users might want to keep the right to run XP, even though they are forced to buy Win7, who in the world is going to buy Win7, which honestly is nothing more than Vista with Lipstick (I'm thinking of copyrighting that...) and then downgrade to the original Vista (without Lipstick), or as someone here for whom I have great respect terms it very appropriately, "Vistaster"?
jw
PreviousComments on this post
A further twist in the tale (tail!) is that there is no upgrade path from XP to Win 7. Likely this is a business decision rather than a technical one.
It is also interesting to note that, before Vista, XP was a much maligned OS for, amongst other things, its security vulnerabilities. The subsequent acceptance of XP in preference to Vista speaks volumes.
Businesses will be faced with obligatory clean installs of Win 7 when they choose to move on, with all the costs and inconvenience that will involve or upgrade to Vista in order to upgrade to Win 7 with potentially even more cost and inconvenience. Neither choice looks very appealing.
Moley, I've missed you! Thanks for the comment. Every time I have mentioned the lack of an XP-Win7 upgrade, there have been various replies about how "difficult" it would be, ensuring a compatible upgrade path and such. Well, gee. I can certainly see that Microsoft wouldn't do it if it were "difficult", no matter how badly their customers needed or wanted it. I agree with you - I think this is going to cause a lot of noise once the general public, and especially large business accounts, realize what the restriction means.
As for XP being scorned, but now being praised, or at least accepted, I had personally expected the same thing to happen with Vista, to be honest. Those who have read my ramblings from the beginning will know that I tried Vista on my S6510 laptop a number of times, each time expecting, or at least hoping, that it would be "better", before giving up and tossing it in the bin for good. I thought that by the time SP1 was released, it would be chugging along nicely, and people would be over their initial distaste for it (myself included). How wrong I was!
jw
Not really a solution for deployment over the network but, You can upgrade from XP to 7 like this.
Use any old Vista disk, Run an upgrade from XP to Vista, then run the Vista to 7 upgrade. This works because I've tried it. As you have 3 days to activate Vista, you needn't worry about a product key, It's just a game of leapfrog.
A slow, long, and tedious game of leapfrog of course, and upgrade installs are never quite the same a nice fresh install.
On a lighter note, Linux mint was top of the recommendation list in this weeks micro mart.
I'm not sure where exactly in the process it happened but when I tried "upgrading" a clean, only run for a day copy of Visaster to Win7 RC, I got a huge folder named Windows.old just like when I went from Win7 Beta to Win 7 RC.
What was especially annoying was that in both instances I booted off the DVD and installed it onto the previous file system but still a complete replacement install. I didn't want to have to copy all of my other folders over. I didn't have much issue with installing only 2 programs of my own choosing on Win7. (FireFox 3 and OpenOffice 3 both of which run very nicely on WIn7 Beta or the RC.)
Also the IT guy when they first stole my XP Pro desktop computer away from me when I was out of the office and "upgraded" it by installing Visaster on top of the XP Pro created an incredible number of BS folders, shortcuts, "libraries" etc. Massive clutter. I couldn't tell the real from the "virtual" on the desktop or in the freaking Exploder window. I still have not gotten a clear and authortative explanantion of what the blazes that creeping green bar signifies when you open a folder in Visaster Exploder.
The XP Pro machine that was trashed by Visaster ran so bad that after three days I told them it was worthless and could I please have the ENTIRE drive wiped and have a "clean" bare-metal copy of Visaster installed. They had already informed me that I was going to have to use Visaster or nothing. This time it came back without most of the excrement placed on the drive by the previous attempt. Now it only crashes or comes to a dead halt once or twice a day instead of every time I would open an executable or Explorer. Actually the crashes on Visaster SP2 are down to maybe one a week. The "white-out" dead halts haven't changed.
The only advantage I have found with Visaster compared to XP Pro is that it ejects the USB flash drives without any issues like XP Pro seems to have with SP3 installed on it. Oh, and I can honestly say that; "My computer ate the email!" When someone emails me and doesn't get a response from me. Lookout seems to run not very nicely on Visaster either.
Win 7 when it goes RTM will be the very first thing I do to get rid of the only copy of Visaster I let run in my office.
