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Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure how good this data might be, being that it originates from software that might not be widely deployed. That said, it is always prudent to look for other sources and compare:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

The most surprising bit of information for me has to do with Vista. I didn't realize that it lost out so much ground to W7. We are still running Vista 64 bit on a number of machines because upgrading to W7 would also require upgrading a number of engineering packages that don't play well with W7 unless upgraded. That would cost tens of thousands of dollars and it simply isn't necessary. Aside from a few "features" Vista 64 has been rock-solid as a platform. Some of these workstations see heavy FEA work 18 hours a day, 5 to 7 days a week.

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>Some of these workstations see heavy FEA work 18 hours a day, 5 to 7 days a week.

I don't really see how constant high CPU usage is a good measure of the stability of an operating system.

Think really hard about what you said. Does a networked multi-core FEA tool running under Solidworks and solving non-trivial problems JUST run the CPU like hell for hours?

Does the operating system do nothing else while this is happening? Does the person using the workstation just sit there and watch it run or is he/she, perhaps, doing other work and running other applications?

While running an FEA tool is not THE test, it is one data point, good or bad. I can't remember the last time on of the Vista 64 machines crashed in the last, I don't know, four years or so.

What are those packages that will cost a lot to move to Windows 7? I am curious because I work on legacy application integration.

I'd have to go back a couple of years and review which ones have upgrade issues. I remember that Solidworks is one of them. We are under maintenance contract on SW itself (~$1,500 year per seat), so that's not a problem. The FEA tool, which cost ~$12K as well as our integrated CAM sofware (I think it was around ~$8K) I believe are the issues. Since the incremental improvement wouldn't really buy us much of anything measurable it makes no sense to spend thousands per workstation just because you upgraded the OS.

Vista got better right around the time W7 was released anyway, right? Both in terms of the OS itself as well as better support from third parties. I've always thought that W7, while a great operating system in its own right, also benefited from Vista acting as a sort of beta test for all the new shit they added like UAC and better separation of concerns. FWIW I had a Vista machine from a few months after release until W7 came out and I liked it well enough to consider it at least an improvement on XP.

XP got good with SP2. W7 ist SP2 of Vista ;)

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