Why You Need To Embrace Windows 10 Sooner Than Later

If there was a single message that Microsoft and its partners wanted to make clear during the 2016 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) it’s that consumers and enterprise customers won’t be able to keep using previous versions of Windows like they used to.

Microsoft is determined to make Windows as efficient and secure as possible, and that means working closer than ever with silicon partners like Intel, AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm to ensure that Windows 10 takes full advantage of new features built into the latest CPUs and GPUs. For example, a PC equipped with one of Intel’s new 6th generation (Skylake) processors will deliver up to 30x better graphics performance and 3x better battery life on Windows 10 compared to Windows 7. That “deep integration” between silicon and operating system sounds wonderful … but it also means that support for previous generations of Windows on new PCs becomes increasingly difficult.

Read the full content of this Article: http://www.notebookreview.com/feature/why-you-need-to-embrace-windows-10-sooner-than-later/

 

I expected better as far as articles go, rather than rehashing the propaganda Microsoft are spouting about hardware to try and get people onto their latest trojan OS.
Hopefully Windows 10 will be the end of Microsoft, disgusting company that is getting worse and worse.
Shame on you NBR

 

What disturbs me the most about WX is not MS unprecedented brazen approach to grabbing personal information or utter disregard for user control or privacy. Its the lack of concern from the general public. Chaos would break out if they tried 1/10th of the stuff just a few years ago.

 

30X performance? Not hyped, thank you.

 

When the Average Joe's software isn't even taking advantage of yesterday's hardware to the fullest, what's the meaning of peddling 30X more performance compared to today's hardware? These claims seem to be only relevant towards those computer geeks like us at NBR, but the problem is that if you're that sort of person then you're also be in the know about how Microsoft is using Windows as a massive personal data feed to their servers, making the newer hardware less appealing to purchase (hell, just look into NBR's Windows subsection for verification of this idea). As for the Average Joe, who generally only cares about websites/webapps and a word processor, 30X better performance is a non-factor and just yet more marketing babble (would grandma even understand, let alone care, about this difference?).

And let's take the premise of Windows 7's code being unworkable for integrating newer hardware features. Sure, this is certainly possible, however as a software developer it's not too hard to add in a few #ifdef statements in the 7/10/etc. kernel code to detect if the OS is running on Kaby Lake hardware (I'm assuming that NT is still in C and C++). nVidia and AMD already do this for their GPUs when you use the headers for OpenCL/OpenGL/CUDA, and it wouldn't been too hard for Intel/AMD to provide header files for this sort of thing (for example, #define __INTEL_KABY_LAKE__ 1 for when that hardware is present). That way, the OS can enable the 30X features if the hardware is detected, and fall back to "slow mode" if they are not.

Overall, this is just a poor excuse to give to the tech press (and in turn, NBR readers) for upgrading to Windows 10. There are legitimate reasons for going to 10 (DirectX 12 comes to mind), but a hardware lockout that's a thinly-veiled strong-arm isn't a genuine or even useful reason for Average Joe to upgrade.

 

No, that's not actually true. So long as there are drivers that support 7, you can install those drivers, and just not upgrade to newer drivers if those drivers don't support 7. Same as it has been with previous versions of Windows. nVIDIA doesn't release XP drivers for my old Inspiron anymore, but I can keep using it just fine because I keep it on the latest drivers that do support XP.

If Windows 7 were like Windows 10 with the automatic updates, including of drivers, then this could be an issue - if there were a new driver that only supported Windows 11, and it were auto-installed on Windows 10, that would cause a problem. But happily, Windows 7 allows opting out of automatic updates, and de-selecting updates that aren't desired, so you could stay on the working Windows 7 drivers even 20 years from now, regardless of whether the drivers of 2036 supported Windows 7 or not.

In short, I thing Microsoft may be a sponsor of NBR... there hardly seems to be any actual analysis in this article, but rather repeating what Microsoft wants the press to say. And sure, it'd be great for Microsoft to only have to support one version of Windows. As a developer who's supported multiple versions of software at the same time, I know it means extra effort and can add extra complexity as well. But that doesn't mean that supporting only one version is the best thing for their customers.