News Microsoft extends Windows downgrade rights

This isn't strictly true. I am an "IT Professional" and I would love to upgrade the whole corporation to Windows 7. Unfortunately you have to take into account the users who need the system to do their job. The training doesn't only cover the people who have to administer the new system, everyday users have to be retrained as well and when you are talking about 800+ people that takes both time and a ludicrous amount of money. I know that most people who visit this site are able to pick up a new OS and learn their way around relatively quickly, non tech savy people tend to panic when introduced to something new.

You also have to take into account drivers for old hardware that just won't work on 7, that will all have to be replaced (back to money again).

Not every company can justify that sort of expenditure especially when they will likely loose money whilst the users learn their way around the new system rather than working.

 

It's not about studying up. I'm almost at the end of my MCITP: Enterprise Server Admin training and can honestly say it's not the IT departments who are the issue. Any decent, knowledgeable IT professional will know that Windows 7 is the better choice here, however it comes down to various things:

- Time
- Money
- Users

The time factor is what is involved in rolling out the new systems. Money is pretty obvious. Users comes down to lack of knowledge and training. All this compounded together is 99% of the time what causes new technology to fall behind in business. Businesses are here to make money, and if Windows XP is working and nothing is going wrong and it is still supported, then it makes no sense for the business to spend money on upgrading the operating systems when the current system does the job just as well.

So yeah, the "lazy IT professionals" you mentioned, are pretty much all behind Windows 7. I bloody hate XP now. I use Windows 7 and Server 2008 at home and love them. It's much easier to use, whereas at work I am stuck with going through longer routes to get things done due to using Windows XP and Server 2003. Even the old DOS-based programs that people have mentioned, work fine in Windows 7, thanks to the XP mode infrastructure they added.

 

I wouldn't mind them killing XP so much, if they had an alternative for "older" hardware - not everyone wants to, or needs to upgrade to dual core 4GB+ ram just have their OS run acceptably. Businesses etc shouldn't need to upgrade everything every few years just to keep on top of the OS when the PC use doesn't really change. A bit of internet, word processing, email etc.

Vista / 7 on a P4 / 1GB ram is too slow imo once you've added things like a virus scanner etc.

 

Like I said, the deal breaker for me with Windows 7 are some of the new (UI) choices, specifically that inane auto-sorting when you e.g. copy a file to a folder or extract an archive to a folder.

Also, not having a proper Explorer ticks me off. I know many users do it the "Mac" way, but I want a proper two-pane Explorer like the one in XP. There's probably some 3rd party version which would work as I want/need it, but why change that in the first place? Seems a lot of the changes are simply for changes' sake.

Some other things that tick me off are the way the new Start menu behaves and how I can no longer uncheck "Hide protected operating system files" without seeing desktop.ini files on the desktop.

 

Explorer was made to be like Mac (I think), and I hate it too.

I'm convinced "change for the sake of change" must be a secret Microsoft motto.