UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums General Off Topic Microsoft requires Vista rollback before 7 upgrade

This just gets better......

Microsoft is asking Windows 7 beta testers to remove the program and return their computers to Vista, before upgrading to the forthcoming release candidate of the firm’s latest operating system.

The near-ready version of Windows 7 is expected to land next month. However, Microsoft has admitted the path to the RC isn’t going to be easy for anyone who has been testing out the beta of the OS.

In a long-winded blog post, the software giant confessed yesterday that it planned to block upgrades from the beta to the release candidate of Windows 7, although MS has offered a work-around for rebellious types who refuse to go by the rules. “We’ve learned that many of you (millions) are running Windows 7 Beta full time. You’re anxious for a refresh. You’ve installed all your applications. You’ve configured and customised the system. You would love to get the RC and quickly upgrade to it from Beta,” wrote Redmond on the Engineering Windows 7 blog.

“The RC, however, is about getting breadth coverage to validate the product in real-world scenarios. As a result, we want to encourage you to revert to a Vista image and upgrade or to do a clean install, rather than upgrade the existing Beta. We know that means reinstalling, recustomising, reconfiguring, and so on. That is a real pain."

Meanwhile, those stick-in-the-muds who “really, really need to” bypass Microsoft’s request that they revert to Vista first will need to boot from a flash drive or another partition before modifying the build number in the “cversion.ini” file via text editor.

Microsoft also reiterated yesterday that it had "no plans to offer an upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7".

What?
Are they in bed with the computer companies now. Can't upgrade from xp so what do you do.
Upgrade to vista then to v7.
Or buy a new computer with windows 7 installed already.
Then you will probably have to trash all of your programs because of compatibility issues.
It is bad enough with vista now.

Not like any of my systems have the ability to run vista past like a 2 other than my desktop; so no real worries for me; but it's a real shame that they'd do this to their users... It's like a huge slap in the face...

I don't understand why they are releasing Win7 when Vista hasn't been taken up by the masses. As an indication for example, only 30% of my sites visitors use Vista and 62% still use XP. You'd think that they'd try and phase out the use of XP before progressing to the next stage.

If you think about it, 10 years ago PCs were still developing at an alarming rate. My first PC was a Win95 Pentium II 200MMX with a 40GB hard drive and 32MB DDR memory. Every month or so I'd be down at the local store buying better memory, a larger or extra drive, upgrading the motherboard because the new CPU had a different shaped slot than the last one, ditching the V91 modem for a new ADSL router, etc, etc, etc. I think that now PCs have got to a stage were you don't really notice much difference when something new is available.

Unless your a gamer (which I'm not) and need huge amounts of fast memory and a blazing fast graphics card, the average user who runs the odd office app and surfs the net will be happier for longer with the machine that they have. I for one won't be upgrading my PC for many years to come. The only reason I have a 18 month old PC with Vista now is because the motherboard on my previous 'self-build' PC packed in and it was cheaper to buy a complete package than buy all the bits myself to build another one. If it hadn't died I would still be happily using it, along with XP, now.

They're doing it to replace Vista 'cas it was a flop...

Wow, my first box was a Tandy 1000 with a 300 baud modem less than 640k memory and a 10 MB hard drive with a VGA monitor.
Well that is what I remember anyway. But I think I started out with less than 640k ram and when windows 3 came out I upgraded to 640K and played hell with the ini files to get to "Enhanced" mode.
But it worked fine once I figured it out. I just did a lot of finger tapping waiting on things to load up.

hehe I remember upgrading to a 5mb hd! I think I still have it in the garage lol

My 2nd box was a DX50mhz with 640k and a 200mb drive and a 1200b modem. I though I would never need to upgrade again. Forever.
Forgive my foolishness.

Lol I have a couple of 486 DXII's here; they're the decommissioned Nike machines from when they upgraded in like 95... Picked them up at a local pawn shop for like $50 each lol... Which wasn't half bad considering what they charge for "under a GHz" computers now there lol...

$50.00 Dollars????
God I think I paid like $2000.00 at the time and I had big time issues with overheating . Had to buy a cpu cooler fan.

Lol yeh I know, they didn't know the value of computers evidently lol... It was insane... Now they charge like $300 for a 500mhz computer when I could buy a new 1.5+ghz laptop for that

640K of memory should be enough for anybody.

No, wait, screw that... I want 64G!!!

I'm building one with 12gb, it'll be finished when the HD gets here Tuesday (I forgot to order the HD when I ordered everything else )

I'm going to use the pc to do image editing, my current one just bogs down too much with Adobe Bridge CS3.



I think my first one was similar, back then accessing the internet was through BBS's and I'd spend hours trying to figure out the commands to get from one BBS to another then waiting for it to actually happen. Prodigy made it so much easier

Remember the wicked speedboost we got going from Windows 3.1 to WFWG 3.11? Seemed to double the speed.

Ah the old bbs. I remember there was something where the different bbs boards were linked and they would update each other over time. with the posts. I guess something like a dns server does today.
I just can't recall what the name of it was.
But I do remember that a reply may take a day or two later to get because the bbs you were using had not received it yet.

I have a "wont power on anymore" atari 2000 in my bedroom

it was called fidonet; a bbs system of email and file distribution using "store and forward". hubs, nodes and points would have a set time to dial into their uplink every day to download/upload netmail, news and file requests.

it was primitive, painfully slow, but it was all we had in those days



that's the one. any number of things could go wrong with that system.

thank god for internet ...

former fidonet sysop, 1984 - 1991
,696,ASIAPAC_Network,Maylands_WA,Gary_Dean,61-9-370-3506,9600,V32,CM,XA

Yes and even when things were starting to move along and the modem had gotten to the 14.4k speed Microsoft still only had 2 modems to access their files for download and they were both 9600 modems.

I only go back to about 1988 myself for messing with that stuff.
Just can't remember much of the names of things from back then

I can't believe Adobe still hasn't developed a flash player that works on a 64bit browser yet :smash: How long has 64bit OS's been out/relatively mainstream? Years, eh?

Well you also have to remember the limit of the serial port was 9600. Unless you had the latest greatest uart that allowed you to exceed the 9600 barrier.

I actually had a custom chip for that. I forget the name now, dang too long ago.

The point being that Microsoft was already one of the big computer industry players by that time and was way behind most other vendors that often had banks of modems and they were custom modem boards that did not rely on the PC architecture.

it was the 16550 (?) uart chip. some serial cards had a socket for it. oh, the things we forget ...

yeppers, teh 16550 did the trick.. i wrote many a serial driver for that puppy..

also the SIO chips in tandem with the Z80 cpu..

sigh.. the good ole dayz

Actually, this won't bother me at all since my install was done strictly on a spare drive and will be doing the upgrade/install on a different drive. In fact, I expected to have to do this when I installed the beta.

Damn, I must be old. Your system must have been about my third computer.

My first computer was a laptop with 2 times 720 K floppies, this was a top model for having TWO drives, so one would have to switch floppies less often. And 720K floppies were the latest rave, much better then the 360 K floppies.

Of course, our world class University computing center had 20 megabit hard disks the size of a industrial washing machine, a few years earlier already.

But back to the topic: if there is no upgrade from xp, maybe we should just stick with xp.

I have a legal Vista license and worked hard do downgrade my laptop to xp and am very happy with it.

My first machine was a TI 99 then a TI 99/4A. I had the expansion box, floppy drives, speech modules, printer, serial cards, memory expansion cards, 300 baud modem, and everything you could get for the thing. Boy those were the days.