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#11
As you say, Jeff, Microsoft absolutely does have a release date, and they will do exactly what they did with Vista. Marketing says you will not slip a date just to be sure the bugs are all gone! We told 'em Vista was too buggy to release, but Marketing had the release date written in stone. And that stone was tied around Vista's neck as it went down with the ship.
The same thing happened with Windows 7; however, someone did something right and although there were some bugs, the rest is history. Service Pack 1 took care of most of those bugs.
It seems to me that about every other OS release, we get a really nasty surprise. Look at Windows ME, Vista and Windows 8. Then take a look at Windows 98, XP and Windows 7. I'm thinking that Windows 7 will be the next XP for awhile.
And I do have high hopes for Windows 10.
Good grief, guy. You're gonna have every nutcase out to get ya with a moniker like that! Someone's gonna yell "Dogpile!" and you'll be buried alive!
Seriously, welcome to the forums, even though I think you can come up with a better name than that. :)
As the rest of us have said, there is most likely a release date written in stone by Microsoft Marketing, but none of us have been told when that is.
The best thing I can say is that I like Windows 10 (not you, the OS!) :) Sorry, couldn't resist. Too good to pass up.
I'm hoping to dual boot it on my desktop sometime soon, like maybe in a month or so.
I believe we've discussed this before. Vista's problems were not so much that it was buggy, although it certainly had some bugs at release, which were cleaned up very quickly in hotfixes and SP1. If it had just been that, they would have been quickly forgotten and everyone would have been fine with it.
No, Vista was a sort of perfect storm of many factors that had very little to do with the OS's quality. Some of the problems were design decisions, such as making UAC deliberately very "chatty" in order to force ISV's to fix their buggy apps (the idea was to make apps that required admin privileges so annoying that customers would put pressure on the vendors to fix them, and this worked really well, but at the cost of a huge bad reputation for Vista.
Another problem was that Vista had not been intended for low-end netbook sales, but Marketing insisted on pushing it at that market, largely because Intel forced them to. This lead to unsatisfied users because they were running Vista on under-spec'd machines.
The fact is, all products ship with known bugs. If they waited to ship until the product was bug-free, it would never ship. And Vista's release date had slipped many times, so it's not really fair to say that they wouldn't slip.. they did. Finally, they had to get something out, even if it wasn't perfect.
Another problem was the same problem Windows 8 had, in that it was deliberately sabotaged by the "Technorati". The bloggers, and sysadmins, and techies down the street found it trendy to rip on Vista (and Windows 8), sometimes even for reasons that they had no problem accepting in Linux or MacOS (such as running as a normal user and having to elevate, yet for some unknown reason they absolutely HAD to run as a privileged user all the time in Windows).
And thus, we see what SHOULD have been the case with Vista, had it not fallen prey to all the other issues.
Windows ME and 98 are totally different beasts. ME was never even supposed to exist, and was a stopgap because Windows 2000 wasn't consumer ready. So yeah, it was rushed out and was a pile of garbage.. because MS needed a release that worked on modern hardware for OEM's.
Windows 8 was actually a relatively stable release, it was just unpopular. It was also deliberately a transitional OS, as the Windows Runtime (ie WinRT or Modern infrastructure) was immature and still in development. Of course, all non-trivial software has bugs, and complex software like modern OS's have lots of bugs. The issue is whether those bugs are commonplace and affect a large percentage of the users.
Windows 10 is a more mature Windows 8, that's for sure. But Microsoft has to go through cycles where they introduce technologies and have to refine them... Clippy anyone? How about those automatic hiding menus in Windows 2000?
I'm afraid W10 is going to be a completely different ballgame, unlike anything else up til now. "Unifying" OS and all that jazz. Modified release cadence, different way of delivering updates and upgrades etc. Can't see any connection to 95 - 98 - ME or even 2000 - XP.
ME, I liked a lot but as only a stop-gap measure it didn't hang around long enough. Vista, I missed almost entirely save for a bit of a late try just to see how it works and what's all the commotion about it. Manged to get it working on surprisingly lo end HW and not too bad either. I already got Win7 at that time so unless you count my curiosity, it was pointless to me.
Hi there
The ONE thing that could be of interest to make W7 users migrate to W10 is the STORAGE SPACES feature incorporated from all releases of Windows 8 onwards.
With people having loads of HDD's around these days the crazy scheme of Drive C, D, E etc is becoming no longer fit for purpose (if it ever were in the first place).
Storage spaces allow you to aggregate numbers of HDD's (dynamically too) to "Storage Spaces" or Pools and unlike conventional RAID the HDD's can be of DIFFERENT sizes too. Great for large multi-media libraries for example --you could have say a 1.2TB Movie / Audio library spread out over 4 X 500 GB HDD's. The OS handles all the physical layouts so you just access your library in the normal way with File explorer. You can also use part of the space like RAID for data integrity -- but unlike RAID volumes can be of different sizes.
Note - you can also use EXTERNAL HDD's too for storage spaces - so those nice 2 TB external USB drives can be aggregated to say 2 X 2 TB (4 TB storage space). This makes a nice area plus part for recovery for those fast USB 3 drives.
I'm surprised hardly anything has been mentioned about this incredibly useful addition.
Cheers
jimbo
Hi there
you can define a % to be used as a "safety area".
if an HDD in the array starts failing the data can usually get recovered and you can dynamically remove an HDD and replace it.
My experience with modern HDD's is that they don't fail very often and provided you take backups regularly you shouldn't have any problems.
The consensus seems to be reserve about 20% for "recovery". Note that data is spread evenly across the array so recovery isn't a mega problem usually. Of course one can always have a "Catastrophic Failure" but if your backup system is robust then you should be OK.
Cheers
jimbo
Tnx, Jibmo, I was just asking as a matter of interest because of my case where I have a bunch of external HDDs mostly with backups on them and 3 HDDs inside the case. They are all of different sizes and couple are IDE, so it would not be too practical for me.
I once setup a mirror drive, thinking I wouldn't need to do backups... (this was a long time ago). Well, one day my power supply literally exploded. I heard a huge bang. Anyways, the power surge fried both drives (and the motherboard) so lesson was learned the hard way. There is no replacement for good physically seperate backups.