For Boot Camp Users, New Macs Require Windows 8 Or Newer 209
For anyone using Windows 7 by way of Apple's Boot Camp utility, beware: support for Windows via Boot Camp remains, but for the newest Apple laptops, it's only for Windows 8 for now. From Slashgear:
This applies to the 2015 MacBook Air, and the 13-inch model of the 2015 MacBook Pro. Windows 8 will remain compatible, as will the forthcoming Windows 10. The 2013 Mac Pro also dropped Boot Camp support for Windows 7, while 2014 iMacs are still compatible, along with 2014 MacBook Airs and 2014 MacBook Pros.
For those who still prefer to run Windows 7 on their Macs, there are other options. This change to Boot Camp will not affect using the Microsoft operating system through virtualization software, such as Parallels and VMware Fusion. Also at PC Mag.
Running only Windows on a Mac (Score:2, Interesting)
I've always been curious if there is ever going to be a clean way of running straight windows on a macbook air (ideally Windows 10).
The air form factor is fantastic and really is actually cost competitive with what others put out when compared to quality (apple does have volume) despite all those who say you can get a macbook air equivalent PC for $300, I've never found one that works right.
For work reasons though I'm stuck with windows... so I'd love to skip the whole bootcamp thing entirely... but still n
Re:Running only Windows on a Mac (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Running only Windows on a Mac (Score:5, Informative)
In my experience the Surface Pro tablets cost more because the price they list doesn't include the keyboard, which it alone is anywhere from $150 to $200.
Re:Running only Windows on a Mac (Score:5, Informative)
The base $799 model also comes with less SSD space and a slower processor. That may or may not matter for you, but is worth looking at. For me 64GB of space (what the entry-level Surface Pro 3 has) is getting to be tight.
To get a rough spec equivalent to the MacBook Air, which comes with an i5 CPU, 128GB SSD, and a keyboard, you have to spend about $1100 on the Surface Pro 3, which is a bit pricier than the $899 MacBook Air.
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To get a rough spec equivalent to the MacBook Air, which comes with an i5 CPU, 128GB SSD, and a keyboard, you have to spend about $1100 on the Surface Pro 3, which is a bit pricier than the $899 MacBook Air.
Sure, the Surface Pro is more expensive than a Macbook Air of similar performance levels, but that's because you're paying for a larger, higher-resolution (2160px wide vs 1440) touchscreen, with a detachable keyboard..... so you don't have to go buy a separate tablet for commuting or kicking around at home or whatever. You may end up saving money overall.
Microsoft has also said that Surface Pro 3 keyboards are going to be compatible with the upcoming Surface 4, so if you're a chronic upgrader (or your Su
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I've used the Surface Pro keyboard covers, both cheap and expensive. It's amazing that anyone who's actually used one would tout that piece of crap as a feature. It's horrible!
And seriously - who wants to lug around a two pound tablet? if you want a Windows laptop, just get one of those Yoga things.
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Speak for yourself. The type cover is light and does the job perfectly. It's no IBM model M but it's on par and a shitload better than some laptops out there. As for who wants to lug around a two pound tablet? I ask you a different question: Who wants to lug around a 2 pound laptop AND a 1 pound tablet.
I have a small light tablet and an older laptop. I've used neither and taken neither out of my house since getting a Surface. If you're buying a Surface to replace just the laptop, or just the tablet then you
MacBook Air OK for software development (Score:2)
... horrible trash that are unusable for anything but email and office productivity software ...
Actually a MacBook Air is just fine for software development. At least for iOS and Android development. For Mac OS and Windows app development it would depend on the app. To be honest I normally use a MacBook Pro but on the road I've occasionally used a colleague's MacBook Air. I was pleasantly surprised. For a couple colleagues it is their normal dev system. External monitors and keyboards/mice used at home and their office; used with internal display, keyboard and trackpad on the road and at client's.
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Apple is not for gaming, that's it.
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Honestly I'm not a fan of gaming laptops at all. I've had one before, and it sounds nice on paper, but it ends up being so heavy and such a battery hog that you end up leaving it on a desk all the time anyways and never carry it anywhere except for special occasions.
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MSRP is $130 for a Surface Pro 3 keyboard. They generally sell for under $100, sometimes under $80 if you don't mind one of the less popular colors or getting a refurbished one. I'm not sure where you're getting this $200 figure from, but it's significantly off-base.
Further, the Surface Pro doesn't have a hard requirement that you use Microsoft's keyboard. You can use any bluetooth or USB input devices you'd like.
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I have a "Type"-style (the same sort the Pro 3 uses) purple cover for my Pro 2. I paid $58 for it on Amazon. I actually wanted purple but I could've gotten a pink one even cheaper. Would I take a refurbished keyboard? No question that I would. We use other people's keyboards all the damned time, especially those of us who have an IT support component to our jobs (or for that matter anyone who has ever used an ATM). Am I looking places besides major retailers? No I am not. If you can't find one at a signific
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The new Dell XPS 13 (2015 version) is a pretty solid contender for "best Macbook Air-like device that runs Windows 8". Either that or the new X250 Thinkpad. I own the X230 and will probably pick up the XPS 13 to replace it here soon. It has a keyboard, the base model costs the same as a MBA, and has a 1080p screen. Hard to beat. The high end model has some insane 3200x1800 touchscreen which Win8 actually scales pretty well.
Dell XPS 13 (Score:3)
I've worked with one of these, and it is very sweet. Honest PC alternative to a Macbook. I'm no fanboi (I use both platforms), but PC laptops have been flimsy plastic throwaway junk for years, whereas apple builds reliable, solid, throw-it-in-the-bag and go with no McAfee crapware to deal with. The Dell comes with a little McAfee crapware to uninstall, but in every other respect it is the first decent PC laptop I've seen in a long while.
Quality costs. The XPS with 8.1 non-Pro, 8GB RAM, the lower-resolu
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I'll concur with that, in fact I'll say it's way better than the macbook air. Just the SP3 isn't IMO.
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If you mean $130 at a time when there's no discounts running (I've regularly seen them $30 off). Then sure.
Hardly the major calamity considering the device is a fully convertible tablet and the device it is being compared to is not even remotely similar.
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also "They have to use a dongle for USB ports!!... That's a $79 accessory!!!"
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Only if one is not intent on running Windows ON A MAC. It's to be presumed that you wouldn't run Boot Camp if you just wanted to have a system that runs Windows.
If you must run Windows on a Mac, is there a problem with running it in Virtualbox instead of Boot Camp?
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"For work reasons though I'm stuck with windows... so I'd love to skip the whole bootcamp thing entirely... but still need the drivers.."
The EFI firmware on a Mac can either emulate BIOS (like any standard EFI firmware) or on more recent Macs, do a UEFI boot. That means any OS, including Windows, that can do a BIOS or EFI boot, can run natively on a Mac. I have a friend who runs Linux on his Mac. I also have friends who run Mac Pros running Windows only because at the time Apple was getting special deals on
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The problem is the drivers.
They won't be signed for Windows 7 and therefore won't load. Also I believe Apple uses ancient intel EFI not standard UEFI that is on modern boards. However, my information could be very outdated so someone can correct me if I am wrong as this was the case late last decade.
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The problem is the drivers.
They won't be signed for Windows 7 and therefore won't load. Also I believe Apple uses ancient intel EFI not standard UEFI that is on modern boards. However, my information could be very outdated so someone can correct me if I am wrong as this was the case late last decade.
Newer Macs can definitely UEFI boot (older Macs notably can not UEFI boot Windows, although they will present it as an option.) Internally, I don't think it's standard UEFI internally. But it exposes UEFI 2.0 functionality to perform booting. I was trying to look up some more info, as I UEFI boot Windows 8 on my Macbook Pro, but no one seems to really keep track of the exact EFI standard Apple implements, if any. I know my 2009 Macbook Pro cannot EFI boot Windows, but my 2013 Macbook Pro can.
While it's poss
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you can't boot it up in the "unsigned drivers are ok" mode then?
that's one of the things that suck with windows 8/8.1.. going to the place to do that is a fucking chore so installing some cheapo duinos(or hell a makerbot replicator) is a chore.
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>> I've always been curious if there is ever going to be a clean way of running straight windows....
There's no clean way of running windows anyway :)
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I've always been curious if there is ever going to be a clean way of running straight windows on a macbook air (ideally Windows 10).
Eh? "Bootcamp" is straight Windows. It isn't a virtualiser like VMWare or Parallels. Its just a point and drool wizard to set up a 'dual boot' system. If you want to do it manually I'm sure there are instructions out on the Interweb.
but still need the drivers..
Last time I looked, Bootcamp Assistant had an option to download the Windows drivers as a disc image.
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My understanding is some of the problems people have is that macs often have customized hardware. It might be a Nivida X card but with their own special crap added to support a non-standard connector say. Anyways the bootcamp version does a bunch of crap that makes windows suck more than it needs to on a mac. Ex from what I heard: fans in mac book pros often run full speed all the time in windows but proper power management happens when running OSX. They also do things that are kind of arbitrary like only s
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My understanding is it isn't the hardware: Bootcamp has crappy drivers for windows side of things and things that would make sense like having the fan slow down under light load and such only work when running OSX. Apple then gets to claim 10hr battery life and when people complain about 3-4 hour battery life in windows Apple gets another chance to say why they are better.
Another example (might be MSs fault, Apple's, graphics card maker (ATI for this version?)) but the retina iMac 5k but only in OSX. There
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Unless you want to play a windows game or do something else like 3d modeling in which case it's actually quite handy.
Not just Apple laptops, No drivers for new laptops (Score:5, Insightful)
Which isn't surprising considering (Score:2)
It is time to stop selling 7 now. Windows operates on a 10 year lifecycle, split in half. After the first 5 years it goes in to "extended support" meaning patches but no new features. So that's a good time to stop selling it. Also, you don't want to sell a laptop with an OS that will go completely out of support right away and require an upgrade. Again, a reason to stop selling it.
Hence new systems are going 8 only for support.
Also, despite the whining, it is a fine OS. It's only real issue is the start scr
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Also, despite the whining, it is a fine OS. It's only real issue is the start screen is inefficient to us. Not impossible, not insurmountable, just inefficient. You can use a system with it just fine. What's more, it is a real easy problem to fix. Buy Start 8, or get Classic Shell for free and you're done, a classic start menu that works nice.
When I first saw this topic my gut reaction was "Those bastards!" and then I remembered I've been running Win 8 for the last year on a Surface Pro with Classic Shell w
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Actually, that's not the case.
See, for my purposes, 7 is still superior to 8. Example - RDP7 connection to a hyper-V server using RemoteFX - 3D applications get DOUBLE the performance versus using RDP8.
Hoping 10 fixes this, but it doesn't seem likely due to how Microsoft changed how things got handled.
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Just testing a new driver costs millions of dollars.
No, it doesn't. In any case, Apple doesn't supply most of the drivers for their laptops.
Developing complex drivers can cost millions, but the testing isn't nearly as costly. Much of it is automated. Do you think that Intel, AMD and Nvidia spend millions of dollars a month just on testing?
Most of the hardware in a Mac laptop is off-the-shelf stuff, developed by other companies. I haven't checked but I expect it is an Intel chipset. Maybe Apple decided to be dicks and change the hardware IDs, but the driver i
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Developing complex drivers can cost millions, but the testing isn't nearly as costly. Much of it is automated. Do you think that Intel, AMD and Nvidia spend millions of dollars a month just on testing?
No, they just release them as betas and wait for the bug reports to roll in. Why pay for testers if so many people will test for you for free?
I started writing this post going for funny, but this actually sounds pretty insightful.
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Millions of dollars? If your OS had a decent and open ABI, there is no reason the actual interaction of your code with the system could be traversed and tested in a fortnight. I've never seen any company dumping millions of dollars in a single version of a driver, a few thousands at best (and most driver code for laptop hardware looks like it was never even tested).
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enterprise use is still 7 and most drivers are 7/8 (Score:5, Insightful)
enterprise use is still 7 and most drivers are 7/8 at least from amd / ati / nvidia / intel.
So is apple going out of there way to lock out 7 or just is to lazy to add the 7 drivers as well?
Re:enterprise use is still 7 and most drivers are (Score:4, Insightful)
When has Apple ever cared sweet fuck-all about enterprise?
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ha!
my last gig was at cisco. you would not BELIEVE the amount of silver aluminum laptops that you see walking around the san jose (and world wide) campuses. half, maybe more than half of the employees! and I've heard more and more bay area companies are allowing their employees to select mac or win7 (sadly, linux is still rare for corp world). and some companies are almost entirely mac. a friend of mine was lamenting that all of his group and co-workers use macs and so he was 'forced' to use one as his
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To be fair, they could get a server license for OS X for $20 and use any random 10.10-compatible Mac as a server that can push out configuration policies, install some software, etc. It's still weaksauce compared to what AD can do.
It annoys the crap out of us that Apple ties their OS to their hardware, in such a way that we can legally set up OS X virtual servers in VMware, but only if the host computer is made by Apple... and they haven't made honest-to-god servers since 2009.
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In the sense that a Mac Mini is a "workgroup server", I suppose. By enterprise I'm referring to operations with several hundred to thousands+ employees. IIRC their official server tool for managing iOS and OS X devices will start getting really bad performance past ~300 devices and after that they recommend a third-party tool that's $$$.
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Really? Then how come Macs have a reputation for holding their value and are generally considered well built?
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So is apple going out of there way to lock out 7 or just is to lazy to add the 7 drivers as well?
If those are the only two choices, then it's that they're too lazy. This isn't the first new model to lack Windows 7 support via Boot Camp. It's the third. It's actually kinda strange that this one is getting so much publicity, since they've been slowly dropping it with new hardware releases for over a year now.
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It's a bit more than that. I'm no Windows hater. I just really like and work with Windows 7, and I don't like what Windows 8 and onward needlessly take away.
If the only PC I had to worry about was my own, than I'd be more ok with undo'ing all the stupid things that Windows 8+ did with the interface, ClassicShell, Window Blinds, whatever. But at work that's not an option. IT has a reasonable interest in keeping things supported and uniform, and adding and supporting tons of third-party interface stuff i
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Regular Joes too!
Win 7 is now the new XP as much as MS is trying to be asses about this (hence try to activate a Windows 7 machine to purchase a license and are redirected to a win OS designed for tablets) and paying BestBuy to destroy copies of 7 long before EOL to force people to use a tablet 8 version etc.
MS has a problem. Once they have a good thing they throw it away and start a new and then it takes years to fix. XP worked well. Vista I can see some reasons for a new platform but the new low color ico
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Indeed, I have Windows 7 actually refusing to install on a motherboard from 2014. I did not try with the hard disk in MBR mode, but that's because I had already partitionned it in GPT with way more than four primary partitions and installed a linux dual boot (swap, linux OS, another linux OS, a home partition, a data storage partition, room for the Windows partition somewhere in there..)
I guess we're waiting for Windows 10 for that one.. or add another HDD so that Windows 7 can be installed on a MBR one. Bu
What the hell? (Score:4, Funny)
> For anyone using Windows 7 by way of Apple's Boot Camp utility, beware: support for Windows via Boot Camp remains, but for the newest Apple laptops, it's only for Windows 8 for now.
Those sadistic bastards.
Parallels works best (Score:2)
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Re:Parallels works best (Score:4, Informative)
I've been virtualising Windows environments for years & you're clearly ignorant. Using bridge mode is child's play on both Parallels & VMWare Fusion.
The only thing that's difficult is disabling the use of network interfaces entirely in the Host OS while still making them available for bridge mode in the VM clients & that's a rare need.
Granted OffTopic, but can BootCamp do Linux? (Score:2)
I tried for a day to get Linux installed on my Mac. I thought Boot Camp would be perfect; it repartitioned the drive nicely, but I couldn't get Linux to load. I couldn't delete the Windows partition, couldn't remake it as a Linux partition. Eventually gave up. Is there a way to do this?
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then your google foo is sadly lacking
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It's a lot easier now than it was in the past, but all you need to do avoid legacy boot.
And that's what happened here - Apple stopped supporting legacy boot.
Instead, it's UEFI firmware does a UEFI boot, which has been support
Let's clear up some misinformation. (Score:5, Informative)
Traditionally, "Bootcamp" has been a conglomeration of two separate things:
1) A compatibility module residing in the system firmware (an EFI module) that provided the ability to boot legacy MBR-based operating systems
2) A set of drivers packaged by Apple that was more or less guaranteed to install all required drivers for your system
The CSM (compatibility module) was recently depreciated and removed from the 2013 Mac Pro, and now several of their laptops as well. That is because Windows 8 (or newer) is capable of booting directly from EFI without the compatibility layer in-between (and therefore an MBR partition).
As far as I know, Apple isn't really even providing driver packages anymore since these operating systems generally support the Macintosh hardware OOTB. This had happened before as well, certain systems like the MacPro1,1 were capable of running Windows 7 or newer (even though Apple didn't list support for those)- you just had to go out and find the drivers yourself, which was fairly easy since nothing in that machine was really proprietary.
So really, the story should be that Bootcamp has been removed from these Macintosh systems, because it no longer exists. There's no more CSM for booting legacy operating systems and the drivers mostly work OOTB. The recent versions of Windows are capable of booting directly on the machine WITHOUT "Bootcamp".
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Too bad you posted this as an AC. It's both insightful & informative.
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Unfortunately you need a nasty hack to get 64-bit Windows 7 to boot on a MacPro 1,1 because it's got 32-bit firmware; this is true of several early Intel Macs.
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All you need is to load a 64 bit kernel by using a custom compiled 32 bit EFI that simply passes all 'foreign' calls to the hardware. The hardware is 64-bit.
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You're forgetting something else: Boot Camp Assistant, the application in the Utilities folder on Macs.
For those who don't know, the Boot Camp Assistant is a Mac OS X application that walks you through starting a Windows installation. It asks you to insert a CD-R or USB drive to copy Windows drivers. It partitions your HD/SSD for you. It asks for you to insert your Windows media, verifies it, sets the system hardware to boot from it, then restarts the hardware.
Later versions of Boot Camp Assistant automatic
I felt s great disturbance in The Force (Score:2)
As though dozens of voices cried out in terror...and were silenced.
Re:My condolences (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, come off it. Install something like Classic Shell and an average user will barely know the difference between 7 and 8. I have confirmed this empirically with dozens of users.
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Until you go into Windows Update, or many of the myriad things that have been changed to run in a POS full-screen mode for no f***ing reason.
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The average user still doesn't care.
On a side note though most of those things have had their functionality duplicated. Windows update still has a standard control panel page and the only thing that I so far have found forces you to a full screen mode is adding a bluetooth device.
But once it's paired you never need to visit that page again as you have access to it from the standard devices and printers page.
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You really should upgrade to 8.1, it's free for legit 8 users and Metro apps now have a standard title bar with minimize/maximize/close buttons. For me they usually open as windows instead of full-screen.
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Spot the 12-year-old Xbox Live gamer.
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What about wanting to use USB3 or other newer things that Win2k didn't know about?
It's a 3 (Score:2)
There's only been 3 reasons since Win2000 to actually upgrade
[...]
3. You buy new mobo and find out they didn't bother writing drivers for the older versions of Windows for it.
Bingo. The new MacBook ships with Windows 8 drivers.
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Spot the guy who doesn't actually keep up with developments but has Dunning-Kruger'd himself into thinking he knows what he's talking about.
Besides much better support for newer devices and software, Win8x has a lot of performance improvements in such things as over-the-network copying (support for SMB 2.x and 3.x), boot and reboot time, RAM usage, &c. You also get better multi-monitor support, vastly better available security (some of it needs rewritten/recompiled programs), and the ability to use
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Wrong.
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There's really not much wrong with windows 8. It's not as bad as people make it out to be, and the search feature works quite well for running applications - much the same way quicksilver on a mac would work.
The "Angry" people are generally the ones that are completely lost if you take away the start menu. Personally I never used it in the first place so it didn't bother me.
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Oh Windows 8.1 let me count the ways compared to Windows 7
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7 is more stable, reliable, not designed for tablets, more compatible with apps, has aero, no dual personalities of metro and non metro apps (I had a grandma call me in frustration Skype looked funny and was missing things. She didn't understand there were 2 skypes with 8??), purple stripe notification center taking up vertical space, no backgrounds in UAC aka closed door syndrome, flat icons, high cpu usage in explorer, crippled t
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Under the covers, Windows 8 is arguably superior to Windows 7 in many ways, such as performance, account syncing, improved multi-monitor support, storage pools, etc. I'd have to give equal marks to stability simply because it's hard to get better than "never crashing". I've actually never seen Windows Vista or Windows 7 crash (except for a case of bad RAM). It's just that they really screwed up the UX in Windows 8, making the mouse + keyboard user without a touch interface a second-class citizen.
I also d
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Pfft. You have a legitimate complaint about the UI being bad for non-touch use, but then you started talking about using "all sorts of undocumented APIs". If they're undocumented, then how in the hell would a third-party (and open source, so review the source and give me a cite) program like Classic Shell use them?
You're full of shit.
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Classic Shell uses DLL injection [wikipedia.org] to get a lot of its functionality to work [classicshell.net]. This is pretty much the definition of undocumented functionality. You're essentially dynamically inserting code into another process to re-routing function calls to your own code. It allows you to do a lot of really cool things (measuring FPS in any game and displaying it in an overlay, like Fraps), but it's also used by malware writers to do sneaky things (such as hiding itself from the file system or processes viewer).
Undocumen
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*applause*
That's how you prove to someone that you're not full of shit, folks.
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Heh, I was hoping you'd get a chance to read it after the effort I put into typing all that up. ;-)
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That's entirely incorrect. You can access the network adapters much the same as you could in any other version of windows - via the network and sharing icon in the control panel. This is the real problem - people line up to criticize something they clearly don't understand.
It'd be like me saying Linux has the shittiest networking ever because I couldn't figure out how to use ifconfig.
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If you knew anything about it, you'd know there weren't search boxes plastered all over everything. It's pretty simple. Press windows key, start typing, select item as it comes up or hit windows key again to dismiss it.
But hey, we get it, you'd rather complain than spend the time to come up with a legitimate gripe.
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Oh yah
Windows 10's icons all sooo modern and crisp [neowin.net] compared to 7?
Re:Hilarious (Score:4, Insightful)
Many of us require a full-featured real operating system rather than Microsoft's badly designed program loader. But our jobs require us to run Windows software sometimes. So I run Windows in a vm, no reason to that crippled crapware to monopolize my hardware
Re:Hilarious (Score:4, Insightful)
I love how Mac and Linux users are constantly trying to figure out ways to make their computers run Windows applications, if not Windows itself.
Why not just run Windows, period?
If you could flip a switch and turn your commuter car into a truck to haul a couch home, why WOULDN'T you?
Take your Us vs. Them ONE OS stuff back to the 90's please. We have computers coming out our butts now, and more platforms, more competition, is welcome.
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The key thing here is that noone really wants to run Windows. They perhaps want to run Windows applications. It's all about the ecosystem. Everyone that puts up with Windows does so because of the positive feedback loop that's existed from the days of DOS. Everyone thinks it's the only option so it becomes the only option.
The troll is also ignoring the possibility that somoene might by Apple hardware for it's own sake and merely want to do whatever the HELL they want with their own personal property.
At one
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The key thing here is that noone really wants to run Windows. They perhaps want to run Windows applications. It's all about the ecosystem. Everyone that puts up with Windows does so because of the positive feedback loop that's existed from the days of DOS. Everyone thinks it's the only option so it becomes the only option.
The troll is also ignoring the possibility that somoene might by Apple hardware for it's own sake and merely want to do whatever the HELL they want with their own personal property.
At one time I ran Linux on Macs. It made sense at the time. Apple's hardware was just another PC to me.
I want to run Windows. Windows 7 that is. It is gorgeous with aero, stable, supports .net, and there is no reason for me to change.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought these arguments disappeared in the early noughties, but clearly there are those that want to wallow in nostalgia. While I've always lived in the Apple/Mac world, I've never been one to indulge in this, even when it was slightly fashionable, which it most certainly isn't these days. However, I've had reason to engage with numerous Windows computers this week for the first time in ages, over a range of versions from XP to 8, and I have to say that in every case it was a reminder that even now, fifteen years on from when those arguments raged, it still sucks. My assumption has been for the last, ooh, eight years-ish, that basically there was no argument, the differences were just quirks and it was whatever you're used to, and for the price you pay extra to be on the Mac side of things, it wasn't worth it. Maybe that's true for a lot of people, but the frustration, general bad temper inducing, sheer passive-aggressive baulkiness of the damn thing made me very glad I don't have to deal with it regularly. And that whatever I pay extra, if I do (meh, my company pays for my hardware, so I don't give a shit how much it costs, personally), is worth every single penny.
Point is, a lot of people like Windows for some reason, and lots of other people like Apple stuff, for some reason. Maybe there will never be much understanding either way, but the silly finger-pointing name-calling from one camp to the other is childish, tribal and idiotic. No matter how sincerely the sentiment is meant.
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Maybe that's true for a lot of people, but the frustration, general bad temper inducing, sheer passive-aggressive baulkiness of the damn thing made me very glad I don't have to deal with it regularly.
Maybe there will never be much understanding either way, but the silly finger-pointing name-calling from one camp to the other is childish, tribal and idiotic.
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Why are you buying a Mac if you want to run Windows 7 in the first place?
1. You feel Mac hardware fits your needs at your price point better than other options.
2. Your employer bought you a Macbook but you want to use Windows (I was in this situation until a couple months ago).
3. If you are buying a Macbook / Surface / etc. you probably don't care about the extra cost of an OS. If you do care, you probably should be buying cheaper hardware anyway.
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Who cares? People who spent too much for a shitty unupgradeable computer will have to deal with a different shitty overpriced OS.
This is an obvious rant/flamebait/troll. And I take the bait, because I'm tired of people saying you can get the same thing for cheaper. That's NOT the same thing. Macbooks are known to be performant, reliable and even nice. Upgrade? You can ask the Apple Genius to upgrade your macbook, or many 3rd parties can perform that as well. All in all, you may get some cheaper stuff from another maker - but you only get what you pay for.
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It sounds more like you're bitter that you are stuck with 6 year old hardware. 10.6.8 sucks, and XP was an abomination.
I bet you want $4 AAPL shares so you can actually afford to buy one.
What are you talking about Windows 7, XP, and Snow leopard are the best operating systems ever made back when software was good in 2009. Before low quality, agile release every week buggy, and flat low color became cool.
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Screw APPLE!
Windows 7 is the best OS ever made. It is still modern and I could list 30 defects in WIndows 8.1 It is a terrible unusable operating system that can't even stay up or be stable on a server grade Asus Sabertooth Mark II board. The UI is schizophrenic and suffers from closed door syndrome in almost everyway from UAC prompts which take away the background, to no aero to show the background. It is loaded with pastel nursery school colors. Even with a start menu program it is just awful and 10 will [neowin.net]
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Windows 8 still has not approached the marketshare of even XP yet. Yes it is that bad. Of all win desktop marketshare Windows 7 is still not even declining yet and it is HUGE like over 60% of the whole market including all versions of Windows and Macs and Linux in there according to statcounter.com. Windows 7 was the default OS until just 2 - 2 1/2 years ago.
XP was kept alive well during the Vista years as Xp didn't even start to die until it was nearly 11 years old in 2011.
The difference is PC users rarely
Windows 7 (Score:2)
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They are trying drastic things but I don't know if people care enough to notice. For example upgrades from 7-> will be free for the first year win 10 is out. Not sure how they are going to map which version you can go to from which version of the predecessor but still that is pretty sweet. At least according to what I heard on Windows Weekly they aren't even going to check if your version of windows is legitimate before allowing the upgrade. Meaning should you care to get a pirated version of windows 7 U
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Wow you have an attitude, and a bad one at that.
If you couldn't run Windows 8 without it crashing, then thats your problem - get better hardware. I have Windows 8/8.1 on several computers, none have crashed once in over a year. The OS is rock solid, even works perfectly with sleep and hibernation modes.
Who gives a shit about the colour scheme - for 99.9% of the time I'm staring at the same application screens I would be in any other versions of Windows, colour schemes don't come into it. Neither does aero,
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I agree with the aero. Never had a lesser version of Win 7 but my understanding was that the versions that didn't support aero you also didn't get aero snap: that is the only bit I care about. Glass interface was pretty I suppose but it was really the half screen left, half screen right etc that made my day when I switched. You get that in Win 8+ + a better task manager, better windows explorer the option (not for me but some like it) for metro apps etc. The only complaint as someone that didn't like metro
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Ah yes ribbon in explorer that take up precious pixels. Why is it on an i7 4770k the cpu usage spikes when you scroll up and down? Don't believe me? Open task manager and ... oh that's right it doesn't support per logical cpu like 7 does so you can't tell if a single threaded app monopolies a core. Resource monitor for that.
You do a search and closed door syndrome start page pops up and it bings resource monitor instead of searches it like 7.
With 7 ms added frost around text in the title bar in darker color
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? What's not to like? Start menu takes all of 10 min to replace. After that it might as well be win 7 except with a slightly improved explorer and task manager and support for a better version of .Net (which I use in my work).
The POS part was that out of the box you see the start menu and you either like it or not. Those that aren't very technical pretty much just say: "why can't I just get it with the thing I know already?" and the stores for the most part have said: "okay". Heck my 60 year old tenant got