Survey shows XP lingers on while Windows 11 makes a 0.21% ripple in the enterprise Microsoft's Windows 11 adventure is going swimmingly. IT asset management outfit Lansweeper has published the results of a 10 million PC survey that gives the new operating system a 0.21 per cent market share. That is a good deal less than the 3.62 per cent of Windows XP and a nose ahead of the reviled Windows Vista. It is …
Company PCs are the last ones, at this point in time, that are going to dally about with a new Windows release.
It took about 10 years for companies to get away from Vista, and that transition still isn't entirely finished.
Don't look to companies to bolster Borkzilla's new pet project numbers.
We had Vista once, preinstalled on a couple of laptops.
Surprisingly it was rock solid, never gave any blue screens or issues.
Sadly the laptops themselves have dieded and gone to where dead laptops go, and Vista is no longer with us.
Microsoft said the 11 year old netbook I'm typing this on could not be upgraded to Vista. So it was forced to upgrade to Kubuntu. Now it's Kubuntu 21.04 - their latest and brightest on kernel 5.13. Great marketing MS!
XP lingers on in a partition. Still doing good stuff. Though the fact that Linux can just read/write the NTFS partition while XP still denies the existence of ext4 makes communication a little one-sided. Especially as XP isn't allowed to go out and play on the interwebs anymore. Methinks many more XPs are lurking beyond the reach of these surveyors,
Indeed, my audio engineering is still done on XP 'cos it has been that way since I got into sound engineering. It requires no internet so isn't at any great risk of anything other than the hardware failing. It still scans and prints documents on the Canon PSC, which is more than I can say for my Windose 10 machine....
I am ever warey of Microsoft upgrading this Windose 10 box to Windose 11 during an update - without my agrreement. They cannot do that to my XP box. NA!
ALF
Curious which Netbook? I have a ASUS Eee PC 1000HE 10.2" Netbook that I just dug up the purchase receipt on and I bought it in May 2009 so 12 years ago. It has been running Windows 7 home for several years, originally came with XP.
I didn't upgrade(windows) it, but installed clean from a Win7 home CD I bought through a friend who worked at MS at the time. I don't use the netbook often(few hours/year), but it is super handy in some situations with it's small form factor. Memory maxed out at 2GB I think and has a Samsung SSD in it now. Battery still seems ok too. My only real complaint about this eee pc I suppose is the weak CPU, being able to get more than 2GB of ram would be nice too but the cpu holds it back more than anything. I have a bunch of old games on it too from GOG that work fine(games that were built for 486s originally)
I also had the original Asus eee PC with linux and a 4GB flash storage or something? That thing was terrible by contrast. Whether it was the screen, or slow storage, or lack of storage, lower memory(I think it was less than 1GB). I gave my original eee pc to someone else 10 years ago.
Personally i have one WinXP, one Win2k and even a murky old Win98 computer sitting around...
Along with all that hardware that cannot cooperate with later windows versions because the proprietary and never updated drivers just cannot be installed there and the likewise proprietary software also wont run.
We also have some off the net WinXP computers at work, exactly for the same reason. While the price for a new computer with a newer windows is not much of a concern, the price to replace the specialised hardware the WinXP machines are attached to is quite exorbitant and in one case would mean we had to construct that kind of specialised plasma cutter from scratch as that model is no longer manufactured and the manufacturer also does not exist anymore.
Take a look at other software collectors. Gamers for instance will still have XP around as none of the more invasive "copy protections" will accept or be accepted by a newer system. If the games run at all on newer hard/software.
The Rejects of Redmond are not making any points with the hardware specifications for Bloatware 11. I have a Bloatware 7 partition around that get used a couple of times a year for the odd Bloatware program that needs to be run very occasionally (it is not allowed to connect to the Internet). The only reason for me to upgrade my hardware is for photo and video processing of large files, 4x and 8x files are not small. But here I might only upgrade on box as dedicated photo/video processing box (not using Bloatware for this). Otherwise, like most home users, I do not normally need that much hp to do my daily computer activities.
My 6 household PCs/Laptops are still Windows 7. I've not had any issues with using them on the 'net. I have a very good enterprise class firewall and locked down browsers, however.
All of these PCs will get converted to Mint very soon (with maybe the occasional Win 7 VM). Windows 7 will be the last version of Windows for our household.
I work from home, and my work PC is Windows 10. I truly hate Windows 10, but with OpenShell it's sort of tolerable. I dread the thought of being forced to use Win 11!!
Unfortunately retirement is too far off to be able to get completely away from f***ing Windows.
Took delivery of a new laptop yesterday. Booted it up and the Win10 install promptly upgraded itself to Win11. OK - let's try that.
Start with - create admin user that isn't a microsoft account. Hmm - nope. Lots of web searches and trials. Still nope - all the helpful suggestions are no longer valid. OK - create a fake new account, complete the login process. Create local user, reboot and log in with that.
Install Brave browser, set DDG as search engine, set Brave as default browser (which, in itself, took 20 minutes and a lot of reading). Click on a link - get Edge. Reboot. Try again. Same thing.
Check pi-hole and see a *huge* amount of traffic going to microsoft sub domains that I've not seen before. Blacklist domains. Random stuff stops working - e.g. volume control. WTF?? And I thought Android was bad.
Put Mint 20.2 on flash drive, boot from that, install with complete wipe of disk. Fully working laptop with no stupidity 20 minutes later.
Put Mint 20.2 on flash drive, boot from that, install with complete wipe of disk. Fully working laptop with no stupidity 20 minutes later.
Exactly the same with me although in my case it was Windows 10 (as 11 wasn't out then). I was just trying to install Thunderbird without an MS account. Tried to do so but was beaten back at every point until I gave up rather early on. I put Mint on it as fast as i could and haven't looked back since.
The key to Windows 11, seems to be setup Windows 10 with a local account, install the browsers you need, set the default browser. Lock down all the privacy settings (opt out of all the opt ins), turning off every single option. Then do an in-place upgrade to Windows 11.
I've only done this with Windows 10 Pro -> Windows 11 Pro though so far, but the results are a fairly locked down Windows 11 Pro with a local account, and both Firefox and Google Chrome working as I expect. I'm not seeing Edge very often, but then I'm not using anything that requires a Microsoft account on this test machine. Search on the taskbar doesn't automatically give web results only local (locked down), but if you specifically search for microsoft.com etc, it's annoying in that it will open that address insecurely as http rather than securely, https in Edge. (more snooping?)
But overall, it's mostly like a locked down version of Window 10, with a centralized menu that is all but useless/pretty much a blank space.
Windows 11 certainly fights back in forcing product placement advertisements for Apps that are made to look like full version installs in the start menu, but are just adverts for trial installs.
If Windows 11 was a person/colleague at work doing similar, you'd be reporting them for harassment, that's for sure. You have to wonder, do Microsoft employees take this type of control/abusive behaviour they program into their code, home with them?
Or do you just accept defeat, walk away - install Linux? (rhetorical)
User from another company was using Orifice365 (Word, Excel, Visio, Projects etc) for his stuff.
Got whacked by an Orifice365 upgrade which hosed his entire Office.
His IT team had to take in his laptop and fix the Orifice365 issue.
I'm hating this newfangled installers which'll sh*t themselves if the smallest amount of Office is still left behind on the target PC, and you'll need to jump through big flaming hoops to get Orifice to install.
Back in the days WP5.1 and SuperCalc you can get a speed advantage with muscle memory, especially with often-used commands. <clickety><click> and you're done... but not so with this newfangled Orifice and its horrendous ribbon...
I'm thinking of getting a cheap Celeron-based craptop just for myself, just to do the odd web browsing and wordprocessing/spreadsheeting at home, but I shall most definitely install Linux Mint on it, and Ickdoze be damned.
When my Windows drive died four days ago, I had to decide which operating system to install out of Windows 7, Windows 10 and Linux. Windows 10 has a bad reputation with Microsoft's "Ready or not, here I come" installation of buggy updates, changing user preferences and hiding settings, all of which make Windows 7 appear more reliable to me. Linux was not a practical option as I have so much Windows software so I reinstalled Windows 7.
Since I went over to Windose 10 boxen for the daily grind, office admin has become a nightmare. Open Office and Libre Office both do the same unexpected crashes every half hour or so and have to re-cover the docuemt I was working on, had saved but the saved work is not evident and has to be re created !!!!!
Is this an issue with both Open Office and Libre Office ?
I do not think so. They work fine under Linux, XP, Win 7.........
So I would expect that neither open office software will work properly under Windose 11 and so my next OS change will take me back to using Debian for my daily administrative grunt work.
Happy to know that it'll take only twenty minutes to install and configure Debian, as opposed to - as many days for the Microshite OSes I've dallied with over the years.
ALF
Have been using Libre office (6.2.2.2) on Windoze 10 for a couple of years with no unruly behaviour whatsoever. Other than the usual 10 crap. Machine is MS Orifice free.
But windows 10 will be my last windows as it is just so unproductive and unituitive. Once the move to 11 is forced, there will be a minty flavour of penguin everywhere around me, rather than just on some pi's and nuc's and the like.
I got me my new Toshiba Satellite 2400 and is she ever a beaut: Pentium 4 1.6GHz (180 nm!), 512 Meg DDR, 140 GB hard drive, DVD-rom / CD-RW, 3.5” floppy, wi-fi, 16MB S3 super-savage, V90 56K fax modem, ECP printer port, 3x Universal Serial Bus, infrared port, SD card slot, 2x PC Card slots, 85 key keyboard + 12 function keys, Alps touchpad, RGB monitor port, RCA video port, 1024x768 14.1” TFT LCD.
HANDILY runs Lubuntu 16.04 straight off the live DVD, but why would I toss out Windows XP? How else do you propose I run my Purble Place?
I have purged the network of all things XP and 2003.
Don't need any Service Packs and ISO's to take up storage space.
It is only Windows 7 and 8.1 remaining (4x Win7 and 3x Win8.1) here, but they'll get their marching orders. Soon. Muhuhaha.
Server2008 is still hanging on, but we are busy looking at alternatives to that, and it'll go into the dark night sooner or later.
I was feeling reckless (and have a separate Linux PC anyway) so I went ahead with the upgrade. First action was installing the Start11 menu replacement, which has made it look quite pleasant.
It's not too awful to use, except there is a bit of weirdness going on with the sound, not sure if that is realtek drivers or win11 that keeps losing the plot tho.
Have to admit I have spent very little time on it, as after it was loaded I moved on to rebuilding my Linux PC and installed Pop!_OS, just for a change. Much nicer experience than Windows.
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