Users remained stymied today by endless reboots after trying to upgrade their PCs to Windows 7, according to messages posted on Microsoft’s support forum.
An answer has yet to be found for all users, who began reporting the problem last Friday after watching the upgrade stall two-thirds of the way through the process. Most users said that their PCs had displayed an error that claimed the upgrade had been unsuccessful and that Vista would be restored. Instead, their PCs again booted to the Windows 7 setup process, failed, then restarted the vicious cycle .
Those instructions didn’t do anything for some users, who said that their systems were still crippled.
“You people at Microsoft just don’t get it, do you?” protested a user tagged as “FJP57” on the thread. “The problem for many here is that the store-bought upgrade, not just the download, is failing in all types and makes of computers. Read the posts. It’s not isolated. There is NO BOOT MENU OPTION TO LOAD VISTA AGAIN. IT’S GONE. The boot cycles over and over again. It’s that simple. This is not an operator error. It’s a Microsoft problem.”
What a surprise! Luckily, most of my customers have taken my advice not to be beta testers.
Apple’s ads do not take place in the world of facts, so I don’t know why they’d bother using this instead of concocting things out of whole cloth like they usually do.
Actually I was trying to come off less snarky in my question. I’m wondering what indeed Midnight is offering as the alternative.
I’m sitting in a business with ~30K desktops running XP that’s at the end of support. There is no way we can afford NOT to shift to Win 7 at this point. I know a smaller business might not have these issues but if not Win 7, then what? Snow Leopard? Perhaps he was just advising them to wait but if so how long?
Well, he says he advises them not be beta testers by which I presume he means wait until after the first service pack is released or at the very least until the most glaring problems have been patched.
Curious, but my IT team was saying the same about end-of-life about another product, and there was absolutely no option but to upgrade or lose support.
In such a scenario, do you really have an option not to move to Win 7?
Not to move entirely? No, we have to do it at this point for a number of reasons at my company. But I was referring to Midnight Son’s comment. I’m assuming perhaps his clients are smaller and could get by with a short period of time as the initial Windows 7 kinks are worked out. He didn’t really explain the comment much.
This has less to do with the timing of Windows 7 and XP lifetime support and more to do with the planning of what we have going on throughout or company right now. To summarize it though, if we don’t do it now, the timeline for when we can do it will be nearly a year from now if not longer. There is some support issue to it though, notably software assurance licensing and it’s renewal.
Probably not. You either continue using XP without support or updates or you move to Windows 7.
I suppose there’s always the option of biting the bullet and shifting to Linux or OS X and only retaining Windows for employees who use applications that aren’t available or can’t be easily replaced on those OSes. That’s insanely complex though and I can’t see it being a realistic option for companies with more than, say, 50 employees.
It’s also a very real demonstration of why relying on proprietary technologies can be a huge problem.
Your users have lived with XP for 7 years. There is no pressure to upgrade tomorrow. I agree with others. Wait till year end, put the cap expense in to next years budget and roll it out then. Are you buying all new machines for everyone? You must be thrilled MS decided to punish all the Windows Vista avoiders and make it so you can’t upgrade in place from XP
Bear in mind this is Midnight Son we’re dealing with. If he could nuke Windows from orbit and get everyone to switch to Linux or (maybe) OS X, he would.
Which doesn’t make him wrong to tell folks not to switch to Win7 until it’s fixed (or as close to “fixed” as a Windows OS gets), just that he’s not the most impartial OS arbiter here. :-)
Our pressures are noted above, they aren’t really support guided only, it’s also a cost thing regarding keeping software assurance active or not.
As an IT guy I don’t really have an opinion either way on them cutting support for XP. I look at it from both angles. Yes it must suck to work there and still have to support something that many years later, especially with a new OS just out that is many years ahead of it in features. On the other hand, if Vista wouldn’t have been such a major change, many organizations would have switched to it in the interim period, thus negating the quandary we have right now.
Our plan is:
Upgrade only a certain machine type (out of about 4 we have deployed.)
New machines will get imaged with Win 7.
The 3 machine types left will be replaced as their lease runs out, or on an as-needed basis.
Note though that there are about 20+ other projects related to the Win 7 change internally, mostly with reprogramming business applications and changing internal web sites to be more IE 8 friendly. This is something that could have been done long ago but when given the choice to be lazy, any department can fall prey to it.
I’ve advised them to wait for at least SP1. I just want to add that the Microsoft fanbois/employees here are not exactly impartial either. Ya’ll got me outnumbered!
The one thing I am looking forward to with companies upgrading from Windows XP is for there to be less customers entrenched with IE 6.0. I’m especially looking at you, US Government IT.
