Upgrading/replacement of a preloaded OS

[J N Winkler]

My inspiration is the parallel thread dealing with the support cutoff date for Windows XP (currently April 8, 2014) and the obsolescence of XP generally.  It has occurred to me that one reason for this particular can being kicked down the road is the still-large market share for XP (currently 31% of PCs), which I suspect has been prolonged at this very high level--at least at the consumer end of the market--by the Great Recession taking away disposable income which might otherwise be spent on new PCs with preloaded operating systems more recent than XP.  One assumption underlying this hypothesis is that very few computer users actually upgrade from the preloaded OS or even set up a different OS in a separate partition, so I am opening this poll to see whether this is true.

One note re. parameters:  don't choose a Yes answer if the upgrade is limited to a new service pack or different release of the same OS version (e.g. an upgrade from Windows XP SP1 to SP2 doesn't count, and neither does an upgrade from Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Ultimate).

[corco]

I dual booted Ubuntu on an old laptop that I also upgraded from XP to 7. The nice thing about being in college though was the cheap software- University of Wyoming made it possible to buy the Windows 7 upgrade for something like $20 right when it came out (and Office was free!), so it was hard to pass up.

I now only use Ubuntu on that laptop- it runs a lot better on that old machine and my main laptop has Windows, so I'm in good shape.

[Zeffy]

I've upgraded to Windows 8 from Windows 7 which is what was initially loaded on my laptop. But I have a touch screen on my laptop so I figured the metro interface would be a cool experience.

EDIT: Welp, I'm the only voter for the first option so far. 

[SidS1045]

I've upgraded to Windows 8 from Windows 7 which is what was initially loaded on my laptop. But I have a touch screen on my laptop so I figured the metro interface would be a cool experience.

EDIT: Welp, I'm the only voter for the first option so far. 

Not the only one.  My five-year-old laptop has had XP, Vista and 7 on it.  It was designed and originally licensed for Vista, but came from my vendor with an XP downgrade.  Problem was, running certain Microsoft Office apps on XP (with drivers provided by the manufacturer) would freeze the entire machine.  When I finally gave up and installed Vista, the freezes went away, only to be replaced by Vista's too-numerous-to-mention annoyances.  7 turned out to be the OS Vista should have been, and it's been rock-solid ever since.

[hotdogPi]

I use Mac 10.6.8. (I used to think it was 10.6.5.)

[oscar]

My inspiration is the parallel thread dealing with the support cutoff date for Windows XP (currently April 8, 2014) and the obsolescence of XP generally.  It has occurred to me that one reason for this particular can being kicked down the road is the still-large market share for XP (currently 31% of PCs), which I suspect has been prolonged at this very high level--at least at the consumer end of the market--by the Great Recession taking away disposable income which might otherwise be spent on new PCs with preloaded operating systems more recent than XP.  One assumption underlying this hypothesis is that very few computer users actually upgrade from the preloaded OS or even set up a different OS in a separate partition, so I am opening this poll to see whether this is true.

Wouldn't many XP users have hardware that wouldn't even support an upgraded OS (at least staying within the Microsloth Windoze family, leaving aside options like Linux)?

And I suspect many won't know what "set up a different OS in a separate partition" even means.

In any case, the AARoads community may be very unrepresentative of computer users in general. 

My own vote was the last option (preloaded operating system exclusively, no upgrade on existing hardware), though I think one of my former work computers got an OS upgrade by our in-house tech support on the old hardware. 

[sammi]

I bought my Acer Iconia Tab W500 in October 2011. It originally came with Windows 7, which was sometimes a pain using touch only (but I had a keyboard so I managed). I bought Windows 8 in November 2012, and installed it over this one, most of my applications staying intact. 8.1 just came out, and I can't upgrade for some reason. @_@

[Thing 342]

I have run about a dozen different OSes on my laptop (Windows 7, 8 Preview, various Linux distros), although I currently use Linux Mint 16. 

[Scott5114]

I would imagine most of that 31% market share is accounted for by business systems. Most times businesses have little reason to upgrade as long as their core software set is still running. Sometimes they may even actively avoid upgrading, to avoid that software being broken, especially if it is specialized software tailored to a specific industry or bespoke software specific to the individual company. Sometimes this software is dependent upon a specific older version of a Windows component (usually IE6).

[J N Winkler]

Wouldn't many XP users have hardware that wouldn't even support an upgraded OS (at least staying within the Microsloth Windoze family, leaving aside options like Linux)?

I think this is true for a substantial chunk of XP users.  There is probably also another segment of the Windows user community (this poll is not aimed just at XP users) that has equipment capable of accommodating upgrade to a new version of Windows, but does not want to sacrifice performance or open the door to driver issues similar to what plagued many XP-to-Vista upgrades.

In my own case, for example, I have a gaming laptop with Windows 7 which definitely has specs good enough for Windows 8 or 8.1, but I won't even consider the upgrade because of the risk of a performance penalty.  (I asked about "most recent computer" only, but in fact I have never actually upgraded the preloaded OS on any computer I have owned.)

And I suspect many won't know what "set up a different OS in a separate partition" even means.

Perhaps so, but I am pretty sure the people that have actually done it will know exactly what it means.

In any case, the AARoads community may be very unrepresentative of computer users in general.

This is almost certainly true--I'd expect the AARoads community to be more tech-literate and more likely to dedicate disposable income to IT equipment than the US population in general.  This poll is designed more as a starting point than as a representative sample.

I would imagine most of that 31% market share is accounted for by business systems. Most times businesses have little reason to upgrade as long as their core software set is still running. Sometimes they may even actively avoid upgrading, to avoid that software being broken, especially if it is specialized software tailored to a specific industry or bespoke software specific to the individual company. Sometimes this software is dependent upon a specific older version of a Windows component (usually IE6).

I am sure a large fraction of XP's 31% usage share is enterprise systems.  I am not sure the majority of it is, however.  In contrast to the ordinary home user, businesses are more likely to have well-defined use cases, IT staff with the ability to monitor software support cycles and quantify obsolescence risk, and the investment capital to make appropriate upgrades such as purchases of new hardware or software, porting existing programs to new operating systems, etc.

I am aware that the business community has always been quick to quote reasons XP just can't be moved from, but I suspect a lot of that is deliberately overstated in an attempt to send a signal to Microsoft and to other application developers (e.g. Adobe) to steer clear of feature changes that break existing functionality.  Sometimes the businesses win the battle, sometimes the developers do (as Adobe did with the battle over the Acrobat single-document window), but either way both sides stay in business and the particular issue being fought over is never heard from again.

For the ordinary home user it is a different story.  Take a typical household of three people, where two out of three routinely use superannuated computers in addition to their workhorses, while the third, being aggressively technophobic, continues to use a desktop computer made in 2004.  In such a household XP has three out of five computers, or a usage share of 60%, even if the vast majority of the computing is done on Windows 7 machines.  Now suppose the technophobe is told of the April 8, 2014 drop-dead date for XP support and decides to upgrade to a Windows 8.1 desktop, and another person in the house decides to take over the existing XP desktop to use as a home FTP server (which is possible in vanilla XP by activating the Internet Information Services component).  Then the end result is a household in which the respective usage shares of XP, 7, and 8.1 are 50%, 33%, and 17%.

[Duke87]

I've never upgraded the OS on a computer, nor do I imagine I ever will. Why not? Well, because for me the useful lifespan of a computer is about 4 years. So, I just change the OS I'm using when I get a new computer. No need to change it sooner.

I do have a second laptop which is dual boot Windows 7/Ubuntu, but it came out of the box that way so I can't claim I "upgraded" it.


To some degree I limit my options by insisting on having only laptops. They are highly convenient but they pretty much have to be 100% OEM. Thing is, I've gotten too used to lounging on the couch with my computer, so a desktop that requires me to sit upright just doesn't do it for me. Then there is also the issue that in my tiny apartment I don't have anyplace to put a desktop even if I did have one!

[SteveG1988]

Most of the time i reinstall the OS on a machine, that way i get less pre-loaded fluff. I have a 7 home premium disc from dell, i used it to redo my sister's laptop when we got it from my aunt who died, after we checked to see what was on there, fresh install, wiping out the recovery partition in the process.

My laptop i use now came without a copy of windows, or a CD key, but thankfully i had an HP OEM CD Key. I have a 1tb drive that i've used in three different systems, backing up the data on a seperate partition at times, or copying to my desktop for a fresh windows install in the new hardware

[vdeane]

My computers are quite long-lived and have seen several OS changes (well, aside from my Chromebook).  I originally got the desktop around 2002, performed a major upgrade in 2005, and a couple of minor upgrades since (the hard drive upgrade involved ghosting the drive image, so it's more or less continuous); the only original component left is the floppy drive.  At this point all I use it for is my web server due to age.  My laptop was bought in 2009 when MS was offering "free" (with very expensive shipping) upgrades to 7.

Desktop: 98 -> XP (in place upgrade; never doing that again, it caused numerous problems) -> XP again (clean install) -> XP/Ubuntu 9.10 dual boot -> XP/Fedora 15 dual boot -> Fedora 16 -> Mint 15 -> (no further upgrades planned, I intend to buy a new desktop and install Mint 17 if I can find the money)

Laptop: Vista -> 7 -> 7/Fedora 16 dual boot -> 7/Mint 13 dual boot -> Mint 14 -> (either Mint 17 or 7 depending on multiple factors including the desired desktop replacement; may end up dual booting again, since LibreOffice doesn't always preserve formatting on word docs)

[Dr Frankenstein]

My most recent (and primary) computer shipped with Windows Vista in 2008, and I did an in-place upgrade to Windows 7 a few months after it came out. It took an entire evening to install, but it actually fixed a problem or two, which I suspect were driver-related (and Dell wanted me to ship it to them to have it fixed... screw that).

My previous ones have been through all sorts of OS changes, and multiple clean installs. Windows 98 SE, Windows 2000 Pro, Windows XP without and with dual-boot setups with Red Hat 9, Mandrake, Mandriva, then Ubuntu. One of my computers even ran BeOS for a little while. I also had Ubuntu as my primary OS (with Windows XP in a VM) for a while.

I had two servers for quite a while; my main one with Windows Server 2003, and a secondary one running Ubuntu. Both are now out of service (fried motherboard and crashed HDD, respectively).

[doorknob60]

Yep, when I got my last laptop little over a year ago (came with Windows 7), first thing I did was dual boot it with Linux. A couple months later I got a cheap copy of Windows 8 through my school so I triple booted Linux, Win7 and Win8. When I replaced the 500 GB HDD with a Solid State Drive (120 GB), I only installed Windows 8 and Linux onto it. However, I can't think of any recent times where I've upgraded Windows in place. I normally don't keep Windows around long enough to do that, and I'd rather just fresh install it if I'm upgrading.