Windows 10 - free upgrade to those with PC using Windows 7 or 8

[Apache]

Anyone remember Win95? When it was first released so many people were claiming that it was crap and either do not to install it, or wait until it was out for awhile. Sound familiar? Well as bad as Win95 was, it was much better than Win3.1. Multi tasking and 256 character naming (instead of 16 character) are just two of the things that made it worth getting as soon as it was released.
Apache

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Apache

Anyone remember Win95? When it was first released so many people were claiming that it was crap and either do not to install it, or wait until it was out for awhile. Sound familiar? Well as bad as Win95 was, it was much better than Win3.1. Multi tasking and 256 character naming (instead of 16 character) are just two of the things that made it worth getting as soon as it was released.
Apache

I always prefer to wait a few months after the release of any new o/s to see if there are any significant issues with it. Applications are more important to me than the o/s.

Originally Posted by Apache

Anyone remember Win95? When it was first released so many people were claiming that it was crap and either do not to install it, or wait until it was out for awhile. Sound familiar?

Windows 95 had much more in common with Vista in that respect. A lot of people were trying to run it on hardware that it simply wasn't designed to run on (e.g. slow processor or too little RAM). A lot of software simply would not run because changes in the OS exposed poor programming practices used by third party developers. (Windows 95 exposed poor memory management and applications that attempted low level hardware access. Vista had issues with software that expected administrative access.) There were also parallels to Windows 8, with people who rejected the new user interface.

Windows 10 is different. While Windows 95 meant waiting for independent developers to clean up their act and for users to upgrade their computers, Windows 10 is a bit buggy. From my perspective, it seems a bit too buggy for a beta that is going gold in a month or so. Then again, I could be wrong. I have had no prior experience with Microsoft betas, so maybe they're better at cleaning up bugs than I think they are. Yet it is also worth noting that it won't be fixing some of the faults with Windows 8. Example: the UI, while significantly better, still has a split personality. (That is easily encountered while in the system settings.)

As for the benefits of upgrading, Windows 95 (and even Vista) had more significant advantages over Windows 10. Windows 10 is about fixing the release cycle, which is a concern to Microsoft rather than users, and fixing the UI, which is something that users could adapt to if they gave it a chance. Windows 95 was about software stability (memory management, preemptive multitasking) and Vista was about security (among other things).

[patrickt]

I haven't seen a new anything that wasn't trashed by the usual suspects at first. I remember how horrible the Kindle Paperwhite was for some. I bought two, gave one to a friend, and my sister bought one and they were all fine but from reading the forums it was surprising Kindle even stayed in business. Then there was my first DSLR. I got the one I could afford at the time but according to some the pictures were "soft" and the door to the memory card slot was flimsy. It went out with me every single day for years and the pictures were not soft and the "flimsy" door did just fine.

It seems to be the nature of some to wait for a chance to whine. Me? I signed up for the Windows10. It will be fun to play with. And, if it's crap, I can go back to Windows 8.1 which I'm happy to be using now.

Originally Posted by patrickt

It seems to be the nature of some to wait for a chance to whine. Me? I signed up for the Windows10. It will be fun to play with. And, if it's crap, I can go back to Windows 8.1 which I'm happy to be using now.

Why wait to whine, when you can do it right now! You are right though, some people will find reason to complain. But do understand, that they frequently have legitimate reasons in their mind. That's true even if others don't see things in the same light. For example, I don't have huge issues with the "Modern" UI in Windows 8.x. I don't like it, but it certainly does not make or break the OS in my humble opinion. Likewise for the excessively flat appearance of Windows 10. Once I poke out both of my eyes on the sharp edges that appear throughout Windows 10, I didn't understand what all of the fuss was about. Yet even though I find those things trivial, other people obviously do. Just look at the adoption rate of Windows 8.x and how Microsoft is partially back-pedalling in order to satisfy their customers.

That being said, there is also something to be said for waiting a few months to see how it is received and to let other people work out the bugs. If you don't subscribe to that approach, fine. I know that I don't because I love playing with new technology. Yet for the vast majority of people, they would rather stay with the tried and true until they decide to move on There is nothing wrong with that.

[fjtorres]

Meh.
None of the recent catfights compare to the CLI vs GUI war of the late 80's.
I was but a pup but I clearly remember the carnage.
Nobody was safe.

[DustyDisks]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Meh.
None of the recent catfights compare to the CLI vs GUI war of the late 80's.
I was but a pup but I clearly remember the carnage.
Nobody was safe.

Yep !

CLl vs Shells

The blood ran deep and freely !

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by BWinmill

Windows 95 had much more in common with Vista in that respect. A lot of people were trying to run it on hardware that it simply wasn't designed to run on (e.g. slow processor or too little RAM). A lot of software simply would not run because changes in the OS exposed poor programming practices used by third party developers. (Windows 95 exposed poor memory management and applications that attempted low level hardware access. Vista had issues with software that expected administrative access.) There were also parallels to Windows 8, with people who rejected the new user interface.

Windows 10 is different. While Windows 95 meant waiting for independent developers to clean up their act and for users to upgrade their computers, Windows 10 is a bit buggy. From my perspective, it seems a bit too buggy for a beta that is going gold in a month or so. Then again, I could be wrong. I have had no prior experience with Microsoft betas, so maybe they're better at cleaning up bugs than I think they are. Yet it is also worth noting that it won't be fixing some of the faults with Windows 8. Example: the UI, while significantly better, still has a split personality. (That is easily encountered while in the system settings.)

As for the benefits of upgrading, Windows 95 (and even Vista) had more significant advantages over Windows 10. Windows 10 is about fixing the release cycle, which is a concern to Microsoft rather than users, and fixing the UI, which is something that users could adapt to if they gave it a chance. Windows 95 was about software stability (memory management, preemptive multitasking) and Vista was about security (among other things).

My problem with Windows 10 is not so much any possible bugs, but rather some decisions MS made. Especially with regards to tablets. Until I'm sure that I can still use my tablet in tablet mode and in desktop mode (both 8" and 10") I won't even think about upgrading.

And as long as there's no good replacement for Media Center (which works with encoded cable signal), it's no use replacing our media center pc.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Meh.
None of the recent catfights compare to the CLI vs GUI war of the late 80's.
I was but a pup but I clearly remember the carnage.
Nobody was safe.

The Windows vs. OS/2 "wars" were even worse!

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The Windows vs. OS/2 "wars" were even worse!

I've had OS/2... I bought a new PC, and it has OS/2 running on it. I didn't know it but was willing to give it a try. Within 2 hours I had Windows running on it...

I started the machine, OS/2 started, it looked good. I started an application (don't ask me what, this was in the first half of the '90s), it didn't do anything. So, I started another application. Again, nothing. After a minute of 10, I gave up. And tried to close it down. Then suddenly, after 15 minutes or so, the application I had started first finally actually started.

The hardware on that PC simply wasn't capable of running OS/2 with a decent speed, it turned out. It took almost 10 to 15 minutes to start an application!

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The Windows vs. OS/2 "wars" were even worse!

Oh, that was just a noisy rear guard action by a bunch of system integration fans and computer scientists. IBM lost that game in the first inning, when they pinned their hopes on system integration ("A better DOS than DOS, better Windows than Windows") instead of application developers and end users. (Plus, there was the DRAM conspiracy...)

The CLI war on the other hand was universal; everybody was involved, Atari and Commodore, ARM and Apricot, Lotus, Wordperfect, Apple, Microsoft...
There was Windows vs GEOS vs GEM vs MAC vs XWindows...
The CLI war pitted software guys vs each other, hardware camp vs hardware camp, user vs user, even the Apple fans were divided.
Total war.
Entire companies died in that war. Lots of them.

By comparison Win95 vs Warp was a Hachette vs Amazon catfight: lots of sound and fury and whinging, little substance. The die was long cast...
Both users and software developers had placed theirs bets on Windows.

[Greg Anos]

But with emulators, the software lives on...(to quote myself - crappy immortality)

And so does XP...

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

The hardware on that PC simply wasn't capable of running OS/2 with a decent speed, it turned out. It took almost 10 to 15 minutes to start an application!

Sounds like a 1MB DRAM PC. Just enough to boot Presentation Manager.
OS/2 really needed 2MB to run one big app, 4MB to multitask, 8MB to strut its stuff.

And RAM was pricey: there was a $300 differential between the 1MB and 4MB boxes. And another $200 between the OSes. Plus the apps; lots for Windows, including emerging OFFICE, few for OS/2.

It was no contest.
Kludgey Windows 3.11 won in a landslide. It was the XP of the 90's.

The same dynamic was repeated in the short, barely noticed, UNIX vs NT Workstation war.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

But with emulators, the software lives on...(to quote myself - crappy immortality)

And so does XP...

Emulators, ah yes.
A big part of the CLI war. Those pretty much killed Atari and Commodore.

Microsoft wisely doesn't promote them.
Virtualization they support (probably grudgingly) but emulators undercut native apps.

Fun toys to play with, today, though.

Originally Posted by fjtorres

It was no contest.
Kludgey Windows 3.11 won in a landslide. It was the XP of the 90's.

Unless you had a modem. First with online services and then with the Internet, OS/2 provided a vastly superior solution to DOS and Windows 3.x. Even when Windows 95 came out, OS/2 had a bit of a lead since it took software developers a while to catch up in terms of performance and stability.

One of my favourite experiences was convincing my high school computer programming teacher to leave a computer configured to boot off of floppies, just so that I could use a stripped down version of OS/2 (no GUI). While a lot of students were constantly rebooting after their program took Windows 95 down with it, I was chugging along without major issues. Even when the board cracked down on that, the teacher let me program on the solitary NT server. Even in university, I managed to weasel my way into the grad student's Solaris lab as an undergraduate. While my peers were watching their Maple sessions take out Windows 95/98, I was able to use the Solaris computers to both get my work done and show the other where things went horribly wrong (thus enabling them to complete their projects).

While Windows 3.x and Windows 95 were sufficient for most people because it got the job done, people are forgetting how truly unstable those platforms were. Even when problems were a product of third party software, people are forgetting how the more rigorous memory protection of Unix, OS/2, and Windows NT enabled developers to detect and resolve memory addressing problems during the development phase. Thankfully, Microsoft has made incredible progress on that front.