Man this really bugs me. Look at the pricing for Windows 7.
Then look at the Mac Snow Leopard pricing.
Microsoft has three flipp'n versions at outrageous prices and Apple has 1 version for an upgrade price of 35 bucks.
What's wrong with this picture...?
Just venting... I feel better now.

But microsoft didn't also make an extra $2000 off you selling you your hardware, did they?

Oh how cool, the beginning of a Mac vs. PeeCee thread, and just in time for a boring Sunday afternoon.
Almost as much fun as a Poser vs. Maya thread. :-D

Quote - Oh how cool, the beginning of a Mac vs. PeeCee thread, and just in time for a boring Sunday afternoon.
Almost as much fun as a Poser vs. Maya thread. :-D

Hehehe....

Here we go again ;o).

Laurie

I'm not terribly worried about pricing at the moment, as I have yet to find a compelling reason for upgrading to Vista, let alone Seven.

@Gareee.... right you are, butr look at the market penetration that Microsoft has.

and look at what you are comparing.

Windows 7 is a complete OS. if you read up, it's had a lot of code re-written under the hood since Vista.

the Apple uprade you refer to is a Point upgrade. yes they've improved things and added some features, but it's not a complete OS overhaul.

sorry, price wise I'm not seeing a problem at all. your getting what you pay for, and complete OS or a Point Upgrade. infact, they don't compare when based on that comparison. it's like buying a new car or buying a new engine for an old car.

Quote - Man this really bugs me. Look at the pricing for Windows 7.
Then look at the Mac Snow Leopard pricing.
Microsoft has three flipp'n versions at outrageous prices and Apple has 1 version for an upgrade price of 35 bucks.
What's wrong with this picture...?
Just venting... I feel better now.

What's wrong wit this picture is you are comparing the pricing of  Snow Leopard to XP, Vista and Windows 7 while ignoring OS X, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, and Leopard.

good point!

how much does that work out to?

From what I'm hearing, W7 works fine compared to vista.  If I keep hearing good things about it, I'm likely going to upgrade.

I'm not Microsoft bashing here... just disappointed.

I not seeing any need to upgarde my computer to Windows 7.  My XP machine is chugging along just fine.

Linux is free...

Why would I want to spent any money on W7 at all? XP is running smooth and very fine. All the apps I do use are still 32 bit and XP is still supported by all of them. I know a million things to spent that money on and W7 isn't one of them.

Amigados ROOLZ!

GeoWorks Ensemble FTW!

mmmmmm.... retro GUI

I paid $49 for the preorder upgrade of Win7 home premium when they had the special back in june, which includes 64 bit version. for me it made a huge amount of sense comparing to how much it would have cost me to upgrade from XP 32 bit to either XP64 or Vista64bit. and that XP compatibility thing is really only important if you have really ancient software, I havnt found that one piece of software I own and still use has had any problems running on Win7

@wdupre.... that's great news re compatibility. Now if I hadn't been asleep at the switch, I wouldn't have missed the pre-sale.

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Why would I want to spent any money on W7 at all?

Because it's smooth and slick, and faster than XP, for one.
But also because it represents the future of Windoze operating sytems, and in (I think) 2 years MS will drop support for XP.
But before that happens, many other software manufacturers will drop support for XP. Adobe, for one, already has removed XP from its list of supporting operating systems for their CS 4 line.

Not saying that there's anything wrong with sticking with XP for now, but Windows 7 is really a huge improvement over XP in so many ways.

However, if you're using mostly older and 32 bit programs, there probably really isn't much actual reason to.

Definitely a good reason to move on to a new operating system. Remember Microsoft was originally scheduled to stop supporting XP and they will in the near future. I don't think you're going to see WinXP SP4.

I guess I'll just have to wait for the price to come down... I can go buy it on release date but I think it's just priced wrong for what it s.

They should charge what the market can bear with regards to programs, but OS's, should be cheap. If MS is not careful, a lot of young people adopting the Apple Way will eventually eat at the bottom line for MS.

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They should charge what the market can bear with regards to programs, but OS's, should be cheap. If MS is not careful, a lot of young people adopting the Apple Way will eventually eat at the bottom line for MS.

Well, MS didn't become M$ by selling operating systems cheap. ;-)

I do agree though that they should drop the price, but I don't know how much that would affect the young, future potential Mac buyers.
I mean, buying a mid-range PC with Win 7 preloaded is still pretty cheap, certainly a lot cheaper than a comparable Mac.
And even building your own PC and buying Win 7 is still a good deal...
Doing like I do, building my own high end PCs - even with the high cost of Windoze, I'm still getting a machine more powerful and about a thousand dollars less than something off the rack.

I mean, my current i7 PeeCee box cost me about $1500 to build, but would have cost probably $2500 to $3000 (or more) if I had bought something comparable from some place (and it would have had lower grade hardware, too, but that's a whole 'nother story), so if I have to spend another $300 for Win 7, no big deal.

And that's what their "standalone" and personal OEM and retail OS buyers represent - mostly those who build their own, since the majority of PC buyers are buying "off the rack" with Windoze preinstalled, where MS is not getting anywhere near that 300 bucks per machine.

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What's wrong wit this picture is you are comparing the pricing of  Snow Leopard to XP, Vista and Windows 7 while ignoring OS X, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, and Leopard.

What's Mac going to do when they run out of cats?

MikeJ, what do mean by, "Adobe, for one, already has removed XP from its list of supporting operating systems for their CS 4 line." ?

Coldrake

I'm wondering about that also? CS 4 still lists it runs on XP......

Quote - > Quote -

What's wrong wit this picture is you are comparing the pricing of  Snow Leopard to XP, Vista and Windows 7 while ignoring OS X, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, and Leopard.

What's Mac going to do when they run out of cats?

They only need another three or four (there are definitely more than that that they haven't used) and then I suspect they'll switch to another naming scheme for the 11.x series.

Oh I guess I got that wrong. It seems it's only Photoshop, and then only PS x64 (and maybe After Effects) and XP 64 that's not officially supported.
It's possible though that they've changed that since I last read about it, because XP support by Microsoft had also been extended.

And in software manufacturer terms "runs okay on" and "supported OS" are very different things.
Googling it seems to turn up a certain amount of confusion regarding the whole thing.

Have you ever noticed that the only good version of windows is the one that hasn't been released?

The only reason I would go to Win7 would be for 64bit support since my version of XP Pro is only 32 bit and it doesn't use all 4gb of ram.

Right now, that would be the only reason for me to do anything, and even with that, it's still using 3.5gb of it.

Quote - Have you ever noticed that the only good version of windows is the one that hasn't been released?

You mean Windows 8?

Windows 7 Ultimate - Release Candidate 1, both 32 bit and 64 bit has been available for free for public usage for about 6 months now. For those who have it installed, it will stop working on June 1, 2010. The public beta version was available far earlier than that.
The final RTM version of Windows 7 has been available to developers through MSDN for over two months now. Or anyone with an MSDN account.
You don't think all the people here that have talked about using Windows 7 have just been speculating and guessing about it, do you? ;-)

"Cry havoc and loose the dogs of war".....

THIS makes Windows 7 pricing look a bit better.:tt2:

Quote - "Cry havoc and loose the dogs of war".....

THIS makes Windows 7 pricing look a bit better.:tt2:

Take THAT all you Mac VS PC people! :tt2: I Pre-Ordered the Pro version of 7 back in June or July when they made the offer.

So there are dumb ass MAC users also..... Cardinal sin not backing up data at any time let alone when upgrading an OS.

I think WIN7 is a clean wipe and install when migrating from WINxp. Any word on this issue?

Upgrading an OS on an existing system is more problematic than buying a new system with the OS already installed. New versions of an OS often have compatability problems with old drivers and manufacturers don't always release new drivers in a timely fashion, if at all for older hardware and software. 

Most people buy a new computer every three or four years, so it's usually best to wait for a complete system upgrade (which will include the cost of the new OS). Depending on what kind of computer a person wants to buy, anywhere from 10%-30% of the cost of the new system will be wasted on upgrading to W7 today. Based on Microsoft's past OS releases, early adopters will be advanced beta testers.

My advice would be to save the money and buy a new computer in a year or so, with W7 installed, after it's been patched up with a couple new service releases.

As far as XP going away, that won't happen till the bulk of new netbooks have migrated to W7.  Netbooks gave XP an extended stay of execution. Microsoft wasn't about to let Linux be the primary operating system on a new class of computers. Microsoft initially offered Linux netbook users a $25 upgrade path when the normal XP upgrade was over $100. Microsoft is competitive when they have to be and not competitive when they don't nee

The OS market isn't being entirely driven by the home PC market. It's also being driven by the millions of government agencies, retailers and business users who were  scared to death by Vista and refused to have that OS installed on their systems.
Microsoft won't be pulling support for XP until it can convince those markets that it has something stable to replace it with.
As far as the upgrade price is concerned I can't really blame them for trying to recoup some of the billions they wasted trying to convince the consumer's that Vista wasn't the Anti-Christ.

Quote - .
I'm leap frogging VISTA (thank heavens) straight to Win7 strictly for the 64bit advantage.

Brace yourself... you'll be in for a full re-install for it if you go that route.

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Quote - What's wrong wit this picture is you are comparing the pricing of  Snow Leopard to XP, Vista and Windows 7 while ignoring OS X, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, and Leopard.

Thing is, nobody was forced to run through that particular sequence. I ran OSX 10.3 just fine when it arrived on my dual G5, then finally bothered to upgrade to Leopard (without incident) earlier this year - working apps and all. XP users won't get to upgrade, since they skipped Vista... they have to re-install the whole wad.

[quote}I mean, buying a mid-range PC with Win 7 preloaded is still pretty cheap, certainly a lot cheaper than a comparable Mac.

Unless you want to be stuck with the Home/Basic edition, you'll still have to shell out for it, though not as much as you would for the retail/box editions. shrug

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Quote - THIS {the bug thingy} makes Windows 7 pricing look a bit better

May want to read the article to see how it gets activated. You have to have a guest account on Leopard, upgrade to Snow Leopard, log into it as guest, unplug (or somehow kill) the machine, then log back in as an admin in order to lose the data.

Not exactly something folks would do on a regular basis... :)

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Now, in Windows 7's favor, it does run a lot smoother than Vista.

OTOH, having used it for over a month or so (Windows 7 Enterprise edition - it's good to have handy access to an EA agreement), I can tell you that it will face the same problems XP had, albeit not as bad as XP had it. You'll still get the registry bloat, the bog-down over time, and in general the same headaches that XP and Vista share. This means you'll still have to get A/V, some sort of registry cleaner (CCleaner works wonders), and some sort of defrag utility (jkdefrag is good for this).

Markus 2000 is correct though - the bulk of Microsoft's sales will come from business and enterprise... though there have been some bumps and bruises there too (e.g. I STILL can't run VMWare vSphere 4's client from Windows 7, in spite of it running just fine in XP and Vista).

Quote -
Based on Microsoft's past OS releases, early adopters will be advanced beta testers.
My advice would be to save the money and buy a new computer in a year or so, with W7 installed, after it's been patched up with a couple new service releases.

The only reasons I can see for someone not to upgrade to Win 7 is if they can't afford it, aren't comfortable doing complete reformats and reinstalls, don't need it, or simply don't want it.
But fear of being an "advanced beta tester" or the OS being broken or something are not in the mix, IMO. I've been using Win 7 since April or May, on two different PCs with entirely different hardware configurations and have had no problems with it.
For home users, that is. I do think it's good advice for businesses to not jump on the latest OS release unless they've been testing it out and know it will work for them.
And of course it also has a lot to do with your own overall experience. I might lose half a day at the most if an OS dies or causes problems and I have to reinstall everything. For other people that could be a week-long exasperating affair, requiring outside help.

I also have a PC running XP on it, but that's just for my very old printer and scanner, which I need XP for, since I can't get any drivers that work for Win 7 (or Vista). I hate even turning that machine on, because it's so sluggish. It only has a dual core AMD @ 3.0 ghz and 4 GB of RAM though, so it's a pretty weak machine to begin with.

Windows 7 is a ginormous improvement over XP and a huge improvement over Vista, as well, in many, many ways.

Quote -
Unless you want to be stuck with the Home/Basic edition, you'll still have to shell out for it, though not as much as you would for the retail/box editions. shrug

Well that's what I meant by "mid-range". Home/Basic is just fine for most people.

Regarding a clean install of Win7 from WinXP, would installing another clean drive as the boot drive and keeping the original boot drive in the system help at all?
I always install my applications to another drive anyways so they are never on the boot drive. However, Windozs has a nasty habit of spreading configuration files all over the boot drive.
I already have 6 drives in my system so another is no big deal.

Quote -
Regarding a clean install of Win7 from WinXP, would installing another clean drive as the boot drive and keeping the original boot drive in the system help at all?
I always install my applications to another drive anyways so they are never on the boot drive. However, Windozs has a nasty habit of spreading configuration files all over the boot drive.
I already have 6 drives in my system so another is no big deal.

I have 5 drives in my main machine right now. What I do when I reinstall Windoze is simply disconnect all the other drives except the one I want to actually have the OS on, to avoid all that.
If I'm adding a new drive to be an OS drive, I'll first disconnect all but the one that has the current OS on, and boot from the Windoze disk and then completely reformat the current OS drive. Then disconnect that and hook up the new drive and install it on that.

Quote - Regarding a clean install of Win7 from WinXP, would installing another clean drive as the boot drive and keeping the original boot drive in the system help at all?
I always install my applications to another drive anyways so they are never on the boot drive. However, Windozs has a nasty habit of spreading configuration files all over the boot drive.
I already have 6 drives in my system so another is no big deal.

I had no problem when installing the beta I just installed it to a partition in a seperate drive(I didnt disconnect the xp drive at all) and I can select either Win 7 64 bit or XP 32 bit when I start up the computer. some of the software (including all my versions of poser) I didn't even have to reinstall I created a shortcut to the .exe and they worked fine in win7.

Awesome thanks..a dual boot scenario.  I'll try that when I'm ready to pony up on the discounted Win7.. oh about January 1st, 2010 I suspect :).

Quote - Regarding a clean install of Win7 from WinXP, would installing another clean drive as the boot drive and keeping the original boot drive in the system help at all?
I always install my applications to another drive anyways so they are never on the boot drive. However, Windozs has a nasty habit of spreading configuration files all over the boot drive.
I already have 6 drives in my system so another is no big deal.

wdupre has a good solution... Me, I would do that route if I were you. Just make some room on one of your drives and use it.

Thanks everyone for the healthy debate and suggestions.
Maybe we should start a thread on "being ready for Win7"

Attached Link: http://www.dailytech.com/US+Army+Says+No+to+Windows+7+Yes+to+Vista+Upgrade/article15217.htm

I tried googling "government upgrades to vista" and found the above article that the US Army is upgrading to Vista and not Win7. I suspect that has less to do with any particular technical preferences than that Win7's exact security features won't be fully known till it's been released and that it will take time for Army testing to confirm that it fully meets their needs.

This article, from a year ago, states that XP sales were going to be extended till 2010 due to Ultra Low Cost PCs.
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/04/03/microsoft-extends-xp-through-2010-ultra-low-cost-laptops

A newer article extends XP sales through 2011 to allow time for migration to Win7, with a backtrack capability to XP for compatibility issues.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9134528/Microsoft_backtracks_extends_XP_availability_to_2011?taxonomyName=Windows&taxonomyId=125

You can always buy the cheaper OEM versions of Windows from places like Newegg and Tiger Direct.

OEM versions although intended for computer builders can be purchased by anyone who wishes to save money. Though there are some limitations using this route.

Yup... I do that all the time at Canada Computers but you usually have to buy a system. In most cases they look the other way. The serial number says OEM and the support would be somewhat restricted from MS. However the MS site is a good source for fixing issues so who needs direct support anyways.

Didn't hear about any massive line ups to get the latest and greatest from MS.

Quote -
Didn't hear about any massive line ups to get the latest and greatest from MS.

Well, Windows 7 was the most pre-ordered item in Amazon history, so I guess that should count for something. ;-)
Also, people don't have to line up to order online from NewEgg or Amazon, or Best Buy, so the lack of lines at stores isn't any real indication of anything anymore.

But you also have to consider there are millions of people using the Windows 7 RC 1, which will continue to work until June 1st, 2010. While making both the beta and the RC free to the public might have been brilliant for getting people interested, it could possibly hurt release day sales, since a lot of people might just wait, since RC 1 itself is very stable.

I bet there will be a huge surge in Windows 7 sales next May, when Windows 7 RC 1 starts telling people their time is almost up.

Good point on the line up issue. I guess the last big que was for WinXP. Didn't hear much about Vista line ups.
Yup, all those Win 7 RC 1 beta testers will hopefully make this the most stable OS out of the gate. We'll see.......

Now if I could just get games to run in Windows 7 RC smoothly for an extended period of time without getting a blue screen from an NVIDIA (BFG GeForce GTS 250) error which has also happened with the Logitech VID webcam software that would be nice. Although I guess it isn't so bad booting back out to XP in order to play them.

That would be my only gripe for the moment.

Games I've been running under Windows 7 x64 Ultimate RC 1, with an EVGA GTX 285:
Far Cry 2, Fallout 3, Assassin's Creed, Oblivion, Prototype, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Half Life 2, Half Life 2 Episodes 1 and 2, Portal,  STALKER: Clear Sky, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, Rainbow Six Vegas, Call of Duty 4 and 5,  and Sims 3.
And the online versions of all the above, where applicable.
You might want to check your drivers for those devices and make sure you're using the manufacturer drivers and not the crap generic drivers Windows 7 installs. I've read of reports of Windows updates rolling drivers back, although I've never seen it happen before, and it's only been from one person here who I've seen claim that, so I'm kind of skeptical about that one. But it can't hurt.