What Would I Give Up If I Go To Windows 7?

[Abby Brown]

Hi,

We have XP running on all our home and corporate computers and
are happy with it. But it seems the clock is ticking and some
new software and hardware products don't support XP. I didn't
like Vista so retrograded my laptop to XP after a year. Every
new OS drops some things from its predecessor that causes
problems. One I am concerned about is NT4 File Manager (works
in XP, needs hack in Vista). Another is performance counters; I
wrote a program to display network activity (or any other
counters) at the top of the screen. The counters weren't
available in Vista Premium. Will I give these up? What else
have you had to give up?

Thanks,
Gary

 

[Pegasus [MVP]]

Hi,

We have XP running on all our home and corporate computers and are happy
with it. But it seems the clock is ticking and some new software and
hardware products don't support XP. I didn't like Vista so retrograded my
laptop to XP after a year. Every new OS drops some things from its
predecessor that causes problems. One I am concerned about is NT4 File
Manager (works in XP, needs hack in Vista). Another is performance
counters; I wrote a program to display network activity (or any other
counters) at the top of the screen. The counters weren't available in
Vista Premium. Will I give these up? What else have you had to give up?

Thanks,
Gary

Here are a few things you will have to give up:
- All 16-bit programs, unless the BIOSs of your machines support the Windows
XP compatibility mode.
- Write-access to c:\Program Files.
- Write-access to the root of C:.
- Utilities that do nasty things such as feeding passwords into "runas" or
attempt to write directly to the disk.
- The WinXP versions of some third-party programs such as partition managers
or imaging tools.
- A lot of disk space. WinXP got by with 10 GBytes. Windows 7 needs 40.
- An easy way to repair the boot environment. It is no longer sufficient to
run "fdisk /MBR", then drop a few boot files into the root of C:.

On the other hand, as you say, the clock is ticking . . .

 

[Erik Vastmasd]

We have XP running on all our home and corporate computers and
are happy with it. But it seems the clock is ticking and some
new software and hardware products don't support XP. I didn't
like Vista so retrograded my laptop to XP after a year. Every
new OS drops some things from its predecessor that causes
problems. One I am concerned about is NT4 File Manager (works
in XP, needs hack in Vista). Another is performance counters; I
wrote a program to display network activity (or any other
counters) at the top of the screen. The counters weren't
available in Vista Premium. Will I give these up? What else
have you had to give up?

I didn't give up anything. I was using XP and purchased a new computer
which I partitioned into C: D: E: drives.
Then installed C:\ Windows 7.
I regard Windows 7 as an operation system and expect nothing else.
I copied my programs to D: and my music to E: and away we go.

Most programs on D: don't need to be installed, I can just create a
shortcut, then click on it and the program fires up.

MSMoney, Opera. Eudora etc.

 

[Thee Chicago Wolf [MVP]]

Hi,

We have XP running on all our home and corporate computers and
are happy with it. But it seems the clock is ticking and some
new software and hardware products don't support XP. I didn't
like Vista so retrograded my laptop to XP after a year. Every
new OS drops some things from its predecessor that causes
problems. One I am concerned about is NT4 File Manager (works
in XP, needs hack in Vista). Another is performance counters; I
wrote a program to display network activity (or any other
counters) at the top of the screen. The counters weren't
available in Vista Premium. Will I give these up? What else
have you had to give up?

Thanks,
Gary

Unless you use some ancient DOS programs (which *might* still work
ok), nothing much. I've been using Windows 7 64-bit and all my 32-bit
apps run well and without issue. If you have a system that can use
64-bit, go that route from the get-go and you'll be future-proof.

- Thee Chicago Wolf [MVP]