Windows 10 to be offered as free upgrade

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Windows 10 to be offered as free upgrade
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sean
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 42219
Location: North Devon

Posted: Wed Jan 21, 15 9:00 pm Post subject: Windows 10 to be offered as free upgrade
BBC Linky No idea if this is a good or bad thing. I assume they're trying to avoid the 'having-to-support-XP-for-ages-and-ages' scenario.

dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 46362
Location: yes

Posted: Wed Jan 21, 15 9:09 pm Post subject:
when my lappy's vista is no longer supported for all of it's built in online weaknesses i will keep it for ps and a few things i can do sort of ok and do all online stuff ,tunes etc with a very old pile of bits running on linux ,like what im doing at the mo the early days of doze such as ms dos was ace ,since then they have been more interested in cash than care or ease of use.

vegplot

Joined: 19 Apr 2007
Posts: 21301
Location: Bethesda, Gwynedd

Posted: Wed Jan 21, 15 9:13 pm Post subject:
with Cortana and HoloLens it can only be good. However there's no upgrade path from XP.

dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 46362
Location: yes

Posted: Wed Jan 21, 15 9:28 pm Post subject:

or from vista from the data on the beeb

so as i see it they are offering to mend the carp(7 huge and messy,8 very huge messy and weird) stuff hat has been one of the last nails in the ms trust coffin

compared to victorian steam engines or historical styles of firearm ms has probably had it's generation and a bit of cutting edge supremacy

i wonder if there is a lost the plot version of moore's law for software developers

vegplot

Joined: 19 Apr 2007
Posts: 21301
Location: Bethesda, Gwynedd

Posted: Wed Jan 21, 15 9:38 pm Post subject:

dpack wrote:

Windows 7 was hugely successful. 8 much less so because of it's innovative but unpopular interface. Both are excellent productivity platforms.

The world changes however and desktop is not where the future lies. The move to 10 is a step towards a unified platform for other systems to integrate with not least Linux and OSX both of which are being fully supported to run Microsoft software natively on these platforms.

dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 46362
Location: yes

Posted: Wed Jan 21, 15 9:54 pm Post subject:
cross platform is probably a good move i was a big ms fan from early 80's to early 000's since then it has been a matter of making useful software or peripheral hardware work and has not always been a happy mutually beneficent deal from my point of view

henchard

Joined: 23 Aug 2012
Posts: 232
Location: Carmarthenshire

Posted: Wed Jan 21, 15 10:22 pm Post subject:

I moved from XP to Windows 8 because I had to get a much faster PC for Photoshop work.

Everyone was saying how awful Windows 8 is and 'don't go there'. To be honest I've found it very, very good and the most stable version of Windows I've ever had. It can be easily set up to look and feel just like older versions of Windows. I've no idea what the fuss was about.

The decision whether to take the risk of a free upgrade is going to be the difficult one!

dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 46362
Location: yes

Posted: Wed Jan 21, 15 10:54 pm Post subject:

if it works for you stick with it

i still have a version of 98 sp something that is fine for running some (at the time)very posh sound software when i have opportunity to play with noise.

the "must upgrade to a new ,better thing" only really benefits the thing sellers

for simple and useful ms dos on a 486 processor could do some good stuff with software and data that would fit on a tiny drive

my vista lappy has about 200g of os which uses a fair bit of ram just to keep alive and is usually not doing more than this lean machine is at less than 10 % of that

Shane

Joined: 31 Oct 2005
Posts: 3467
Location: Doha. Is hot.

Posted: Thu Jan 22, 15 4:04 am Post subject: Re: Windows 10 to be offered as free upgrade

sean wrote:

I assume they're trying to avoid the 'having-to-support-XP-for-ages-and-ages' scenario.

No - I think they're just trying to get people to use it. I'm perfectly happy with my Windows 7, can't bloody stand the sight of Windows 8, so never upgraded.

If Windows 10 is free and looks okay, I'll upgrade, so I guess I'm exactly the kind of user that MS is aiming at.

henchard

Joined: 23 Aug 2012
Posts: 232
Location: Carmarthenshire

Posted: Thu Jan 22, 15 8:26 am Post subject:

dpack wrote:

the "must upgrade to a new ,better thing" only really benefits the thing sellers

Couldn't agree more but I had to upgrade from XP because software I needed will only run on 64bit Windows.

I certainly won't be an early adopter of Windows 10 but presumeably if I do upgrade (free) I will get MS support for much longer than I would if I stick with Win 8.

Shane wrote:

can't bloody stand the sight of Windows 8, so never upgraded.

I keep hearing this from people but still haven't worked out why people have this opinion. As I say I moved from XP to Win 8 and had it configured to work in almost the same way on a desktop within about 20 minutes. It's been running pretty much 24 hours a day since last May and is as solid as a rock.

Last edited by henchard on Thu Jan 22, 15 2:26 pm; edited 1 time in total

vegplot

Joined: 19 Apr 2007
Posts: 21301
Location: Bethesda, Gwynedd

Posted: Thu Jan 22, 15 9:26 am Post subject:

dpack wrote:

my vista lappy has about 200g of os which uses a fair bit of ram just to keep alive and is usually not doing more than this lean machine is at less than 10 % of that

If you're running Vista you deserve or want the pain.

vegplot

Joined: 19 Apr 2007
Posts: 21301
Location: Bethesda, Gwynedd

Posted: Thu Jan 22, 15 9:35 am Post subject:

dpack wrote:

cross platform is probably a good move

i was a big ms fan from early 80's to early 000's since then it has been a matter of making useful software or peripheral hardware work and has not always been a happy mutually beneficent deal from my point of view

Steve Ballmer's hand at the helm didn't do Microsoft much good during early part of this century. Much like his persona it was a blustering buffoon with half baked ideas of Windows Everywhere domination. It turned a lot of people off.

Under Nadella it's taking a very different approach. We're already seeing some very sound robust products come out of MS including cross platform and/or opensource such as HaloLens, Cortana, Azure, vNext, and Hub.

vNext of particular interest. A cross platform developer framework that is truly opensource.

mark

Joined: 14 Jul 2005
Posts: 2191
Location: Leeds

Posted: Thu Jan 22, 15 3:08 pm Post subject:

The reason it is free to upgrade from Windows 7 or 8 FOR THE FIRST YEAR is to get the platform established in a short time frame.

If you decide not to upgrade early you will probably have to pay to upgrade later on

There is some adopters that later adopters will have to buy windows as annual subscription but if you upgrade in the first year that is valid for the life of your machine ! I may have misunderstood that as their is a lot of contradictory information out there..

I presently have windows 7 on my desktop which I like and windows 8 on my laptop which I like less. My tablet and phone are android.

Microsoft are probably trying to entice me and those like me to go Microsoft across the board ..

But right now I use Libre Office and Google Drive and Dropbox and Evernote and Googlemail as my mainstays. I got my feet in a number of camps and am resistant to jumping into a single Apple Type ecosystem which traps you ! so we''l see.

So I only keep data in forms I can easily transfer and access from many platforms. The next few years could go many ways. Its hard to tell !

Betamax was a great format and the Sinclair QL had great specs but they were a dead end! My Space was everywhere! What happened to compuserve?

Stay flexible and make sure you can always export your data is my motto !

But I'll probably upgrade my laptop and Desktop to Windows 10 when it comes

oldish chris

Joined: 14 Jun 2006
Posts: 4148
Location: Comfortably Wet Southport

Posted: Thu Jan 22, 15 6:17 pm Post subject:

What I think is a shame is that this anti-Windows 8 started at all. Looking at any Comments page of an on-line report about W8, there is a lot of strong language and very little information. From what I can make out, W8 is very good (independent reviews reckon that it is much more secure that earlier versions). Professionals seem to like it.

However, MS somehow "overlooked" a crucial requirement of a large number of users. Over in Linuxland we had the same sort of problem when desktop designers decided what the future will be like, and created radically different UIs. The screams and abuse! (I ducked out and use a "light-weight" alternative that does the trick.)

If I were wedded to Windows, I'd explore the trial (beta) version, which I believe can be road tested, and see how far I can modify the UI to make it look like XP or W7.

oldish chris

Joined: 14 Jun 2006
Posts: 4148
Location: Comfortably Wet Southport

Posted: Thu Jan 22, 15 10:25 pm Post subject:
Found this: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?px=Microsoft-Windows-10-Features&page=news_item Best bullet point preview I've seen.

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