Happy Birthday Windows 7

October 22

[bill]

Windows 7 was released October 22, 2009. [webmasterworld.com] According to Microsoft, Windows 7 is the fastest selling operating system in history with 240 million licenses sold.

Microsoft is celebrating with a blog post that contains Top 7 lists of various Windows bloggers along with top 7 tweets, press quotes, etc. You get the idea...

Celebrating Windows 7 at 1 Year [windowsteamblog.com]

Today’s an exciting day! We are announcing that more than 240 million licenses of Windows 7 have been sold. Windows 7 is the fastest selling operating system in history. As of September, Windows 7 was running on 93% of new consumer PCs and has over 17% global OS market share (according to Net Applications as of October 1st). There is an amazing array of great PCs out on the market today. Six months after launch, 100% (over 18,000) of our OEM partners were selling Windows 7 PCs versus 70% for Windows Vista PCs at a comparable time period.

[Tom_Cash]

It has to be said, that for Windows, this is a decent OS. Happy Birthday 7!

[Status_203]

It has to be said that, well... it's better than Vista.

Still get more grief trying to configure it (especially networking - wired and wireless) than Ubuntu though (and given that Windows is only kept on the machine for games that grief comes from very little configuration.

Why, why, why does it "forget" how to connect to our wireless network every so often? And then insist all valid connection details are invalid?

In my more paranoid moments, I wonder whether MS have learnt from the XP->Vista debacle and have gone back to making the interface confusing, and functionality intermittent, in order to ensure that people will always upgrade to the next version in the hope that it will fix the issues!

[ByronM]

Are you sure its windows 7 forgetting your wireless network and not some cheesy wifi driver that tries to replace the built in Win7 wireless functionality?

I'm on the go a lot with my win7 laptop and it never flinches with any wireless network i find / use / maintain

Happy bday win7

[dataguy]

Happy birthday, Windows 7, though we've never met, and I doubt we ever will!

[edited by: dataguy at 3:13 pm (utc) on Oct 22, 2010]

[bhonda]

Well done, Microsoft.

It's good to see a company come back after a hiccup like Vista.

[Rugles]

I am running it at home and a couple of machines on our office network. It is really good. There is a bit of a learning curve when it comes to networking it but its worth the effort.

We completely skipped Vista and stuck with XP Pro.

[incrediBILL]

It's good to see a company come back after a hiccup like Vista.

Windows 7 is solid, so is my Vista machine.

Never did see any of the issues others complained about, it's up and running for months without reboot, works flawlessly and so does the Win 7 machine.

Of course I'm running full 64-bit with plenty of RAM which may make a difference, who knows, but I'm very happy with both machines :)

[bill]

Although I like Windows 7 and use it on many of my machines, my main workstation runs on 64-bit Vista, and my primary home machine is still on XP. I actually prefer the Vista for its layout. It's also one of the most stable OSs I've run. Like incrediBILL, I have a lot of power on my Vista workstation and so I never came across any of the problems that most people complained about.

[jimh009]

With enough power - and knowing how to turn off the horrible UAC - Vista works great. Still...I have Windows 7 sitting on my shelf, patiently waiting until the day arrives when my HD crashes, forcing a reformatting. Then it will be time to upgrade. Unfortunately, vista has proven so stable on my laptop that I've begun to wonder that once that day arrives if another Windows OS already be out by then!

Speaking of...does anyone know what Microsoft plans to follow up Windows 7 with, and when? I'm assuming MSFT won't be waiting six years between major upgrades again like what happened between XP and Vista.

[atom42]

I was such a fan of XP, I resisted the upgrade to Vista. Moving from XP to windows 7 was a bit of a leap for me, but I'm absolutely glad I did it. I think they've done a fantastic job with this OS.

Only thing I wish it had, was a built in/always on screen grabber, like my mac has. It's a nice touch, which I use a lot.

On the other hand, I use the snap feature all the time - and on a mac you have to download and pay for software that does this (Sizeup by irradiated software).

Happy birthday indeed. Look forward to picking up my goodie bag as I leave.

[rocketfuel]

For my main machine, I have used Microsoft operating systems since the 1980's. I have worked at M$, I have been a partner, I have evangelised MS to my friends.

I currently use 1 Win7 laptop, an Ubuntu netbook, a hackintosh, a Win 2k8 server and 3 linux servers. As a human, I am biased, but I do like to spread the love.

For a *very* long time, Windows XP was easily the best desktop OS there was. I love and use Linux every day, but normal humans can't edit xorg.conf. Macs are high-quality machines, and the OS is beautiful to use, but I get frustrated by the lack of options.

I ran vista since the day of RTM, and I was not pleased. As I said, I am pro-MS, and I still hate that OS. I made an agreement with myself: if Windows 7 didn't do the trick, I was gonna get a Mac.

Windows 7 did the trick.

Win7 is an achievement. It doesn't crash, ever. I install drivers that have warnings on the download page, and it still doesn't crash. I periodically get pleased when I discover some new usability improvement.

In this day and age, with all the cloud stuff etc., for how long will the OS matter? For most people I know, it doesn't any more. Every OS, and any computer less than 5 years old, can do everything that the majority needs. Gamers and nerds are the only people who need faster CPU's (I am talking desktop here). I am a massive nerd and my computer is 2 years old- 8gb ram and an SSD make it do everything I need without any delay or frustration.

Anyway, enough drunken rambling. Win 7 is a triumph, and congratulations to the many hundreds who worked so hard to give it to me.

[PCInk]

Windows 7 doesn't crash, that does seem to be correct!

But I am another having problems with networking. The LAN will not connect to anything. Just on "Identifying", then decides there is no cable attached so disconnects. Then back to "Identifying" again. Endless loop. Microsoft haven't got a clue what the problem is. I've never, ever, had a problem with a LAN connection before on any computer!

[outrun]

PCInk try the following commands in the command line as Administrator

netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt
netsh winsock reset

[PCInk]

Thank you! That seemed to work! Must save that in a file somewhere now.

It seems you know more about Microsoft software than Microsoft!

[graeme_p]

normal humans can't edit xorg.conf

Normal humans cannot edit the Windows registry either (I assume its still there?), and you are much more likely to need to edit the Windows registry than you are to edit xorg and similar on Linux.

I recently did the same config change on Mandriva Linux and Windows Vista. On Vista I needed to use a text editor to add a line to the hosts file, on Mandriva I did it though a GUI. I also found it a lot harder to install software on Vista (I am still looking for a GUI app that actually works that will rsync backup a server to a Vista desktop).

[incrediBILL]

@graeme_p: never used it, but try grsync (gui rsync) [opbyte.it...]

If it works you owe me a beer ;)

[graeme_p]

I tried Grsync first, because that what I use on Linux. I cannot remember exactly why it did not work because I tried Grsync, CWRsync and Deltacopy before giving up, but I could not get any of them as far as connecting to the server over ssh.

It was my first attempt at installing something on Windows for years, and it did not go well. I have decided Windows is to complicated for me and someone else can try to get it working.

I'll definitely buy you a beer anyway, all you have to do is turn up in my part of the world to collect it!

[incrediBILL]

I cannot remember exactly why it did not work because I tried Grsync, CWRsync and Deltacopy before giving up, but I could not get any of them as far as connecting to the server over ssh.

Can you get SSH to work from windows using Putty or something?

I don't remember what I had to disable, but there was a setting you have to disable, possibly in the Windows firewall, to enable SSH to work.

Once you get that done, Grsync should fly.