{"id":1365,"date":"2009-02-13T10:10:18","date_gmt":"2009-02-13T10:10:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/02\/upgrading-to-windows-7-its-all-about-reliability.htm"},"modified":"2009-02-15T23:31:27","modified_gmt":"2009-02-15T23:31:27","slug":"upgrading-to-windows-7-its-all-about-reliability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/02\/upgrading-to-windows-7-its-all-about-reliability.htm","title":{"rendered":"Upgrading to Windows 7 – it’s all about reliability"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s been plenty written over the last week or so about Microsoft’s plans for users upgrading to Windows 7 and, in short, customers will be able to purchase an upgrade license, but there will be no in-place upgrade path from Windows XP (direct in-place upgrades from Vista will be supported but are not recommended).<\/p>\n

After all the anti-Vista press, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see that much of what’s been written about Windows 7 has been relatively positive (I even wondered if they should market the product as Windows Mojave<\/a>!) but now the critics have found something to complain about.<\/p>\n

“What! No direct upgrade path from my 8-year old (n-minus-2) OS?”<\/p>\n

Yes. Exactly. And that is A Good Thing.<\/p>\n

I’ve often wondered why Windows gets such a hard time with stories of system crashes and general unreliability but that’s just not been my experience. I thought that maybe it was because I’ve been running NT-based systems (including Windows 2000, XP, 2003, 2008, Vista, 7) for the last thirteen years – after all, I certainly experienced that sort of chaos at one company where I worked but when we migrated the 4000 European employees from something approximating 4000 customised installations (mostly Windows 95\/98, with users rebooting several times a day) to a standard Windows XP image, reliability improved significantly.<\/p>\n

Ironically, it was buying a Mac that helped me to realise why people think that Windows is buggy and unstable. My Windows systems are my workhorses. I install standard software and I use them. I might install the odd application here and there, but it’s generally well-written software and it’s not a succession of installations and uninstallations. I also tend to dump the OEM installation and to perform a clean installation of Windows with each new operating system (although I have also used upgraded machines). On the Mac I’m much more of a novice: I have to learn how to do things; I download things that look interesting, then take them off again – and then I have reliability issues. Not a huge problem – but probably the cause of more forced restarts than I experience on my Windows PCs.<\/p>\n

So what exactly is my point? Well, firstly this is not a Mac vs. PC discussion. The point I’m making is that, on any platform, the key to stability is only making configuration changes where necessary (i.e. incessent tweaking is generally not a good thing). The other point is that starting from a known baseline (i.e. a clean OS installation) is highly recommended.<\/p>\n

When Apple shipped the last major update of its operating system (Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”) the general advice was to perform an “archive and install<\/a>” installation. Basically, that’s what Microsoft is offering for XP users moving to Windows 7 but, unlike Apple, who have the benefit of a closed system with only a few devices (at least at a hardware and operating system level), Microsoft has to support almost infinite permutations of hardware and software for its operating system. And, from a brief conversation yesterday with one of my colleagues, it seems the situation is no different on Linux – if I want to move from an old distribution of Ubuntu to the latest version then I should expect to have to reinstall.<\/p>\n

There was one comment on the article that Randall C Kennedy’s wrote for his enterprise desktop column at InfoWorld<\/a> which just about summed this up for me:<\/p>\n

“[…] I’ll bet if Microsoft did allow for an upgrade his next article would be bitching about all the upgrade problems Windows 7 caused from XP systems. <\/p>\n

Next blog we’ll probably see how puppies (really cute ones too) are slaughtered in the process of making Windows 7. Desperate stories call for desperate measures.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even his colleague J Peter Bruzzese at InfoWorld can’t agree when he argues why Microsoft’s XP-Windows 7 upgrade strategy is right<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Opinion aside, for most corporates, clean, imaged, installations will be the preferred deployment option for Windows 7. Meanwhile, the majority of consumers will run an OEM-installed copy of Windows that came with their PC. Only a relatively small number of consumers, small business users and hobbiests will want to upgrade directly from Windows XP or Vista to Windows 7 (and the Vista users will be able to do this in-place, if they so desire) and, from Microsoft’s perspective, limiting the options to reduce the likelihood of users experiencing upgrade issues makes sound business sense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s been plenty written over the last week or so about Microsoft’s plans for users upgrading to Windows 7 and, in short, customers will be able to purchase an upgrade license, but there will be no in-place upgrade path from Windows XP (direct in-place upgrades from Vista will be supported but are not recommended). After … Continue reading Upgrading to Windows 7 – it’s all about reliability<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[144,98,99],"class_list":["post-1365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-windows-7","tag-windows-vista","tag-windows-xp"],"yoast_head":"\nUpgrading to Windows 7 - it's all about reliability - markwilson.it<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/02\/upgrading-to-windows-7-its-all-about-reliability.htm\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Upgrading to Windows 7 - it's all about reliability - markwilson.it\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"There’s been plenty written over the last week or so about Microsoft’s plans for users upgrading to Windows 7 and, in short, customers will be able to purchase an upgrade license, but there will be no in-place upgrade path from Windows XP (direct in-place upgrades from Vista will be supported but are not recommended). 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