12 ms·

Windows 7 'back by popular demand', says HP as it targets wary consumers

50 points by Cbasedlifeform 13y ago

raganwald 13y ago
Windows 8.1 vs Windows 7 is not so interesting to me. But Microsoft 2014 vs Microsoft 1994 is very interesting to me. There was a time when they had enough weight that they could force their vendors to toe the party line on OS versions. Enterprises might drag their feet on upgrading, but consumers were force-fed the new release even if they hated it. They had failures, but even so their vendors were reluctant to push back like this. Or at least, that's how I remember it. Not any more.
- bad_user 13y ago
  Let's remember the versions history for Windows targeted at consumers ... Windows 3.0 (1990) => 3.1 (1992) => 3.11 (1993) => 95 (1995) => 98 (1998) => 98 SE (1999) => Me (2000) => XP (2001) Besides Windows Millennium, which was a total clusterfuck (and I happen to have used it), all other versions were better than the ones prior to it. Also worth considering - 3.11 was released one year after 3.1, however it was the same Windows, but with improved networking. And Win 98 SE was like a service pack for Win 98. The only time Microsoft hurried to release a major version of Windows within only one year of the previous one was after Win Me happened. And I was in high-school then, but I don't remember many Windows Me PCs being on display in computer shops.
  - artmageddon 13y ago
    > And I was in high-school then, but I don't remember many Windows Me PCs being on display in computer shops. I was as well. I can confidently say that there were enough WinME PCs being sold, but it didn't last as long as Windows 98 had. What I can't remember was whether Windows 2000 was sold in stores in between WinME and XP.
  - nollidge 13y ago
    (you've omitted Vista from your timeline)
  - Joeri 13y ago
    I remember a different version history, nt4 to 2000 to xp, each version adding a ton of bloat without expanding the functionality (2000 added usb, but xp added nothing to 2000 except bloat and a dumber ui).
  - dspillett 13y ago
    Many consider WfWG 3.11 a massive beta test for some of the improvements (in the networking mainly, but in I/O handling chunks too) planned for Win95. IIRC Windows ME, or Windows Yuppy Flu as is got unofficially renamed[!] was never supposed to happen: the cunsumer transition from lagacy Windows to the NT line was originally supposed to happen with Win2K but for various reasons (MS were not ready for it, and neither were the app/game vendors) this didn't happen, so they botched together an upgrade to Win98SE so they had something new to sell to that market until XP happened (by which time everyone (MS, the users, and the 3rd parties) was more ready to transition). [!] after the nick name for the debilitating-when-real illness misunderstood by many and that had a reputation for being faked by certain classes of people who thought they worked too hard (most of the yuppie types who were genuinely ill probably had hypertension/stresss related disorders due to lifestyle, but those did't sound as "cool" to have) which has bouts of chronic fatigue as its main identifying symptom
bluedevil2k 13y ago
My desktop and laptop have Windows 7 installed on them and my wife's laptop has Windows 8 on it. As someone who spends 8-10 hours a day on their computer programming/debugging/everything users on this site do, I'm not sure I could handle working in Windows 8 all that time. I feel like Windows 7 got so much right for power users of Windows, and that Windows 8 is for casual users of their computer.
- pmelendez 13y ago
  As a power user and after discovering "win+x" on windows 8, I can't come back to windows 7 but it is a matter of taste I guess
  - falcolas 13y ago
    I looked that up; what does it offer that the Windows 7 (and 8) control panel doesn't? Hitting the Windows key, and typing in any of those names will get you the same content.
    - Spearchucker 13y ago
      Less effort. Key-strokes + click on 8/8.1, as opposed to opening the Control Panel, finding the most likely group for the thing you forgot the name of, and then clicking on the thing you need. The control panel is bloated, and it's organisation is not entirely logical (to me, at any rate).
      - jpatte 13y ago
        Or Win-X + letter on 8/8.1. For example opening the Disk Manager is Win-X + k, Event Viewer is Win-X + v etc.
      - falcolas 13y ago
        Effort reduction is a fair point. However, most of the shortcuts presented are for tasks I do so rarely that having a quick shortcut to them adds relatively little value. The few that I do use frequently from that list already have their own key bindings, or I can find them with 2-3 keystrokes after pulling up the windows start menu (something you can't do with Windows 8 if they aren't regular applications; you have to type and then select a different application category to search in). Ctrl-Shift-Escape == Task manager Win-D == Desktop Win-R == Run Alt-F4 (from Desktop) == Shutdown The net result is that this is not enough of a value add to elevate Windows 8 above Windows 7.
CSDude 13y ago
I'm nearly a power user of Windows 8.1 (using it both coding, designing, using VirtualBox, Photoshop, AfterFX, Office etc), and when you just minimize the icons in the Start screen to the smallest possible tile size, it is not different from Windows 7 at all. The thing I miss most is feeling of depth, which is lost in this flat area. But other than that, I don't understand the hype. Every single application in Windows 7 is available in Windows 8. You don't ever have to use Metro apps. I just remove them from my start menu, since I don't use my laptop as a tablet. I didn't like it first, but I get used to it and I use it faster than my previous Windows 7 installation.
- falcolas 13y ago
  > I don't understand the hype. I use a Windows 7 machine for gaming at home, and I have briefly used a Windows 8.1 machine for a personal laptop. I dislike Windows 8 pretty viscerally. The laptop has a split personality, with some applications behaving one way, and others behaving a completely different way. I can guess how it will behave by the presence or absence of a window around my application, but that's extra cognitive overhead which I don't feel I should have to spend on figuring out how to manipulate an application. I could certainly drop everything Metro, and get a closer to Windows 7 experience, but what is the advantage of that over just using Windows 7 in the first place?
- zeidrich 13y ago
  That's kind of the point though. You can go through a lot of work to undo the changes so that it's just the same as 7. Or you can avoid the upgrade at all. There's other things that 8 does that's annoying, there's some changes to it so that some drivers no longer work, so there's devices that are left unsupported. There's stupid decisions like how if you want to shut down you have to hover in the top right corner with your mouse, then slide down the right side of the window to go to settings to shut off. The problem is that they wanted to make a consistent tablet interface, but it's not easy to use a tablet interface with a mouse. Many many people still use mice, and still have many reasons to still use mice, but they didn't design a system that is comfortable with a mouse. Using windows 8 on a tablet is actually not too bad, but I only use a tablet casually.
njpatel 13y ago
For me, Windows 8.1 'made sense' after I installed a third-party utility called ModernMix (https://www.stardock.com/products/modernmix/ https://www.stardock.com/products/modernmix/). It allows you to run all or some metro apps on the desktop in normal windows. This was the turning point, as I could use apps from the Windows Store (mostly media consuming apps) when I wanted to, as I wanted to. I didn't have to leave my desktop or have a SoundCloud app take up all 27" of my monitor, and the Store apps are much nicer to use and look at when you're in the mood for consuming media. On the opposite sense, I still had Putty/Office/etc right next to them. This really fixed Windows 8.1 for me, and I think Microsoft should consider having it as an option in 9. (disclaimer: I have nothing to do with Stardock, just a huge fan of ModernMix)
Nursie 13y ago
I find 8 awkward to work with. 7 felt like a breath of fresh air after Vista. It cleaned up the interface, it improved (incrementally) the same user experience and flows that MS originally deployed with Win 95 and NT 4. Win 8 felt like they looked at how I use a computer and decided to try to hide everything I use. Everything. And when I can find it I get weird fullscreen fisher-price versions. I'm sure you can relearn the interface just fine. That's not really how I want to spend my time though. Even after two months of using it in parallels, all the windows features I want to use are pinned to my MacOS dock. I'm mostly a linux guy these days anyway, but after 20 years of PC use Win 8 is the release that drove my dad to Apple as well.
dserban 13y ago
While I agree that HP selling Seven isn't news, the shift in marketing focus from Eight to Seven __is__ very much news.
fidotron 13y ago
What's so infuriating about Win 8.x is where it improves over Win7 it's clear, however, MS went out of their way to positively screw it up in whole new ways, such as Metro. It should never be the responsibility of the end user to tweak things to decent defaults - defaults should be right out of the box. Take Metro etc. out (or, better, have it as an app launched from the desktop, and completely uninstallable), sort out the start menu and a few UI tweaks and they would have had an easy win on their hands, but their efforts to do things no one wants are causing them to fail, even to the point of giving people like Google an in with the latest Chrome for Metro aping a full screen Chrome OS like experience which, ironically, is more Windows 7 like than Win 8 is. MS really need someone that understands not only what they're good at but why people have stuck with MS software at their helm.
- malkia 13y ago
  Yup. Imagine a world, where you are still getting all these cool linux kernel improvementds but you are stuck to say "Ubuntu Unity's" ui and nothing else.
- josteink 13y ago
  MS really need someone that understands not only what they're good at but why people have stuck with MS software at their helm Microsoft realizes the end of the PC-era is here. (Almost) nobody is buying PCs and OS-licenses anymore, so Microsoft can't gamble it's future on those petty things. They realize that the future belongs to services spanning several devices and multiple platforms, among which Windows can be one player. That's why you can have Microsoft-software for iOS and Android these days. But for Windows to be a player in the future, people must want to have it on their shiny, portable touch-devices with long battery-life due to apps running in a controlled environment. Nothing from the desktop-era Windows fits into that picture. Nothing. For Microsoft to be on those devices that just needs to go. You and I may hate it, but Microsoft is literally forced to make this "new" Windows-model if they want to remain relevant in the future. Microsoft is upping its service-game, and it will do so at the cost of everything the PC used to be.
  - soundoflight 13y ago
malkia 13y ago
Here is a story that happened last week: I was at my dentist, and we are both immigrants from the same country - so she said she needed a help with her computer (while I needed very big help in the tooth department). She bought this Windows 8 laptop, and man it felt weird for me to explain in simple words that there are in fact 2 internet explorers - and they should use the desktop one... Since she was not sure what's desktop, and what's the other thing (the metro... I said Metro, but I wanted to come up with some other word). Their dentist webpage (seems like other dentists are using it too) - only worked with the desktop Internet explorer, and there was no easy way to run it right away from the "big icon menu" (how do you call it?). I had to explain how I'm getting there (I've had to evaluate Windows 8 at some point), and all I remmember was - well press the Windows Key and hold "D". I might install Classic Shell for them later. So it was frustrating - the explaining process at least for me. Not sure why Microsoft expects people to get their duality?
- artmageddon 13y ago
  I'm going to build a PC for someone and use Windows 8, but install Classic Shell. For others, I figure if Classic Shell isn't an option for a user, I'd just pin the desktop to the top left, tell them to click there upon logging in, and then have their most frequently used apps pinned to the taskbar, along with their usual mixture of icons on the desktop. It's not ideal but it makes the best of a bad situation.
- dugmartin 13y ago
  In 8.1 there is a new setting that makes the Desktop the default window after login. I'd suggest turning that on.
  - bunderbunder 13y ago
    Which is still downright boneheaded on MS's part. The situation is that people are calling in their nerd friends to get help figuring out how to do basic things that they shouldn't need help with, because it's supposedly a platform they've been using for over a decade now. Their supposed solution, a setting somewhere in the control panel, just makes the nerd friend's job slightly easier. It does absolutely nothing to fix the real problem: That the nerd friend is needed in the first place.
r0h1n 13y ago
Jesus! How many times are we going to be played with this non-story on the HN front page? Previously: > HP brings Windows 7 back 'due to popular demand' as buyers shun Windows 8 (theinquirer.net) > 54 points by chakalakasp 16 hours ago | flag | 82 comments > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7092164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7092164 > HP promotes Windows 7 PCs (smh.com.au) > 27 points by hiharryhere 12 hours ago | flag | 43 comments > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7093073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7093073
- GnarfGnarf 13y ago
  Maybe, but this is the first time I notice this story on HN.
Shivetya 13y ago
and here I am trying to figure how to migrate my parents off of XP to newer machines. The hold back to buying them newer machines is that both like the look and feel of Office from that generation.
- Al-Khwarizmi 13y ago
  Give then OpenOffice, it comes from the classic menus instead of that abomination called the ribbon. That's the very reason why I use it, even though MS Office is still better in terms of functionality.
- dublinben 13y ago
  LibreOffice retains the 'classic' menu structure and is an excellent transition to a *nix distro that looks like XP.
lowlevel 13y ago
I can't believe HP was the first major vendor to see Windows 8 as the goat is really is. Usually HP is well behind everyone else.
maresca 13y ago
I've noticed over the years that every other Windows release is good. The next version should be good. Win 8 - Crappy Win 7 - Good Vista - Crappy XP - Good etc.
- jgalt212 13y ago
  I agree. At work, we have a limited number of Windows PC's. They have never run Vista (stuck w/ XP), and hopefully never run 8 (running 7 now).
sremani 13y ago
It makes me minority - I started using Windows 8 from Day One, and actually like it. I completely understand why people who are computer semi-literate bash it. I just exposes their inability with computers, but I am also aghast why people who make it to a site like this one - hate it passionately. I have to reconsider my assumptions about a Hacker News visitor.
billyhoffman 13y ago
The core trouble I've seen with non-technical people on Windows 8 isn't Metro, its confusion/paralysis with a mobile-like interface suddenly on a desktop. People had 5-6 years experience with touch computing on mobile devices. Pull here, touch here, gesture here to make X, Y, Z happen. 1 app at a time and its full screen. An app store is the only way to get software. Instant power-on, single user, very simple shell/OS/application launcher. People know what to expect and do with this interface. Windows 8 force dumps new users into a mobile interface going against 20+ years of how they have used a desktop PC. It's jarring, its weird, it "feels wrong." I've seen this time and time again. My mom is a wiz on her iPhone, and she is just fine with Windows XP/Vista/7. I put her in front of Windows 8 and she had no clue what to do. All her reference points are gone. It feels more and more that Microsoft should have focused on making phones/tablets running Metro, and a Desktop OS that iterated on Windows 7. They crossed the streams [1] and that's bad [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_pack#Crossing_the_Streams http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_pack#Crossing_the_Stream...

Windows 8.1 vs Windows 7 is not so interesting to me. But Microsoft 2014 vs Microsoft 1994 is very interesting to me. There was a time when they had enough weight that they could force their vendors to toe the party line on OS versions. Enterprises might drag their feet on upgrading, but consumers were force-fed the new release even if they hated it. They had failures, but even so their vendors were reluctant to push back like this. Or at least, that's how I remember it. Not any more.

bad_user 13y ago
Let's remember the versions history for Windows targeted at consumers ... Windows 3.0 (1990) => 3.1 (1992) => 3.11 (1993) => 95 (1995) => 98 (1998) => 98 SE (1999) => Me (2000) => XP (2001) Besides Windows Millennium, which was a total clusterfuck (and I happen to have used it), all other versions were better than the ones prior to it. Also worth considering - 3.11 was released one year after 3.1, however it was the same Windows, but with improved networking. And Win 98 SE was like a service pack for Win 98. The only time Microsoft hurried to release a major version of Windows within only one year of the previous one was after Win Me happened. And I was in high-school then, but I don't remember many Windows Me PCs being on display in computer shops.
- artmageddon 13y ago
  > And I was in high-school then, but I don't remember many Windows Me PCs being on display in computer shops. I was as well. I can confidently say that there were enough WinME PCs being sold, but it didn't last as long as Windows 98 had. What I can't remember was whether Windows 2000 was sold in stores in between WinME and XP.
- nollidge 13y ago
  (you've omitted Vista from your timeline)
- Joeri 13y ago
  I remember a different version history, nt4 to 2000 to xp, each version adding a ton of bloat without expanding the functionality (2000 added usb, but xp added nothing to 2000 except bloat and a dumber ui).
- dspillett 13y ago
  Many consider WfWG 3.11 a massive beta test for some of the improvements (in the networking mainly, but in I/O handling chunks too) planned for Win95. IIRC Windows ME, or Windows Yuppy Flu as is got unofficially renamed[!] was never supposed to happen: the cunsumer transition from lagacy Windows to the NT line was originally supposed to happen with Win2K but for various reasons (MS were not ready for it, and neither were the app/game vendors) this didn't happen, so they botched together an upgrade to Win98SE so they had something new to sell to that market until XP happened (by which time everyone (MS, the users, and the 3rd parties) was more ready to transition). [!] after the nick name for the debilitating-when-real illness misunderstood by many and that had a reputation for being faked by certain classes of people who thought they worked too hard (most of the yuppie types who were genuinely ill probably had hypertension/stresss related disorders due to lifestyle, but those did't sound as "cool" to have) which has bouts of chronic fatigue as its main identifying symptom

bluedevil2k 13y ago

My desktop and laptop have Windows 7 installed on them and my wife's laptop has Windows 8 on it. As someone who spends 8-10 hours a day on their computer programming/debugging/everything users on this site do, I'm not sure I could handle working in Windows 8 all that time. I feel like Windows 7 got so much right for power users of Windows, and that Windows 8 is for casual users of their computer.

pmelendez 13y ago
As a power user and after discovering "win+x" on windows 8, I can't come back to windows 7 but it is a matter of taste I guess
- falcolas 13y ago
  I looked that up; what does it offer that the Windows 7 (and 8) control panel doesn't? Hitting the Windows key, and typing in any of those names will get you the same content.
  - Spearchucker 13y ago
    Less effort. Key-strokes + click on 8/8.1, as opposed to opening the Control Panel, finding the most likely group for the thing you forgot the name of, and then clicking on the thing you need. The control panel is bloated, and it's organisation is not entirely logical (to me, at any rate).
    - jpatte 13y ago
      Or Win-X + letter on 8/8.1. For example opening the Disk Manager is Win-X + k, Event Viewer is Win-X + v etc.
    - falcolas 13y ago
      Effort reduction is a fair point. However, most of the shortcuts presented are for tasks I do so rarely that having a quick shortcut to them adds relatively little value. The few that I do use frequently from that list already have their own key bindings, or I can find them with 2-3 keystrokes after pulling up the windows start menu (something you can't do with Windows 8 if they aren't regular applications; you have to type and then select a different application category to search in). Ctrl-Shift-Escape == Task manager Win-D == Desktop Win-R == Run Alt-F4 (from Desktop) == Shutdown The net result is that this is not enough of a value add to elevate Windows 8 above Windows 7.

CSDude 13y ago

I'm nearly a power user of Windows 8.1 (using it both coding, designing, using VirtualBox, Photoshop, AfterFX, Office etc), and when you just minimize the icons in the Start screen to the smallest possible tile size, it is not different from Windows 7 at all. The thing I miss most is feeling of depth, which is lost in this flat area. But other than that, I don't understand the hype. Every single application in Windows 7 is available in Windows 8. You don't ever have to use Metro apps. I just remove them from my start menu, since I don't use my laptop as a tablet. I didn't like it first, but I get used to it and I use it faster than my previous Windows 7 installation.

falcolas 13y ago
> I don't understand the hype. I use a Windows 7 machine for gaming at home, and I have briefly used a Windows 8.1 machine for a personal laptop. I dislike Windows 8 pretty viscerally. The laptop has a split personality, with some applications behaving one way, and others behaving a completely different way. I can guess how it will behave by the presence or absence of a window around my application, but that's extra cognitive overhead which I don't feel I should have to spend on figuring out how to manipulate an application. I could certainly drop everything Metro, and get a closer to Windows 7 experience, but what is the advantage of that over just using Windows 7 in the first place?
zeidrich 13y ago
That's kind of the point though. You can go through a lot of work to undo the changes so that it's just the same as 7. Or you can avoid the upgrade at all. There's other things that 8 does that's annoying, there's some changes to it so that some drivers no longer work, so there's devices that are left unsupported. There's stupid decisions like how if you want to shut down you have to hover in the top right corner with your mouse, then slide down the right side of the window to go to settings to shut off. The problem is that they wanted to make a consistent tablet interface, but it's not easy to use a tablet interface with a mouse. Many many people still use mice, and still have many reasons to still use mice, but they didn't design a system that is comfortable with a mouse. Using windows 8 on a tablet is actually not too bad, but I only use a tablet casually.

njpatel 13y ago

For me, Windows 8.1 'made sense' after I installed a third-party utility called ModernMix (https://www.stardock.com/products/modernmix/ https://www.stardock.com/products/modernmix/). It allows you to run all or some metro apps on the desktop in normal windows. This was the turning point, as I could use apps from the Windows Store (mostly media consuming apps) when I wanted to, as I wanted to. I didn't have to leave my desktop or have a SoundCloud app take up all 27" of my monitor, and the Store apps are much nicer to use and look at when you're in the mood for consuming media. On the opposite sense, I still had Putty/Office/etc right next to them. This really fixed Windows 8.1 for me, and I think Microsoft should consider having it as an option in 9. (disclaimer: I have nothing to do with Stardock, just a huge fan of ModernMix)

Nursie 13y ago

I find 8 awkward to work with. 7 felt like a breath of fresh air after Vista. It cleaned up the interface, it improved (incrementally) the same user experience and flows that MS originally deployed with Win 95 and NT 4. Win 8 felt like they looked at how I use a computer and decided to try to hide everything I use. Everything. And when I can find it I get weird fullscreen fisher-price versions. I'm sure you can relearn the interface just fine. That's not really how I want to spend my time though. Even after two months of using it in parallels, all the windows features I want to use are pinned to my MacOS dock. I'm mostly a linux guy these days anyway, but after 20 years of PC use Win 8 is the release that drove my dad to Apple as well.

dserban 13y ago

While I agree that HP selling Seven isn't news, the shift in marketing focus from Eight to Seven __is__ very much news.

fidotron 13y ago

What's so infuriating about Win 8.x is where it improves over Win7 it's clear, however, MS went out of their way to positively screw it up in whole new ways, such as Metro. It should never be the responsibility of the end user to tweak things to decent defaults - defaults should be right out of the box. Take Metro etc. out (or, better, have it as an app launched from the desktop, and completely uninstallable), sort out the start menu and a few UI tweaks and they would have had an easy win on their hands, but their efforts to do things no one wants are causing them to fail, even to the point of giving people like Google an in with the latest Chrome for Metro aping a full screen Chrome OS like experience which, ironically, is more Windows 7 like than Win 8 is. MS really need someone that understands not only what they're good at but why people have stuck with MS software at their helm.

malkia 13y ago
Yup. Imagine a world, where you are still getting all these cool linux kernel improvementds but you are stuck to say "Ubuntu Unity's" ui and nothing else.
josteink 13y ago
MS really need someone that understands not only what they're good at but why people have stuck with MS software at their helm Microsoft realizes the end of the PC-era is here. (Almost) nobody is buying PCs and OS-licenses anymore, so Microsoft can't gamble it's future on those petty things. They realize that the future belongs to services spanning several devices and multiple platforms, among which Windows can be one player. That's why you can have Microsoft-software for iOS and Android these days. But for Windows to be a player in the future, people must want to have it on their shiny, portable touch-devices with long battery-life due to apps running in a controlled environment. Nothing from the desktop-era Windows fits into that picture. Nothing. For Microsoft to be on those devices that just needs to go. You and I may hate it, but Microsoft is literally forced to make this "new" Windows-model if they want to remain relevant in the future. Microsoft is upping its service-game, and it will do so at the cost of everything the PC used to be.
- soundoflight 13y ago

malkia 13y ago

Here is a story that happened last week: I was at my dentist, and we are both immigrants from the same country - so she said she needed a help with her computer (while I needed very big help in the tooth department). She bought this Windows 8 laptop, and man it felt weird for me to explain in simple words that there are in fact 2 internet explorers - and they should use the desktop one... Since she was not sure what's desktop, and what's the other thing (the metro... I said Metro, but I wanted to come up with some other word). Their dentist webpage (seems like other dentists are using it too) - only worked with the desktop Internet explorer, and there was no easy way to run it right away from the "big icon menu" (how do you call it?). I had to explain how I'm getting there (I've had to evaluate Windows 8 at some point), and all I remmember was - well press the Windows Key and hold "D". I might install Classic Shell for them later. So it was frustrating - the explaining process at least for me. Not sure why Microsoft expects people to get their duality?

artmageddon 13y ago
I'm going to build a PC for someone and use Windows 8, but install Classic Shell. For others, I figure if Classic Shell isn't an option for a user, I'd just pin the desktop to the top left, tell them to click there upon logging in, and then have their most frequently used apps pinned to the taskbar, along with their usual mixture of icons on the desktop. It's not ideal but it makes the best of a bad situation.
dugmartin 13y ago
In 8.1 there is a new setting that makes the Desktop the default window after login. I'd suggest turning that on.
- bunderbunder 13y ago
  Which is still downright boneheaded on MS's part. The situation is that people are calling in their nerd friends to get help figuring out how to do basic things that they shouldn't need help with, because it's supposedly a platform they've been using for over a decade now. Their supposed solution, a setting somewhere in the control panel, just makes the nerd friend's job slightly easier. It does absolutely nothing to fix the real problem: That the nerd friend is needed in the first place.

r0h1n 13y ago

Jesus! How many times are we going to be played with this non-story on the HN front page? Previously: > HP brings Windows 7 back 'due to popular demand' as buyers shun Windows 8 (theinquirer.net) > 54 points by chakalakasp 16 hours ago | flag | 82 comments > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7092164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7092164 > HP promotes Windows 7 PCs (smh.com.au) > 27 points by hiharryhere 12 hours ago | flag | 43 comments > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7093073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7093073

GnarfGnarf 13y ago
Maybe, but this is the first time I notice this story on HN.

Shivetya 13y ago

and here I am trying to figure how to migrate my parents off of XP to newer machines. The hold back to buying them newer machines is that both like the look and feel of Office from that generation.

Al-Khwarizmi 13y ago
Give then OpenOffice, it comes from the classic menus instead of that abomination called the ribbon. That's the very reason why I use it, even though MS Office is still better in terms of functionality.
dublinben 13y ago
LibreOffice retains the 'classic' menu structure and is an excellent transition to a *nix distro that looks like XP.

lowlevel 13y ago

I can't believe HP was the first major vendor to see Windows 8 as the goat is really is. Usually HP is well behind everyone else.

maresca 13y ago

I've noticed over the years that every other Windows release is good. The next version should be good. Win 8 - Crappy Win 7 - Good Vista - Crappy XP - Good etc.

jgalt212 13y ago
I agree. At work, we have a limited number of Windows PC's. They have never run Vista (stuck w/ XP), and hopefully never run 8 (running 7 now).

sremani 13y ago

It makes me minority - I started using Windows 8 from Day One, and actually like it. I completely understand why people who are computer semi-literate bash it. I just exposes their inability with computers, but I am also aghast why people who make it to a site like this one - hate it passionately. I have to reconsider my assumptions about a Hacker News visitor.

billyhoffman 13y ago

The core trouble I've seen with non-technical people on Windows 8 isn't Metro, its confusion/paralysis with a mobile-like interface suddenly on a desktop. People had 5-6 years experience with touch computing on mobile devices. Pull here, touch here, gesture here to make X, Y, Z happen. 1 app at a time and its full screen. An app store is the only way to get software. Instant power-on, single user, very simple shell/OS/application launcher. People know what to expect and do with this interface. Windows 8 force dumps new users into a mobile interface going against 20+ years of how they have used a desktop PC. It's jarring, its weird, it "feels wrong." I've seen this time and time again. My mom is a wiz on her iPhone, and she is just fine with Windows XP/Vista/7. I put her in front of Windows 8 and she had no clue what to do. All her reference points are gone. It feels more and more that Microsoft should have focused on making phones/tablets running Metro, and a Desktop OS that iterated on Windows 7. They crossed the streams [1] and that's bad [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_pack#Crossing_the_Streams http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_pack#Crossing_the_Stream...