Re: Why are PC sales declining ? (Skybuck thoughts on it too)

Yup. I believe abandoning XP was a major mistake.

Quote "Not surprisingly, users may not downgrade to the still-used-but-slated-for-retirement Windows XP".

Big mistake.

Perhaps, but allowing downgrading to Win7-64 means there's a chance I might buy a Win8 computer in the next year or two. Otherwise, there is approximately zero chance.

I was tempted a few times to buy a new one because I can get roughly 2x the simulation speed with more cores. But right now I cannot risk a major interruption because some OS-incompatibility precludes me from running SW or connected hardware that I really need. With some SW I was explicitly told that there's issues with Win-7.

Yes, Win7. I regard myself pretty experienced at computing, I have ended up supporting a couple of dozen others, been a "power user" since DOS and have run linux for 10+ years. Done countless reinstalls and cleanups.

The first time I got hold of a windows 8 machine, I was stumped. I literally had to do a google search every time (from another machine!) just to do the simplest thing. It is really, really, bad.

(trimmed to s.e.d.)

Yup.

I try to maintain exactly two major versions of Microsoft operating systems on my machines at any given moment. I'm not ready yet to give up entirely on XP, so Win7-64 and XP-32 are the two. There's a real advantage to having a 64-bit O/S with lots of usable RAM for some stuff- and XP will no longer be supported for many pieces of engineering sofware such as Solidworks (beyond 2013) and Solid Edge (current version ST5 will not install on XP).

Win8 strikes me as perhaps ending up more of a stepping stone, like ME or Vista, that might be best stepped over, but (other people's) time will tell. I sure don't want (nor do I want anyone else) to touch my monitors with slimy greasy fingers, so the tablet features are not very interesting for a desktop system.

They have to retire it at some point and Win7 is perfectly stable (unlike Vista) and Vista was never quite as bad as it was painted. MS Office 2007 was far more of a dog's dinner at initial release but didn't take anything like the same amount of heat.

Corporates that I know are only just now upgrading to Win7 as MS is trying to push Win8. They are stuck on some prehistoric browser because some other MS intranet product is wildly incompatible with newer ones!

Buy one while you can still get the downgrade to Win7-64 Pro.

Do the sums to decide which CPU has the best bang per buck when you decide to buy. My current PC is a nominally games machine with an i7-3770K and *no* graphics card installed - just using the CPUs fast 2D graphics. It is astonishingly frugal on power unless working very hard. Plenty fast enough for any simulations and the 4 core i5-3570 would be almost as good for programs that don't use hyperthreading efficiently.

The law of diminishing returns sets in for >4 processing units anyway.

If you don't want realtime 3d rendering for action games animation the graphics card isn't strictly necessary. The manufacturer had some difficulty believing the specification that I requested.

The underlying driving force for the computer business is Moore's law. It DEPENDS on more and more and more. Once you have 10X the computing power you need, there's no incentive to buy new stuff.

Apple realized this early and created a (paid) content delivery vehicle. Android made it available at lower cost. You don't buy stuff any more...you pay a continuing ongoing, ever-increasing subscription for the privilege of connecting to the network and for what you use when you get there.

M$ is trying to rent you "office". Reception hasn't been warm, but it's coming.

Won't be long before you won't need a user name and password to log in. Inserting your credit card will take care of all that...accompanied by the gentle "ding-ding" of the cash register app totaling up the charges in the background. The kids who grew up with a cellphone in each hand won't even blink...they'll just pay the bill and keep on tweeting.

Microsoft must FORCE you, kicking and screaming, into that paradigm. I'd bet that "pressing the XP kill switch" comes up at every strategy meeting. As soon as the perceived backlash is acceptable, it will happen. "The XP activation site is no longer available. Your XP license has expired...your computer will be crippled in 30 days. Click here to purchase and update to windows 12... sorry for any inconvenience." ... ... Your hardware is incompatible with Windows 12. Click here to purchase "Surface"...we're still sorry...

Windows 8 is inevitable. Their problem was not doing it earlier. That's gonna cost 'em.

Not with me :-)

Nope, their mom and dad pay the bills. Then when the kids come of age it'll hit them. "Oh s..t! I can't make ends meet". Pretty soon they move back in with their parents. I see it left and right, happens more and more. 40- and 50-year olds living with mom and dad. Why? Because they "need" a $60/mo cell plan, a $150/mo gym membership, a $80/mo cable TV package, Netflix, TiVo, Apps, Tunes, car payments, and on and on. It eats them alive and they have no clue what is eating them alive.

Then it could be like with servers. They lost a big chunk of that market.

It started in the 90's. We were hardcore in the market for an RTOS. Windows was touting CE but at the Embedded Conference they were unable to answer the bulk of our technical questions, instead constantly pointing to "partners", some of whom weren't there. So we picked another OS. And so did lots of others. They could have had it all back then but really blew it IMHO. CE fizzled, which was not at all a surprise to me.

Then they had the golden opportunity to build a phone, together with Nokia, that could have been largely compatible with a PC. We all know the results. If I needed a smart phone and there was one that could run most of my regularly used PC programs I'd buy. That feature alone could actually convince me to "need" one because it finally would enbale people to leave their netbooks at home on short trips.

As a company one should cling to products that simply work and then build upon them instead of tossing everything for a brand new design. For Microsoft that is (or was) XP. Just like the Rabbit or Golf for Volkswagen. Except that Volkswagen was smarter and kept it.

If a tech company's stock price is more or less flat for well over 10 years then people in there should put on their thinking caps.

Chilling picture you have painted with this "paid content delivery vehicle". I complain about the $45 dollar internet "month after month after month" bill. Then there's the cable TV bill, and the phone, the water/sewer/garbage, insurance, etc. I have acquaintance to a lot of bums, The only stress they have is getting there next meal or beer, and where are they going to sleep. Kinda like early man, except their not slaying animals for food.

Oh, I think the slide in PC sales has to do with mobile. I have a friend that got a smart phone from his daughter and now he rarely uses his home computer. My daughter has a smart phone and use her laptop only if she has a long email to type. Her hubby still uses the laptop, but for Youtube videos mostly. And as you know Youtube videos can be accessed on many TV's now and more in the future.

Mikek

Along with so many people out of work, and no decent job on the horizon.

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Thanks John, George H.

I never had to resort to it, but when you use the Pro or higher version of Win 7, you get the right to download a VM of XP.

This should be the link:

I don't know of anyone who regretted switching to win7. The incompatibility issues are more like pilot error. You run into confusion with the virtual stores, so installation sometimes can be tricky. For some programs, I don't allow them to be stored in the default location. Once you leave that default location, the programs install like "normal." Win7 doesn't like binaries plopped into the Program Files directory in some cases. So you create a "bin" directory for programs that don't have an installer.

This isn't rocket science.

You wish they would turn off XP, but they won't. Come April 2014, the remaining XP machines will be pwned. Then starts the attack of the 'bot net.

There are still people out there with win95! The virus writers depend on junk OSs to infect.

Reception in the UK to that move by Microsoft has been pretty hostile. I don't know of any corporates even thinking about it.

I think Microsoft will probably have to relent again on the XP discontinuation - there are just too many really big corporates dragging their heals on it. Otherwise they will find third party hackers supporting it - and/or they will get the blame for the wild botnets on a large unmaintained rump of hackable XP computers on the net. Stats today show a high proportion of XP still in web traffic.

Weblogs for connections show something like:

Win7 33%, iPad 20%, XP 20%, Unknown 15% iPhone, Vista, Linux 5% NT, Android 2%

Win8 might be hiding in "unknown" I suppose, or is not on the radar.

Browsers are similar.

IE 33%, Safari 25%, Unknown 20%, Chrome 15%, Firefox 10%, ...

What do you get for that? Unlimited use of dedicated fibre back to the cabinet? A typical price in the UK would be $30+ for business or as low as $5 for a home user. The early adopter price was about $25 way back.

BT Infinity 38Mbps including TV and all phone calls is about £40 pcm.

I think the desktop or under desk PC is largely dead for consumers now. They may buy some sort of quiet media centre box to store programmes and stream music on but they don't need to use it for general computing.

Laptops still hold some market share but Android is making rapid inroads into the market with small cheap sexy tablets.

There are probably better makers of a gaming machine and it is well worthwhile looking at the local computer magazine reviews. You could put one together from parts with your son depending on what level of aptitude he shows for electronics. Decent project for a keen teenager with knowledgable adult supervision (ie unlike the OP).

I agree. Win8 is a PITA for experts and beginners alike. If you enjoy a frustrating user interface designed by an acid crazed cubist go ahead. Otherwise insist on a downgrade to Win7 64bit and perhaps Mickeysoft will eventually get the message (but I seriously doubt it).

Snap! Glad it wasn't just me that found it impossible to navigate. The problem I was trying to fix was that my neighbours brand new machine wasn't getting internet routing. This made all the helpful "helps" and wizards that go off connecting to the net extremely annoying!

Absolutely and possibly a heftier power supply to feed it with juice. The graphics card in gaming machines frequently has more dissipation and CPU computing power than the main for the right sorts of problems.

You can actually buy software libraries to use certain GPUs as array processors for scientific simulation problems and cryptography.

There are dedicated makers of gaming machines who at least in the UK are competitive as high end PC makers. Provided you don't mind having a computer invoice for a Ice Warrior MegaDeath or something equally crazy they can be pretty good value for money and very high performance.

And very reliable indeed if you take a machine that is designed to be overclocked and run it at the stock speed, cool and quiet. I opted for one with *no* graphics card and they took a lot of persuading...

There also some problems with older programs that baulk at spaces inside directory names and file permissions in the Program Files sub directories if they insist on having write access to files in there.

No but I can see why it can be confusing where certain installers of major programs failed spectacularly on Win7 at the outset.

Win7 64bit seems to be a bit more tetchy about running elderly programs with legacy quirks outside of a virtual XP environment - thatis why it is worth having the Pro version if you have important old software. (a surprising amount actually works without problems, but not all)

On Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:23:14 -0700 mike wrote in Message id: :

That's not going to happen. Microsoft has stated publicly that when they shut down the activation servers for XP, that a patch will be released that will removes the activation requirement.

That should see the number of installed copies of XP double overnight!

I understand that it's what they said. But you sniped the rest of the scenario. If software you want won't run on xp, you're still screwed. Win8 obsoleted 90% of my computers (P4) by requiring NX-bit support. They did it in the name of security, but it was a conscious decision to force hardware upgrades. Pre-release win8 ran fine without it. That also starts another ripple that seeks to inhibit other OS's with the secure boot stuff. It's all about spin.

Bottom line is that the old way of faster and faster has run out of steam. The game user is the only part of the end-user desktop demographic that still needs faster and faster.

They gotta force obsolescence on the rest of us. They will find a way.

Good point! But the ping-pong advances in hardware and software make it unprofitable for hardware vendors to update drivers. It's a win-win for everybody but the end user.

I'd still be using Win2K if it had hardware drivers.