Do you prefer Win7 to Vista/XP one year after release?

Back in January of 2008, one year after Vista's release, 57% of NBR respondents preferred Windows Vista to Windows XP. By January 2009, that percentage had increased to 74%. Now Windows 7 has been out for a year, and has had a noticeable uptake on these forums. Thus a poll comparing it to its predecessors seems appropriate, to help put some numbers on its popularity relative to its predecessors a year after release, and allow comparable empirical comparisons of its uptake to Vista's here at NBR.

Poll open for 10 days, closing on November 1.

 

Of the three, I prefer XP. The truth is it's still all I need in an operating system, but the main reasons I prefer it are because it's very fast on new hardware (it flies on my T410), and it still maintains backwards compatibility with older software that just isn't present with windows 7. I did a bunch of testing not long ago on my notebook and found that windows 7 was significantly slower than XP (both were tweaked on my system), and many of my older games would simply not run properly, or at all. Also not to mention the fact that a basic install of XP only consumes 1.5 GB of HDD space versus 15+ GB for Windows 7.

 

I love Windows XP, but as of right now I would take Windows 7.

I like the basic use of XP, but the ease of using Windows 7 has spoiled me.

 

Windows 7 is reliable, quick, and is visually appealing. The choice is simple.

 

It's all about the visuals. I'm a graphics hore. So Windows 7 for me. Hell, I even prefer Vista to XP for no reason other than visuals and visual effects.

A better poll would have been whether people prefer Windows 7 or Snow Leopard (applying only to people that have used both).

 

Win 7 by far - smooth, efficient & secure. XP is simply too old - it had it's time, now let's move on.

 

I still prefer Windows XP, however, the need for upgrading software overthrew me, and getting it for free was an added bonus too.

 

Windows 7 for any desktop or laptop setup. There is just so much new that I do not want to miss.

XP is just dated. You can use 3rd party applications to add features but that takes time and after it doesn't use less resources than Windows 7 anymore.
Vista is just a beta of Windows 7.

Only thing I still use Windows XP for is for virtual machines and even there I use Windows Server 2003 mostly.

 

I upgraded to Windows 7 when it came out and I haven't looked back since.

The only thing that bugs me about 7 isn't 7 itself; rather, the feeling that it should have come out years ago.

 

7 looks pretty, is as fast or faster than XP in everything, and supports newer hardware (dx11). I can no longer figure out why people choose XP over 7 if both are available - sure, my old lappy runs XP but it has been relegated to backup/dad's computer, but there are people who are installing XP over 7 onto computers they have just purchased. It won't be long before MS drops XP support, might be after the Win8 release.

As for the lightweight argument, which may be the only valid argument left in XP's favor; look into ubuntu, they fit nicely onto 2gb+ usb sticks. Or it might be time to upgrade from that 60GB drive

 

I prefer W7. When Vista came it made my laptop slow, so I went back to XP.
W7 works great, and so do Vista SP2, on the same laptop, now four years old.

W7 is way faster at connecting to WLAN than XP, and the system image backup is a must have. No more reinstalling, or the need to buy/install Acronis or similar.

Whoa, how is that possible?
I get 7 GB (32 bit) and 10 GB (64 bit) with original ISO's, excluding pagefile and hibernation.

I have cut down W7 to 4 GB, disabled some things I don't use (not all listed), so now it's even better.

 

NO. Not again.

I personally prefer XP, and the only thing holding me from installing XP on my Toshiba is the fact that fewer and fewer games and other applications have native support for XP anymore.

I suppose Windows 7 is okay...but all the fancy glowing icons and highlights annoy. I don't want a fancy and overly garish UI, I just want something utilitarian and something that works. XP does that job, and it does it well.

 

Windows 7 has a Windows Classic theme available, comes with every install.... Just need to pick it over the default. It uses less resources too since UI animation is disabled.

 

This is what I use, I do occasionally switch to the Aero theme's, however.

 

Vista was enough to make me want to buy a mac. 7 was some serious redemption.

 

wow, we have seen a significant growth in windows 7, somebody needs to make a poll for linux.

 

FYI, Windows 7 is built upon Vista.

 

Swallowing my desire to be sarcastic... yes, I know Win7 was built upon Vista. That does not mean that Vista was not total crap and that 7 got it much better.

So, I stand by that I hated Vista and very much love 7.

 

Did you even use Vista? For me, Windows 7 is just Vista SP3.

 

I need to use W7 by hardware/software issues.
But W2K could do anything i do today without troubles.
I did not see anything that would made me to go to the store to buy W7, Vista or XP. I change just because i change laptop.

So W2K is what i prefer. That one had a sensible change.
So i didn't voted.

 

I would never be that desperate

I too hated Vista and love Seven. Vista was so bad my friends refused free copies of Vista Ultimate I received as a gift from Microsoft.

 

While that poll certainly could (and I'm sure has) been done, I'm intentionally targeting this question to ask Windows users which version they prefer. That
eliminates any skewing that users of multiple versions of Windows and Snow Leopard may cause (supposing 70% of the people who prefer Vista to 7 voted Snow Leopard and only 20% of the people who preferred 7 to Vista voted Snow Leopard, it is easy to see why the results could be skewed). It also makes it comparable to the Vista polls I created (links in first post). Similar logic applies to Linux. Fewer variables should hopefully make the poll more accurate.

XP and Vista are differentiated because they both are recently-sold previous versions, and I had a feeling that it might be the case that a good percentage of those who preferred (XP or Vista) would prefer XP. Turns out it's a good thing I did include XP, since right now it's 35 for Seven, 8 for XP, and 0 for Vista!

I had a feeling there'd be at least one 2000 fan. I did consider throwing 2000 in with XP, but when I looked at my Vista polls I saw that I hadn't done so then (probably because 2000 had already been succeeded as the most recent OS for 6+ years by 2008, versus 3.5+ for XP now), so for the sake of consistency, I didn't here, either. Oh well.

 

No worries Apollo13

 

OMG!

This isn't even close, windows 7 hands down! I've used XP tablet edition and Vista Ultimate on my tablet, none can compare to windows 7 as far as overall speed and responsiveness of windows 7. It was so good, I deleted Vista Ultimate from my main machine to load windows 7 Ultimate, what a difference!

 

XP is just too limited compared to Vista or 7. Like most before me, I prefer 7 to Vista, but the difference isn't that great.

I wouldn't actually pay to upgrade Vista to 7; not until they give a 90% discount on the upgrade anyway!

BTW, to put this poll in a little more context: Even today, more people use XP than Vista, 7 and ALL other OSs put together.

 

I find that logic to be a bit silly. Take this parallel for example:
A Ford Model T can still get me from point A to point B for pretty much all the local driving I need to do. So why buy a new car? The new one still does the same thing, getting me from one point to another.

In a sense, a new OS is like a new car. It still serves the same purpose (as it should) and its functionality is probably upwards of 95% covered by the old OS. But we like new OSes because they provide increased efficiency and reliability, especially for the changing world around us.

With W2k, a lot of time is spent digging for drivers for the components of many laptops - in W7, this time is saved through many automatically installed drivers. In W2k, search is slow and turns up irrelevant results we don't care about - in W7, indexing of file contents brings results that we want, faster. Yes, in both cases the functionality is the same (provided there are good W2k drivers out for your hardware, but that's another issue), but with W7, there is much better efficiency.

In addition, I think pretty much anyone would admit that W7 is more stable overall than W2k. That leads to less downtime, and less time troubleshooting or doing other things to keep a system running.

So yes, you're right in saying that there's pretty much nothing that I can do in W7 that you can't do in W2k. But there's plenty that I can do in W7 far faster than you can do in W2k. And I'd bet that in a comparison between a W7 machine and a W2k machine with the same hardware, the former would have less downtime and less issues that come up than the latter.

If I didn't have the student discount and if I didn't use an SSD, I'd probably still be using Vista on my T500 rather than W7. But I still prefer W7 over Vista, XP, and W2k - and I'd find it hard to believe that someone could truly prefer W2k over W7.

 

I didn't compared 7 to DOS
The mediocre improvement in quality don't justify.

That is not my experience. W7 is better than W2K in most of the things, but the level just don't justify the expense in my opinion. I can do all i want probably even faster do to lesser hardware requirements with W2K. 9 years later i still can't have all my most important paths in a save/open menu if i don't hack or use third party software. I don't find it more stable ´- if i exclude out of memory issues i had back then due to the fact i went with my 3D programs overboard - going to 2Gb memory while having only having 768mb physical at time so using page file. But i got more issues in comparable situation, going page file with W7, they just happen much less frequently since i have got much memory.

This is an opinion excluding the hardware differences.

 

In my experience Windows 7 takes a lot less effort to set up in comparison to Windows XP when installing from scratch. This is mainly due to the better driver support and streamlined updates for both drivers and patches on Windows 7. I find that I save over an hour worth of admin time in Windows 7 compared to a similar setup on XP.

Under XP, after installing the OS you have to install the drivers manually, update the Windows Update (bit of irony) and then download 110MB+ patches afterwards (assuming SP3 is slipstreamed already). Of course not forgetting installing your own apps and files back on the system, the whole process takes well over 2 hours for me on XP.

Still for a 9 year old operating system, XP has done quite well to keep up. I recently did a clean install of XP on my ThinkPad R61e with a 250GB 7200RPM HDD and it's very snappy. It has a small memory footprint by todays standard and after doing minor tweaks with the registry and services it only boots a few seconds after my Windows 7 machine equipped with SSD. MS Bootvis (I miss that program post XP) reports it boots from BIOS to Desktop around 16.81 secs which I find impressive.

 

windows 7 is my favorite os between all operating systems in the market

 

Vista didn't bother me but 7 has been great thus far.

 

As I said in another forum, Vista about drove me off the deep end. Windows 7 has been nothing but gold for me. I never had many problems with XP but Windows 7 works just as well and looks better doing it.

 

To be honest, Windows 7 has been absolutely awesome.

 

I personally believe Windows 2000 was the best operating system for it's time... It was unbelievably stable for it's time and quite speedy. The added features were perfectly balanced.

However, 7 is now my favorite. Although I enjoyed Vista and thought it was quite underrated and most problems were either greatly exaggerated or fueled by the ignorance of users, it did have a couple problems that 7 has fixed and improved upon greatly.

Is it true that XP was built off Windows 2000, the same way that Windows 7 is built upon Vista?

 

I'm one of the rare few who has had no problems with Vista. While I'm sure 7 improves on alot of things under the hood, I've found Vista speedy & responsive on both my Dell (Ultimate x32) and my Desktop (Home Premium x64), with no major crashes, errors or other problems to report.

With that said, I bought my first Mac (see siggy) before I ever sat down to use 7. My overall opinion is 7 is somewhat of a cross between Vista and OSX - not bad by any measure, just nothing like what I had already been used to.

 

Fully agree with the previous poster who mentioned that 7 is just Vista SP3 - it doesn't offer anything new that couldn't have been included in Vista, and even works pretty much exactly the same...??

People who think Vista is "total crap" (huge quotation marks there) but 7 is "godly, awesome" are just buying into the marketing and media coverage, and have never actually used the 2 side by side. HOW you could come to that conclusion if you actually DID use the 2 and compared them, is beyond me.

 

I certainly prefer Windows 7.

XP was great when it was in it's prime, but technology moves forward, not backward.

 

I still keep XP around for some of my older games that won't run or play nice with Windows 7. Apart from that I exclusively use W7.

 

windows 7 has been good to me

 

I moved straight from XP -> Windows 7 in January, and I have never looked back since. Seven is just amazing. Any BSOD that has occured has been either caused by me (excessive tinkering), or bad video drivers.

I've used Vista for a few days on my dad's laptop, and it pretty much made me want to kill myself. It questioned everything I did (bloody UAC!), it was ungodly slow, and I could not stand that desktop sidebar stuff. On such a low resolution (1280x800), the sidebar was a big nuisance.

I realize that after extensive tweaking, I could have had Vista behave and look a lot better, but given that it was not my machine.... Well, I didn't ever want to use Vista ever again if it was like that out of the box.