Windows 7 vs. 8

So after thirteen years Microsoft has finally decided to cease all support for Windows XP. I now have an excuse to upgrade to a new OS. Problem: I'm thirteen years behind and haven't used either 7 or 8 and have no idea what's the most stable and user friendly.

Tell me what to buy, dammit.

Technician said:

Tell me what to buy, dammit.

7, because it's likely to be cheaper.

Feature-wise, there really isn't much of a difference. They're both just as stable. Some people like to moan about Win8 because of the start menu, but if you really care about that then you can just install one of those menu hacks. Most likely, though, you won't use it anyway - I know I haven't used a start menu in a long time regardless of the OS edition.

XP was totally the bomb I had Microsoft Office 2003 running on that bitch and I was a productive motherfuck.

I've adapted to Windows 7, it took a little time and sometimes I still have to hang my head in shame at the amount of handholding and disorganization present, but overall it is a more stable and secure OS than XP.

go back to windows 2000. Fuck the haters.

I've had Windows 7 since I think late 08 and I liked it more than XP, however I will eventually get windows 8.

Transition from XP to 7: "Oh, they put that button over there now. It does make sense, now that I think about it."

Transition from 7 to 8: "GOD DAMN IT WHAT THE FUCK MY DESKTOP IS NOT A SMARTPHONE, EVERYTHING HAS BEEN OBSCURED, START SCREEN IS GANG-RAPING ALL OF MY ORIFII WITH SQUARES"

It looks like you can't upgrade from XP to 8, but you can to 7. In fact, it looks like the only upgrade path to 8 is from 7, which sort of narrows your choices.

The only direct upgrade path to W7 from XP is through Vista. XP->7 was disabled because of all the issues that Vista had with upgrading from XP, and 7 is hardly anything more than a renamed Vista with a longer support term, so... :p You can clean-install both and migrate (some) settings from XP, which isn't too bad, but you still need to reinstall all your programs and crap.

Anyway, metro sucks, Windows 8.x would be a minor incremental upgrade but Metro ruins it all. Avoid at all costs.

I thought Windows 7 fixed performance issues that Vista had.

chungy said:

The only direct upgrade path to W7 from XP is through Vista.

That's misleading. If you upgrade from XP to 7 it requires a clean install so files will have to be backed up. MORE IMPORTANTLY though, you can buy the Upgrade version of Win7 instead of the Full version. It'll accept XP and that saves you $100.

7 is hardly anything more than a renamed Vista with a longer support term

Nope, Win7 is a vast improvement over Vista.

Avoozl said:

I've had Windows 7 for 6 years now and I liked it more than XP, however I will eventually get windows 8.

Can I borrow your TARDIS?

Bucket said:

Nope, Win7 is a vast improvement over Vista.

Explain. Nobody has described any major differences in the OS itself. It has a nicer GUI, but even third-party drivers are mostly interchangeable between the two. Most of Vista's problems were horrible driver support and applications that didn't play well with UAC. The vendors that still suck at those things also suck on 7 most of the time. (It's been seven years, so they don't get a pass due to MS's poor communication skills anymore.)

Bucket said:

Nope, Win7 is a vast improvement over Vista.

For having used both, I don't see much vastness in the improvement. Booting time is supposedly shorter now (I don't care, I use hibernate mode anyway and only do an actual reboot every couple of months to install updates that insist on rebooting). Otherwise... The calculator has a better hexadecimal mode, but now I have to switch back and forth between scientific mode to use floating point and programmer mode to do hexadecimal conversions, which is annoying. They have also ribbonized the Paint UI, so I grabbed Vista's paint and use that instead. The most visible thing is that they got rid of the traditional task bar and quick launch bar to merge them together.

If there are any other differences (other than PR, I mean) between Vista SP1 and 7, they have been unnoticeable.

I've used 7 a bit over the past two years, but the past year it's been crashing with BSOD errors fairly often and I don't know how to fix it. I'd much rather use Vista as a modern OS.

I've only ever had one bsod and I fixed it by a simple hard drive fragment, I've never really bothered to defragment my drives before then since the very beginning.

chungy said:

Anyway, metro sucks, Windows 8.x would be a minor incremental upgrade but Metro ruins it all. Avoid at all costs.

This is an incredibly stupid comment since you don't have to use Metro for anything else than clicking the "desktop" -icon on it. Source: I use 8 on both my personal and work (=programming) laptops. More than anything, Metro is an unnecessary feature which you can just avoid using. Existence of a feature you don't have to use doesn't make the product itself shit.

Except on the Internet, I guess.

Windows 8 is tolerable as long as you install Classic Shell and ignore the Metro/tileworld shit.

Wait a minute, why exactly does "Microsoft support" matter? It's not like we're running our operating systems on their servers or something.

TimeOfDeath said:

I've used 7 a bit over the past two years, but the past year it's been crashing with BSOD errors fairly often and I don't know how to fix it. I'd much rather use Vista as a modern OS.

Have you ever asked anyone or Googled the error codes in the BSOD? (You can still do this if you 7 installed because it logs them. BSODs are usually caused broken drivers. They can be other things like failign hardware, broken malware, or corrupted system files. Most are easy to fix.

Avoozl said:

I've only ever had one bsod and I fixed it by a simple hard drive fragment, I've never really bothered to defragment my drives before then since the very beginning.

If you only ever had one BSOD how do you know you did anything that affected it at all? All defragging does is make files load faster.

Anyway, I prefer 7 to 8. Even when using the desktop MS decided to tweak all the themes to make everything harder to read and customize. Bastards!

Jodwin said:

Existence of a feature you don't have to use doesn't make the product itself shit.

Existence of a feature being crammed down our throat (still need to click "Desktop" according to your own words, so that's an extra step gratuitously added by that feature we don't have to use) does make the product annoying.

Also it's classic deprecation strategy. Windows 7 works in desktop mode, Windows 8 turns the desktop into an app but encourages people to create Metro apps instead of desktop programs, Windows 9 will declare the desktop app a legacy feature and cripple it somehow while pointing out to that desktop programs have replacement apps you can get from the Microsoft App Store, and Windows 10 will no longer have it at all (at least in the Platinum Home Extreme Multimedia Platform Edition and lesser, you will have to get the Sasquatch Professional Hybrid Gasoline Stiletto Edition or more expensive to get the desktop app otherwise).

chungy said:

XP->7 was disabled because of all the issues that Vista had with upgrading from XP...

...You can clean-install both and migrate (some) settings from XP, which isn't too bad, but you still need to reinstall all your programs and crap.

That's pretty much what it say's on the box - apart from the XP->Vista upgrade issues. All the same, it's a legitimate upgrade option for XP users if they don't mind having to backup and re-install all their shit. I purchased the 3 PC Family Pack for about $40 more than a non-OEM retail copy of Windows 8.

Windows 8, if you listen to random Internet people:
"Metro is fine, get on with the times, plus it boots slightly faster and there's other improvements, if you don't grab Win8 right away you're just a hater."

Windows 8, if you watch random Internet people:
"hey guys, game/program X doesn't run [ properly / at all ], help!"
"what's your OS?"
"Win8"
"oh, that's a known issue with Win8, [ nothing to do about it / perhaps you can get the game/program running if you go through these 8 specific steps ]"

That's not just people being people, scouting PCGamingWiki or gaming forums you will find lists of problems specific to Win8 as long as your arm. Or software in general, for that matter.

Even going from XP to 7 was a major pain in the ass, and I *still* haven't found solutions to many of the problems I had with specific old software (sometimes it's not even that old; Bioshock 1 causes BSODs on my rig, and the game was made in 2007!). Well, the solution happened to be "never use said software again" more often than not.

From an outside perspective, seeing Win8-related issues everywhere despite not even looking for it, Win8 seems an order of magnitude worse than that. I'd say go with Win7 unless you love spending time fixing your stuff, but what do I know.

Win7 all the way. Only BSODs I've ever had were related to a RAM stick failure and with my newly bought SSD it boots in 5-10 seconds.

I jumped directly from XP to 7 and was pleasantly surprised. I used that for a couple of years until I bought a new computer last year and installed Windows 8 on it. I do a lot of mod work on old stuff like Doom3. I play X-Wing, Tie-Fighter and other ancient games. Problem: Windows 8 doesn't support the old 16-bit installers (XvT, X-Wing Colletors) anymore. Luckily someone made a fix for that so you could run the installers as 32-bit. Old DOS games run fine under dosbox. I have a good old Sound Canvas 55 and want to run Midi though it. Oh crap there are no midi settings in win8. Good thing it's easy to configure through the registry.

I don't know, I've had no issues with anything that's not old hardware or *REALLY* old software. It would be fine if they had more support for all that junk, but on the other hand I don't really think it's right to expect that level of support. I work on old junk, I play old junk, I run music in an (for regular computer users) outdated format through hardware from 1991. I have special needs here, yet everything works perfectly with a couple of minor tweaks.

As for "Metro", I only use it to press the desktop button and for searching programs, settings or files. For those uses it's more or less the perfect setup. Fuck the bloated start menu.

AndrewB said:

Wait a minute, why exactly does "Microsoft support" matter? It's not like we're running our operating systems on their servers or something.

Exactly. You don't need to rush out and upgrade just because they're not providing "official" support anymore. Hell, they've still got Win2k SP4 for download on their website. How long have they been "not supporting" that?

GreyGhost said:

It looks like you can't upgrade from XP to 8, but you can to 7. In fact, it looks like the only upgrade path to 8 is from 7, which sort of narrows your choices.

didn't Microsoft offer XP to Win 8 upgrades sometime last summer for 40 dollars? i could've sworn that was the case...

Windows95 for the win of course :P

AndrewB said:

Wait a minute, why exactly does "Microsoft support" matter? It's not like we're running our operating systems on their servers or something.

In april Microsoft will cease development of any security-related patches. You can bet there's a lot of exploits being piled up for the remaining 23% of Windows XP users, ready to be put to use once Microsoft stops excreting patches for it.

As for Windows 8, version 8.1 lets you boot straight to the desktop and adds back a Start button (which brings you to the Metro UI and has some useful context shortcuts to log off, shut down and such). The biggest technical change that I've noticed is that Windows 8 boots a lot faster than 7 did. It's just not such a huge change after all, even if you're coming from Windows Vista.

Shaviro said:

Problem: Windows 8 doesn't support the old 16-bit installers (XvT, X-Wing Colletors) anymore. Luckily someone made a fix for that so you could run the installers as 32-bit. Old DOS games run fine under dosbox. I have a good old Sound Canvas 55 and want to run Midi though it. Oh crap there are no midi settings in win8. Good thing it's easy to configure through the registry.

I don't know, I've had no issues with anything that's not old hardware or *REALLY* old software. It would be fine if they had more support for all that junk, but on the other hand I don't really think it's right to expect that level of support. I work on old junk, I play old junk, I run music in an (for regular computer users) outdated format through hardware from 1991. I have special needs here, yet everything works perfectly with a couple of minor tweaks.

I'm glad you mentioned this. I was going to make a thread about this little doubt I have, but it seems this one is appropriate.

I also need a new computer, and I'm not sure if I should go for 32-bit or 64-bit (and if it should be Windows 7 or 8). If I'm not mistaken, it seems that the 64-bit versions have more issues with this kind of stuff (old software, etc.), but I know there are also ways to circumvent this (like DOSBox, for example), but it's not completely clear to me.

Windows 7, from my experience, is really not much different to Vista. I have no real problems with Win 7, and I didn't with Vista either. Most of the time, Win 7 just feels like a re-skinned Vista. Yes, Vista did have a lot of teething problems and yes the transition from XP was painful for some people (especially for legacy hardware support etc). However, I think the supposed massive improvement between Vista and 7 was due to the fact that by the time 7 came out, most of the Vista problems had been worked through and fixed, it was a couple of years on and there was less legacy hardware around, a lot of people were upgrading from Vist rather than XP, it had better advertising and PR work done for it and, most importantly (IMO), there was a massive dose of "Emperor's new clothes"; everyone was saying 7 was much better so it became much better in people's minds. I still have one Vista machine and it's fine.

Anyway, Win7 has been fine for me. I also own a machine with Win8 on it. The interface is, frankly, shit. It is entirely unsuited for a desktop PC and the awful-looking mishmash of coloured tiles is a clumsy inefficient way to present things on a decent big monitor. However, with something like Classic Shell installed, it doesn't feel vastly different to Win7 and there is just the usual "where have they hidden [feature X]" learning curve to go through.

XP was great and I still have a few machines that run it. Even after using Vista and 7 for years now, I still find it very easy to go back and use XP. However, its 64 bit version was not very stable and, basically, for modern hardware and some software, big RAM requirements and other demands mean that XP isn't the OS of choice for me any more.

Zed said:

I also need a new computer, and I'm not sure if I should go for 32-bit or 64-bit (and if it should be Windows 7 or 8). If I'm not mistaken, it seems that the 64-bit versions have more issues with this kind of stuff (old software, etc.), but I know there are also ways to circumvent this (like DOSBox, for example), but it's not completely clear to me.

Windows 32-bit is still compatible with 16-bit programs. Windows 64-bit dropped 16-bit compatibility entirely.

I know Vista 32 existed as I had one, but I've only ever seen 7-64 around here, and as for 8...