2020? Don't push your luck.

I think that W8 laptop was my first exposure to uefi and the way that hp implemented it on that machine was obtuse. Neither xp or w7 dvds were recognized at bootup. I was disinclined to acquiesce to usoft's demands (to paraphrase Capn Barbossa.) Yes, xp allowed someone with with knowledge see behind the curtain and make use of knowledge. Since then usoft has been catering to the broader market of people without that knowledge and throwing the customers that made usoft a success under the bus. It's a often repeated act when growth expands a company's reach beyond its grasp.
2020 seems a good time to try w10, but I may decide to switch to Linux before then.

Spot on. It's pretty hard to overcome a 2-3 year lag in the tech market - especially when the products you are putting out have little dev support and are relatively expensive when compared with the competition. And that's just here in the US. In second- and third-world nations, Android rules with over 90% market share because their stuff is cheap and can run even on old phones.

I just watched a cool little segment about entrepreneurs in South America. Both farmers and merchants were using mobile phones both in price discovery (farmers would take their goods to the markets with the best prices, merchants would search for opportunities) and in payments. Due to the number of highway robbers, electronic payments now mean that there is nothing to steal because noone carries cash except very small amounts for food, etc.

They haven't had to contend much with competition for a PC OS, but they are very use to contending with the rest of the market -- like smart phones -- and have generally been doing very poorly.

When you change operating system you have to have the proper drivers that work with the hardware.

W7 changed a lot to obstruct configuration that was routine on XP for those who exploited it, as well preventing some programs from running that still depend on XP drivers. It even abolished ntbackup that ran from tailored shell scripts.

This part of the video was especially appropriate in a way not intended in the original:

"We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity" -- followed by another fuzzy image.

Agreed. Each manufacturer has to best guess what the market wants, and those who best fulfill those needs get the most business and force competitors to adjust. Microsoft has been so long without real competition that they aren't used to adjusting to the market. When manufacturers make the terms instead of the customers they serve, it creates an artificial market.

usoft puts a lot of effort into improving the internals of the OS, hidden behind the arrogance of 'look and feel' and privacy violating maneuvers. But they (or more precisely we) could use some more competition to usoft.

I had a some difficulty finding a laptop in my budget with W7 when I bought about 18 mo ago. Bought one with W8 and tried to install Xp and W7, but it was very difficult. Finally took it back for a refund. Bought one a couple months later with W7 and it has been adequate except for the hassle of having to modify the defaults and install/tinker with software to recover the XP/classic interface. MSFT keeps trying to withhold control of the computer I paid for. Reminds me of this:
http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts...

One behemoth (Apple) is no better than the others (MSFT, Google) from a privacy viewpoint, unless you just love the Apple interface (and higher prices because of reduced competition in the closed Apple system.)

What do you mean by 'favorite people', Mike? Is this something from W8 or new with W10?
(I just switched to W7 about 2 yr ago and have extensively modded the interface to keep it "classic" and I do NOT accept updates from MSFT.)

Sounds interesting.

I'm looking to pick up an Apple refurb computer. My son is also a IT, or whatever, and I do resist calling whenever I have a problem. He recommended that I go to an Apple refurb to replace this old laptop I'm using now. Said I'd really like it.

Not according to them. They also said that Microsoft pretty much demanded that they become your new life and that it was especially hard on married folks (one had only grown children, the other small children). Add to that the fact that you can't find affordable housing within a 45 minute drive - even on Microsoft salaries Redmond is insanely expensive - and the long hours at work...

Then there were Allchin's revelations about the political infighting and how unless your project had Ballmer's personal okay that your funding would get cut, the unwillingness of the various business units to work together on product testing and interoperability...

We'll just say I've always taken a somewhat jaundiced view of Microsoft even though in the world of tech you're pretty much stuck with working with at least some of their products. I'm really hoping that Android does to Windows what Windows did to Novell so many years ago and becomes a viable competitor. I'd also love to see Apple get more in the mix there (they are making inroads but their boutique approach doesn't really engender popular appeal). I'm all for competition and Microsoft has been without it for so long that they have really languished. I'd love to see the market force them back into actually paying attention to customers' demands rather than just slapping a new look and feel on things and calling it a new OS.

Is it different for senior software engineers and designers?

They have some bright people, but the ones who stay are the ones who are willing to do things Microsoft's way. My best friend's father moved to Redmond to work for Microsoft after HP (read Carly) downsized him. He left after a year because of the corporate culture there. I knew another guy (married my wife's best friend) who said the same thing after he left: that if you aren't willing to play the internal politics and do what they tell you, you're better off somewhere else.

usoft has a lot of very bright people, but they don't always show the best judgment. My reaction to usoft's user interface was that I am interested in serious computing, not a touch screen wrist watch and don't want my computer restricted to emulating it. If wanted a touch screen wrist watch I would buy it.

Yup.

Microsoft was late to the party with a mobile interface, so to try and catch up, they think that for some reason every device needs to be "web-enabled". Microsoft has never been the brightest bunch (see "Pirates of Silicon Valley), because they fail to recognize that people use a tablet or phone in a completely different manner than they use a desktop. Trying to force everyone to use the same interface on both types of devices actually hampers productivity, and the learning curve for the tiles on a desktop is prohibitive for most users - not to mention the admins like me who have been sick of Microsoft's ever-changing admin consoles since Windows 2000...

Microsoft just needs to allow for two different interfaces: one for mobile devices (where the tiles work fine) and another for desktops/laptops which uses standard icons/menus. Its just that because they've been a monopoly used to pushing out whatever they want for 20 years they think that nothing has changed despite the fact that they're getting absolutely killed in the mobile world.

They did the same thing with upgrades for IE, dropping distributions for XP (and W7?). That was long before they stopped all upgrades (available to the public) for XP.

I'm developing an on-line game for PC. I just read that DriectX 12 will be built into Win10 and that MS isn't offering DirectX12 for Windows 7. I'd call that the hard push into the new OS, wouldn't you?

The current Windows is based on VMS. In the 1990s the windows system was still running on upgraded versions of DOS as the 16 bit OS. NT (for "new technology") was a complete rewrite integrating graphics with the new 32 bit OS based on VMS but without multi-users. NT was released in 1993 as version 3.1 and was marketed in parallel with DOS-based windows through WindowsME until Windows 2000 replaced the old DOS architecture. Windows 2000 was internally NT5.0 and XP was NT5.1. Today's Windows versions are updates of NT and you occasionally see it designated as an NT version internally. The NT file system was NTFS, still used today. The lead architect of NT had previously designed VMS for DEC. But they seemed to have left out the daily stability part.

Here is another W10 "feature": they take over your PC as a zombie, using it for their own network distributions. http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2015/...

Do you know of a program that will allow old windows (specifically Windows XP) to run under Ubuntu? I have a calendar program and a password program that worked great with XP that I'd like to be able to run with Ubuntu. I know there are equivalent programs for Linux, but the retyping would take all day :-(

W8 was a better operating system internally but tried to force a radically new and more restrictive user interface on users, trying to make everyone interface with a computer the way they might on a touch screen wrist watch. usoft stubbornly stuck by it, extending the flop well beyond "initially". Eventually W8.1 partially restored the previous interface, while still arrogantly pushing the disaster as superior -- they don't want to let go. W10 is still pushing it to a lesser degree, partially through defaults, but is better in this respect than 8.1. That is in addition to the privacy problems raised in this thread.

Third party malware packaged by Lenovo is separate issue.

I have read that 8.0 was a flop initially. But why? What is the damage? What is only partially corrected?

I read they are touting W 10 even though 8.1 substantially fixed W 8, but the damage was done to its PR. And now I have read that w 10 doesn't gain you much over 8.1 except for negative concerns as was raised with this post.

The main issues I have had with 8.1 is all the adware and webbars they packaged with it. Lenovo's release was particularly bad with the Superfish malware and the embedded certificate issue. It is all this crap that seems stupid from a customer satisfaction perspective.

8.1 only partially corrected the damage in 8.