Windows 7 overtakes Windows XP on PC Pro

Monday, March 14th, 2011

Here’s something that’s crept up on us at PC Pro towers: Windows 7 has overtaken Windows XP as the operating system most used by visitors to our website (click graph to enlarge).

The graph above runs from January 2008 until the end of last month – Windows 7 actually surpassed XP for the first time in December, we just hadn’t noticed it before (we’ve been busy, OK?).

The growth of Windows 7 has been quite extraordinary. In a little over 18 months, it’s gone from nowhere to the most used operating system. Compare that to Windows Vista, which didn’t even come close to toppling Windows XP, never getting any higher than 27% of the PC Pro audience.

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The best netbook OS: XP, Windows 7 or Ubuntu?

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

With the arrival last month of Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, it’s time to revisit a familiar question: which operating system is best for a netbook? Linux-based systems may seem well-suited to lightweight devices (the original Asus Eee PC ran Xandros Linux), but there are advantages to the familiar interface and applications of Windows.

Indeed, if you buy a netbook today it will probably come with Windows 7 Starter, while older models are likely to be running Windows XP. Still, it’s easy to move from either to Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and of course it’s free. If you want to upgrade an older netbook to Windows 7 you’ll have to shell out £65 for the Home Premium edition, as Starter isn’t sold separately.

Each of these four operating systems has its attractions, but the key question is how each one performs on low-powered netbook hardware. To find the answer, I’ve spent the past few days installing them all – Windows XP Home, Windows 7 Starter, Windows 7 Home Premium and Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, with all available updates – on an Asus Eee PC 1008HA, and timing a series of typical netbook tasks to discover which OS makes the most of lightweight hardware. (more…)

Come on Microsoft, bring back the Windows 7 Family Pack

Friday, August 27th, 2010

Remember this? It was the rather fabulous Windows 7 Family Pack, offering three licences in one friendly bundle. And how very sensible: if you wanted to upgrade a household’s worth of machines to take advantage of features such as Homegroup, then you could.

At launch it cost £150 inc VAT, offering a massive £90 saving compared to 3 x £80 inc VAT for a standard upgrade. Street prices went even lower, down to around £120 inc VAT. So you could upgrade all three machines in your house for a tasty £40 each.

Two weeks ago I received an email from one of our readers, Daniel Cramer. “We, like many other families in the UK, have more than one computer in our household running on a Windows operating system,” he wrote. “We have three, including a laptop. Two run on XP and one, for our sins, on Vista.

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The psychology of the Windows 7 taskbar

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

One of the new features in Windows 7 that barely ever warrants a mention these days is the revamped taskbar.

This is the first version of Windows that not only allows you to ‘pin’ your favourite applications/folders directly to the taskbar, but also to place them in whichever order you choose (at least, without downloading Tweak UI).

What effect has the new taskbar had on the way we interact with the Windows desktop? Have people stopped piling application shortcuts on to the desktop? Are taskbars overflowing with icons? Or is the ‘pin to taskbar’ feature simply ignored?

A survey of the desktops of the PC Pro team reveals it’s a combination of all three, with different members of the team deploying different taskbar tactics. Here are the three different types of taskbar psychology deployed in the PC Pro office.

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HP’s appalling “Windows 7 driver”

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

This weekend was my dad’s 60^th birthday, and so I decided to cheer the coffin dodger up by releasing him from the bane of his life: no, not my mother, Windows Vista. Given that my dad has a tendency to install anything with a Windows logo on it, the thought of performing a clean install and trying to hunt down the serial codes for everything from Microsoft Office to Keith Chegwin’s Interactive Guide to Tiling Your Bathroom filled me with dread, so I decided to perform an in-place upgrade to Windows 7.

Very smoothly it went too. All the installed software was transferred flawlessly, all the files were migrated to the relevant destination, and the whole process took a little under two hours. Yes, the performance of the Windows 7 PC is probably a little slower than it would be with a clean install, but he’s 60 for Pete’s sake: it takes him 20 minutes to get up the stairs now, another 10 seconds on the boot time isn’t going to kill him.

We hit only one snag: the wireless dongle attached to his HP printer wasn’t being recognised by Windows 7. No problem, I thought. We’ll simply head off to HP’s website and download the relevant drivers.

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Why do my Windows 7 thumbnails keep disappearing?

Friday, March 26th, 2010

This is the sight that’s beginning to wear me down. Pretty much every time I go into this folder, which contains hundreds of images that we’ve used on the PC Pro website, half the thumbnails have mysteriously disappeared.

It seems I’m far from the only person being blighted by this problem. Start typing “Windows 7 thumb…” into Google, and the first entry in the auto-suggestion list that appears under the search box is “Windows 7 thumbnails not showing”. Click through and you’ll find sites and forums swelling with complaints about vanishing thumbnails, in both Windows Vista and its bigger brother, 7.

One of those forums led me to what I thought was a blissfully simple solution: press F5 (in the same way as you refresh a browser screen) and the thumbnails suddenly reappear. Unfortunately, that proved only to be a temporary solution. The next time I went back into the folder, many of the thumbnails had scarpered again.

I simply can’t understand what’s causing this problem. The thumbnails file can’t be corrupted, as they instantly reload when I hit F5. And it’s not a problem with some images, as different thumbnails come and go each time. What’s more, it’s a local folder stored on my desktop, not one stored on the server, so there’s no issue with server lag.

I’ve checked on Microsoft’s Knowledge Base and it doesn’t appear to have an answer. So it’s over to you, the good readers of PC Pro. Rescue me from my thumbnail misery. I beg you.

Is Windows 7 killing your hard disks?

Monday, December 14th, 2009

I might simply be unlucky, or it could be that Windows 7 is a hard-disk killer. In the past two months, three different laptops running Windows 7 have totally died on me, while one had a minor collapse and refused to boot for an hour.

First of all, I should make it clear that these machines don’t have an easy life. My laptop travels with me wherever I go, and they have a fair bit of punishment on a daily basis: slung into a laptop bag and down a hill on a bike; into London on the train; and then a 25-minute walk bumping up and down before I get into the office. And then all the way back at the end of the working day.

Nevertheless, for the past six years two ThinkPads have survived without incident for three years apiece. Until I installed Windows 7 RC on the latest one, and the hard disk died. It’s currently sitting in my desk-side drawer whilst I consider what to do with it.

The Dennis IT department sprang to the rescue, offering me a spare workaday laptop from their collection. The first one lasted for less than a month before its hard disk whimpered its way into obsolescence.

Once more, our trusty IT team gazed into their cupboard and fished out a replacement – the exact same model. This one kept going for less than a week.

I initially blamed the two successive failures on the ageing 1.8in hard disks they used, but my confidence has been shaken again today. On Friday, I set up a new system: a desktop PC at work, a netbook to take on my travels. Both of them running Windows 7 and synchronising vital data via the cloud.

The desktop is still working fine, but the netbook wouldn’t boot for my journey into work, with Windows 7’s startup repair system eventually declaring it irreparable. Then, bizarrely, when I plugged it in at work the netbook started to work again (and it still is).

So, the question: am I alone in this? Or is my growing paranoia about Windows 7 and hard disks entirely unfair, and more due to my maltreatment of laptops than my choice of OS? Perhaps, as Steve Cassidy keeps on telling me, it’s time to drop the mechanical hard disk entirely and move to SSDs.

Microsoft still unsure of Windows 7 success?

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

There are a few signs here at TechEd that Microsoft wasn’t quite as sure about the runaway success of Windows 7 as its fanboys (me included).

In planning the layout of the show stalls in the exhibition halls, Microsoft has ensured plenty of space to gently introduce skeptics to its new hot product. You can wander up and furtle about with example machines, and if you stand there too long a Nice Person will come up and ask if you’ve seen this or that cool feature. I thought I was being even ruder than usual by brushing them off – then some Russian delegates popped up beside me and showed me how to do that brush-off thing properly.

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Why all the fuss over Windows Explorer?

Monday, November 9th, 2009

In the latest part of our bid to convert a Mac user to Windows 7, Chris Brennan compares Finder to Explorer and wonders what all the fuss is about

The Finder on the Mac seems much maligned by many Windows users and I have to admit I’m not sure why. Since using Windows 7 I’ve found the methods of storing and finding files much the same. The Finder and Explorer windows look strikingly similar and can be viewed in much the same way.

After using the Windows Explorer I’m not really convinced it’s necessarily better than the Finder, but as I’ve already said that may well be because I’m more used to the Mac way of doing things. I have to admit that the smart folders of OSX are a much better solution than libraries in Windows 7. Unless I’m missing something (and there’s a rather large chance I am) they’re not as flexible.

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How Dixons is (under)selling Windows 7

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

If you’ve been into a Dixons Group shop lately (i.e. PC World or Currys Digital), you’ll have seen the place festooned with posters and displays declaring that the arrival of Windows 7 means it’s “time for a new PC”.

From a marketing point of view, it’s an obvious message for Dixons to be pushing. But in reality, as we all know, one of the great merits of Windows 7 is that most of us don’t need a new PC to run it. I use it happily on an old Advent laptop with 1GB of RAM and a Pentium Dual-Core processor; David Bayon runs it on his Atom-powered Samsung NC10 netbook. If there was ever an edition of Windows that didn’t mean “time for a new PC”, this is it.

With Microsoft getting so much right in Windows 7, it’s a disappointment to see it permitting (perhaps even supporting) such a misleading marketing slogan. And I think it’s a mistake. In the coming years Windows is going to be increasingly threatened from multiple directions — by a buoyant Apple, by emergent operating systems such as Chrome OS and by cloud-based mobile computing. Surely as the battle grows Microsoft will want its best foot forward, in the shape of a satisfied user base. The last thing it will want is to be weighed down by still-lingering resentments over Vista.

Yet this slogan seems designed to deliver precisely that outcome. Dissatisfied customers won’t appreciate being told they must write off their old PC to escape their unsatisfactory OS. Many who can’t afford a new PC will stick with Vista and remain disgruntled with it. And those who know the truth – that any machine that runs Vista will run Windows 7 better – will resent Microsoft’s apparent collusion in an attempt to get them to waste money on an unnecessary new PC.