Windows 7 leaving Redmond’s help desk less busy

maraud

From past reports upgrades seem to be from Vista to Win7, it is possible that if or when there is a surge in XP sales that the phone activity will increase dramaticly.

#2  

johnrr6

Peter----great story------interesting.

Win 7 is a rather big change coming from XP. Coming from Vista----it's a 5 minute orientation.

Maraud may have a point----Tech support business may pick up greatly as XP'ers finally upgrade.

I have in-place upgraded 7 different machines for family and friends. Going from Vista to Win 7 was ridiculously easy compared to previous upgrade processes.

My oldest son's college laptop has XP Pro----and he brought it home for break with a copy of Win 7 Pro upgrade he got at his bookstore at school.

I've got to decide whether I want to mess with the in-Place upgrading from XP to Win7 (which is a bit more detailed than upgrading from Vista) ----or just bite the bullet and wipe it----and start with a fresh install of Win 7.

#3  

PeterT

Copy his data to an external drive and wipe it.

#4  

maraud

Hi John,
If you are questining the ability of the upgrade from XP to Win 7 versus a fresh install then I see little hope for the general public in performing an upgrade from XP to Win7. That said, if M$ wants to upgrade those customers , they will need to provide a simpler upgrade path ie One that upgrades from XP to vista and then upgrades from Vista to Win 7 on one or two cd's all transparent to the end user. That seems very doable to me, but I am not a programmer. M$ needs to do something or they will lose a very large upgradable base that has little or no upgrade availability.

#5  

johnrr6

Good points----but I think the Win 7 bandwagon is so strong right now---Microsoft really doesn't care about the home users on XP. It's been such a long time now since XP---the general public's home machines are so junked up---they have become unusable----and it's too expensive to have the Geek Squad fix them.....

So they just go buy another machine....With Win 7 on it----problem (for them) solved.....

I'm talking Joe Schmoe here----your averge guy who couldn't care less about computers and downloads junk daily.....

Corporates, schools, large businesses won't upgrade in the tradiditonal sense anyway----they will just reimage with data being stored on servers----really no big deal to them....

It's just "the little guy" who gets screwed in this whole XP upgrade thingy....

As always....

#6  

maraud

You are probably right that M$ does not care about XP users and where can they go anywhere maybe Apple. I am still waiting for a price drop and will probably do a clean install of Win7 myself.

#7  

rjs735

I agree here. M$ only cares about the success and revenue stream that WIN7 will bring after the long Vista drought. The only real revenue came from new sales of harware.

I guess they may believe that we will be buying Vista as a bridge to WIN& from XP. (lol)

#8