[Dragon]

I'd be OK with them charging money for 8 if they then gave all it's users Windows 10 for free. Same deal as with Vista/7. The latter was a service pack for the former in all but a name. They shouldn't be changing full price just for that. It does seem that 10 is going to go the same route.

[jr2]

7 should have been free for Vista users.

[S-99]

It'd be cool if microsoft had an experimental release before official release. Oh right, they have had that for years; betas. I mean something similar, but only for the testing of ideas and experimentation, and not for bug testing for official release. That way you can find out what your audience wants first, get it stable at the same time, resulting in an official release of something that's not ****.

Linux does this all the time through official releases of a distro. A lot of distributions are releasing new experimental releases, with the next distro being fine tuned for stability and usability. Mandriva, ubuntu, and other distributions do this. An example i can bring to mind is ubuntu with every xx.04 release (april release) tends to just be a rehash of the previous with maybe some new features offered. I've always considered every april release of ubuntu to be more or less an intended stable product, whereas the previous was just a beta (i do wish that ubuntu openly stated that every october release was a beta; i have considered them a figuratively yearly release distro for a while). They can get away with it because linux is free. And that's more or less how linux gets things done; microsoft is different. Microsoft is where you pay, and if you don't, get ready for loss of support in whatever is microsoft's due time.

[Dragon]

7 should have been free for Vista users.

It shouldn't even be called "Windows 7". They should've called it "Vista SP3", because that's what it was. A large-ish service pack.

[deathspeed]

7 should have been free for Vista users.

It shouldn't even be called "Windows 7". They should've called it "Vista SP3", because that's what it was. A large-ish service pack.

They knew that with the bad rep that Vista already had, that would never sell.  By the time I got Vista, a lot of the issues and drivers had been worked out, and I had no problems with it.  Yet I still jumped to 7 when it came out. 

If MS is serious about wanting people to get their new OS (and ditch XP), they need to make it free, or at least drastically reduce the cost (under $25).  My parent's old PC is running just fine on XP.  It even works with Vista (I had it dual-booting for a while) so it should work with newer OS's.  They aren't about to plop down a hundred dollars to upgrade a nine-year old PC's OS, but they also are not going to get rid of this PC as long as it works.  If the new OS was cheap or free, I could probably convince them.  Otherwise they will use XP until the cows come home.

[S-99]

If they did make it free, we should beware microsoft big brother terms.

At least windows hasn't moved onto being only monthly subscription based.

[Mongoose]

Funnily enough I think that was the original plan for XP, thus the "XPerience" part of it.

[Klaustrophobia]

If they did make it free, we should beware microsoft big brother terms.

as if they aren't already doing that.

[Colonol Dekker]

Win 98 ftw.


I like 7.


But anything beats iphone.

[jr2]

http://www.iclarified.com/41824/pangu-untethered-jailbreak-of-ios-711-has-been-released

Jailbreak it and let your iPhone breath freely.  :yarr:

[Dragon]

They knew that with the bad rep that Vista already had, that would never sell. 

Err... how do you sell a free update? They could have called it "Vista 2" or something, similar to "Windows 8.1" to boost sales, but that's it. Basically, a name that would not say "We made a new OS!" but one that would say "We finally fixed Vista!". TBH, I didn't see a whole lot of difference between 7 and Vista. Sure, installing it freed some HD space, performance got a slight boost and the calculator is neater, but that's about it.

[Edhotmetal]

TBH, I didn't see a whole lot of difference between 7 and Vista. Sure, installing it freed some HD space, performance got a slight boost and the calculator is neater, but that's about it.

And the huge UI overhaul

[Aardwolf]

and the calculator is neater

I don't like Win7 calc as much as the older versions. It used to be you set it to scientific mode and it had everything; now it's got scientific mode and programmer mode and statistics mode, and they all have different subsets of the features, and you can't switch between them without it losing your stuff.

[Dragon]

Well, I like the unit converter. Handy when you're modding realistic rockets in KSP and want to convert some weird American/Russian units to SI. For anything that would require anything more elaborate than that and Scientific mode can provide, I just use Mathematica.

And the huge UI overhaul

I didn't like that, TBH. My Vista was highly customized to my liking, and after switching, I simply had to do that again, restore the quick-start bar, etc... Pretty much why I didn't care much for Win8's flaws, I suppose (though, to my annoyance, some things proven unchangeable in that one).