European Businesses Choose Windows 8

Windows 8 Customer Adoption
In Europe we are seeing great adoption of Windows 8 and today TechEd Europe keynote attendees heard from SAP and the Dutch Public Prosecution Services on how they are using Windows 8, but here are some other businesses from the region I wanted to share who are using Windows 8 to modernize their businesses: ...

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TechEd Europe: European Businesses Choose Windows 8 & UE-V/App-V Betas Released

 

[Superfly]

Customers deploying Windows 8 or developing apps for Windows 8 should continue as their investments will carry over to Windows 8.1 when available later this year. When refreshing PCs, we recommend customers purchase Windows touch-enabled devices to ensure their hardware investments are future proof.

Well my keyboard and touchpad are perfectly touch-enabled devices... so there

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there

VISTA was only hated because the hardware at the time when it was released was not capable of running it decently -- Slow etc. Of course there were a few irrititants like the UAC but they were easily got round and some people (including me) hated the Glass AERO type of idea. But that's also just a personal thing -- I don't like garish desktops etc -- and often when processing photos professionally I find a (for most people a boring ) plain light grey uncluttered background the most suitable for working on. However by the time the service pack came out and people had got newer hardware Vista actually ran fine.

How many W7 people can REALLY say that W7 is very different to VISTA if they were being truthfully honest. -- Just fire up any SP1 version of VISTA - even as a VM - on any piece of decent hardware and you'll see that it runs just OK. It was just released before most hardware around was capable of running it properly.

Of course W7 is more efficient and the OS improved to use modern hardware architectures -- but any newer OS should be more efficient than its predecessor. Apart from that W7 is essentially equivalent what VISTA would have been with say 3 or 4 service packs added if you like - and was only called W7 because of the initial terrible bad publicity VISTA had at release.

W8.1 is faster and more secure in every way to W7 and they are beginning to address the desktop issues with BOOT directly to desktop and splitting the Aplications screen away from the metro start screen -- not perfect but it's a start. IE11 is currently the major show stopper on adopting 8.1 currently but it will I'm sure be fixed -- there's no backport of IE11 to W8 although there is for W7.

I do believe though ms should have released W8 (RT version) for phones and tablets -- perhaps windows RT first and not bothered with the desktop OS until the 8.1 improvements had been incorporated -- and then I'd suspect that about 90% of the original complaints would have just gone away. The cack handed way they handled the release of both W8 and W8 RT will probably be the death knell for RT tablets and they also have a mountain of bad publicity to overcome for the desktop OS too.

W8.1 is still currently BETA software (although it's in preview). This means that there will undoubtedly be some changes before final release.

From what I've seen W8.1 will have to be a FREE upgrade when it is released shortly which makes the standard W8 the SHORTEST lasting OS Ms has done ever. !!!

There are a few glitches in my testing of W8.1 - the major showstopper is IE11 but once these bugs are ironed out I actually feel W8.1 will take off.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[Mustang]

VISTA was only hated because the hardware at the time when it was released was not capable of running it decently -- Slow etc. Of course there were a few irrititants like the UAC but they were easily got round and some people (including me) hated the Glass AERO type of idea. But that's also just a personal thing -- I don't like garish desktops etc -- and often when processing photos professionally I find a (for most people a boring ) plain light grey uncluttered background the most suitable for working on. However by the time the service pack came out and people had got newer hardware Vista actually ran fine.

Up until W8 came out I was using Vista Ult as a backup OS and even on a relatively cheap mobo, with SATA3 SSD HD and sufficient RAM + decent graphics card, there was not a lot of difference in performance speed between it and W7.

It did lack some of the features of W7 which was annoying, but overall a very good performer. It was a big improvement over XP as evidenced by the totally new architecture as shown in things such as the complicated, but also more versatile and wide reaching BCD, (Boot control Data); a much more flexible Disk Management ... etc, etc.

I could live with Vista quite comfortably in getting all the jobs done I needed to do.

When Win7 appeared, the magazine PC Australia showed side by side testing of XP, Vista and Wim7. While Vista was overall better than XP, in some areas XP actually performed better because of it's simpler architecture and size ... CD installation disk versus DVD disk for Vista.

However, Win7 outperformed both of them in ALL parameters. Hence the big swing to this OS.

The crying shame is that W8 had similar improvements in performance over Win7 but M$ crashed it through being over ambitious in promoting a primary OS built for mobile devices, meaning smartphones/tablets ... and expecting it to work on all platforms.

Apart from that W7 is essentially equivalent what VISTA would have been with say 3 or 4 service packs added if you like - and was only called W7 because of the initial terrible bad publicity VISTA had at release.

I always thought Windows 7 was like the SP Vista never had; and akin to XP 2nd Ed relative to XP.

 

[lehnerus2000]

However, Win7 outperformed both of them in ALL parameters. Hence the big swing to this OS.

That's not my recollection of file copy/move tests that I read at the time.

IIRC:

• W7 was the fastest with large files
• XP was the fastest with multiple small files
• Vista was last in both categories

 

[MrBill]

I agree with what jimbo wrote 100% I will say as a caveat that most new desktops will let you side grade to Windows 7. I just did my machine because of a couple of apps that did not recognize Windows 8 as a compatible versions, even in compatibility mode. I was quite shocked at how fast and stable it was. Excluding the boot time, it was as fast or faster than Windows 8 in every way. Windows 8.1 has possibilities, the question will be, are new desktop and laptops defaulting to the desktop, will they make it easy for Joe User to set it up to desktop on initial boot-up, and will people still see this as a Frankenstein OS because of the start screen still dangling to the side?

Hi there

VISTA was only hated because the hardware at the time when it was released was not capable of running it decently -- Slow etc. Of course there were a few irrititants like the UAC but they were easily got round and some people (including me) hated the Glass AERO type of idea. But that's also just a personal thing -- I don't like garish desktops etc -- and often when processing photos professionally I find a (for most people a boring ) plain light grey uncluttered background the most suitable for working on. However by the time the service pack came out and people had got newer hardware Vista actually ran fine.

How many W7 people can REALLY say that W7 is very different to VISTA if they were being truthfully honest. -- Just fire up any SP1 version of VISTA - even as a VM - on any piece of decent hardware and you'll see that it runs just OK. It was just released before most hardware around was capable of running it properly.

Of course W7 is more efficient and the OS improved to use modern hardware architectures -- but any newer OS should be more efficient than its predecessor. Apart from that W7 is essentially equivalent what VISTA would have been with say 3 or 4 service packs added if you like - and was only called W7 because of the initial terrible bad publicity VISTA had at release.

W8.1 is faster and more secure in every way to W7 and they are beginning to address the desktop issues with BOOT directly to desktop and splitting the Aplications screen away from the metro start screen -- not perfect but it's a start. IE11 is currently the major show stopper on adopting 8.1 currently but it will I'm sure be fixed -- there's no backport of IE11 to W8 although there is for W7.

I do believe though ms should have released W8 (RT version) for phones and tablets -- perhaps windows RT first and not bothered with the desktop OS until the 8.1 improvements had been incorporated -- and then I'd suspect that about 90% of the original complaints would have just gone away. The cack handed way they handled the release of both W8 and W8 RT will probably be the death knell for RT tablets and they also have a mountain of bad publicity to overcome for the desktop OS too.

W8.1 is still currently BETA software (although it's in preview). This means that there will undoubtedly be some changes before final release.

From what I've seen W8.1 will have to be a FREE upgrade when it is released shortly which makes the standard W8 the SHORTEST lasting OS Ms has done ever. !!!

There are a few glitches in my testing of W8.1 - the major showstopper is IE11 but once these bugs are ironed out I actually feel W8.1 will take off.

Cheers
jimbo

 

[Mustang]

However, Win7 outperformed both of them in ALL parameters. Hence the big swing to this OS.

That's not my recollection of file copy/move tests that I read at the time.

IIRC:

• W7 was the fastest with large files
• XP was the fastest with multiple small files
• Vista was last in both categories

I can't comment on that particular aspect as I no longer have that copy of the magazine PC Australia. However, in the long list of parameters they did test, Win7 was ahead in all. Don't know if they deliberately missed that one or a genuine oversight?

 

[mdmd]

However, Win7 outperformed both of them in ALL parameters. Hence the big swing to this OS.

That's not my recollection of file copy/move tests that I read at the time.

IIRC:

• W7 was the fastest with large files
• XP was the fastest with multiple small files
• Vista was last in both categories

I can't comment on that particular aspect as I no longer have that copy of the magazine PC Australia. However, in the long list of parameters they did test, Win7 was ahead in all. Don't know if they deliberately missed that one or a genuine oversight?

What's up with this? Vista copy and paste!

 

[MrBill]

That's not my recollection of file copy/move tests that I read at the time.

IIRC:

• W7 was the fastest with large files
• XP was the fastest with multiple small files
• Vista was last in both categories

I can't comment on that particular aspect as I no longer have that copy of the magazine PC Australia. However, in the long list of parameters they did test, Win7 was ahead in all. Don't know if they deliberately missed that one or a genuine oversight?

What's up with this? Vista copy and paste!

View attachment 25846

After looking at your system specs all I can say is who cares about OS's, got desktop envy. Nice Rig mdmd. That said, I think it explains a lot of your point. When Vista, and Windows 7, was released, the hardware was much lower end.

 

[lehnerus2000]

File Transfers via the Network

Oops, I left out a vital fact.
The tests related to file transfers via the network.

Apparently you could reduce or eliminate the problem.
How to Fix a Slow Vista File Transfer | eHow

I can't comment on that particular aspect as I no longer have that copy of the magazine PC Australia. However, in the long list of parameters they did test, Win7 was ahead in all. Don't know if they deliberately missed that one or a genuine oversight?

I didn't use Vista on my PC.
I did use it when I did training courses (on their PCs).

Apparently there were a lot of complaints about file operation speeds in Vista.

I saw articles on a few blogs/forums stating that MS had "fixed" file operations in W7.

Like most things related to PCs, maybe the hardware/software interactions were responsible for the different results.

What's up with this? Vista copy and paste!

View attachment 25846

They didn't do the tests with SSDs.

W7 claimed I was copying at ~220 MB/s on my PC a couple of days ago.
It is highly unlikely as the top speed of my WD Green is ~120 MB/s (according to WD).

I notice the new models are faster (~150 MB/s).

 

[mdmd]

...It is highly unlikely...

Well, this is similar to a Windows 8 boot time, in real time, according to user experience, that from end of BIOS post to start screen (or desktop), with high end components, is about 7 or 8 seconds, yet the event viewer reports boot time at about 23 to 27 seconds.

As for my screenshot, I can report that the copy speed time estimate and actual result is accurate.

Windows 7 and 8 are very superior to Vista in many ways,
but they lack some of the features that do not exist in 7 and 8 that I currently enjoy.

I still use 8 and have a separate ssd that runs 8.1 on it. Compared to the advanced features of 8 and 8.1 that are important to the businesses that are the subject of this thread, Vista is a dinosaur.

 

[lehnerus2000]

...It is highly unlikely...

As for my screenshot, I can report that the copy speed time estimate and actual result is accurate.

I have no doubt that your file copy performance is accurate (you have an SSD).

I meant the message about my file copy performance (I have WD Green HDDs).