The Computer Buzz

November 19th, 2009

Nome and Paul Van Middlesworth - owners - The Computer Factory
 

One Month with Win 7

Windows 7 has been out for a month now and things are looking up for Microsoft. While Win 7 has not spurred any major increase in PC sales, it is getting positive revues. First month sales of Win 7 upgrades are nearly three times higher than Vista’s first month upgrade sales. This is no surprise since almost no one “upgraded” from Win XP to Vista. It is interesting that nearly all the demand for upgrades is coming from Vista PC users. Win 7 has picked up 4% of the existing PC base in its first month, nearly all of it at the expense of Vista’s 30% market share. XP’s 64% share of the PC market is holding steady.

When Microsoft releases a new OS (operating system) they require all the major brand PC sellers to stop selling PCs with the old OS and sell only PCs with the new OS. In the past many users have been reluctant to convert to the newest OS during its first year of release. The conventional wisdom has been that it takes six months to a year to “get the bugs out” of any new OS. Each new OS release (Win 95, 98, ME, 2000 and XP) saw many consumers reluctant to switch in the first year.

Windows Vista saw this reluctance turn into a virtual boycott. As word of Vista’s problems spread, businesses stayed with XP by continuing to use or upgrade their old PC or by erasing Vista from new PCs and installing XP in its place. Most users who got stuck with Vista were home PC users who didn’t know they had a choice. Now that they do have a choice, many Vista users are choosing to upgrade to Win 7.

At this writing we are seeing strong demand for Win 7 in notebook PCs but 90% of our new desktop PC customers have continued to stay with Widows XP.

The reason that many business and home users continue to stay with XP is not because Win 7 isn’t a good OS. Win 7 is a good, stable OS. Our customers have stayed with XP simply because it runs all the new as well as older applications software and runs them faster than either Win 7 or Vista.

Anyone who owns an XP OS license can use that license on a new PC and save the cost of buying another OS license. An upgrade to a five or six year old existing XP PC (motherboard, CPU and RAM) will cost about three hundred dollars and yield a high performance, high quality system that will beat a $500 Dell like a drum.

There’s nothing wrong with Win 7. We will be happy to upgrade your Vista PC with any version of Win 7 you choose. But if you ask us to upgrade your XP PC to Win 7 we’ll probably try to talk you out of it.