Ranting about Microsoft and Tech Support in India

Recently, I upgraded an old laptop running windows xp from 512 megs of ram to 2 (1) gigs worth of ram. As a result, I running well. Do I upgrade to windows vista or windows 7? The laptop is an old d505 (dell d505 latitude).

I was thinking of running windows vista but I do not really do anything serious with this system. The reason to upgrade windows vista is access winboost and use 4 to 8 gig usb drive. Now, I need to maintain windows compatibility with the rest of my computer's and my family's computers. This is my little troubleshooting laptop that is if something major happens to the computer, I am not upset.

Vista will limit you to 4gb ram windows 7 let's you use more. Vista is more games compatible and old hardware compatible. win7 is not. As an old laptop stick to vista. If you need more than 4gb of ram go for 64 bit win7.

Just note ms does not support vista anymore.

Lord Skimper wrote:Vista will limit you to 4gb ram windows 7 let's you use more. Vista is more games compatible and old hardware compatible. win7 is not. As an old laptop stick to vista. If you need more than 4gb of ram go for 64 bit win7.

Just note ms does not support vista anymore.

Yeeeeaaaaah, you're completely wrong there, mate. 7 is more efficient (about as efficient as XP is on the same hardware), and can run anything that XP can (which isn't guaranteed for Vista).

(For the record? Win 7 can actually be made to run on a Pentium 2 with 80MB of RAM. Not well, mind you, but still)

The E wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:Vista will limit you to 4gb ram windows 7 let's you use more. Vista is more games compatible and old hardware compatible. win7 is not. As an old laptop stick to vista. If you need more than 4gb of ram go for 64 bit win7.

Just note ms does not support vista anymore.

Yeeeeaaaaah, you're completely wrong there, mate. 7 is more efficient (about as efficient as XP is on the same hardware), and can run anything that XP can (which isn't guaranteed for Vista).

(For the record? Win 7 can actually be made to run on a Pentium 2 with 80MB of RAM. Not well, mind you, but still)

You really have no idea what your talking about. You "mate" have it backwards. Vista is an extension / evolution of XP. Windows 7 is a replacement product that allows some compatibility and many incompatibilities. Optical drives for instance. Most old ones will not work with the write mode with Win 7. Win 7 works well now, with new hardware, but the question wasn't for new Hardware.

You sound like a kid who has never built a system.

Lord Skimper wrote:You really have no idea what your talking about. You "mate" have it backwards. Vista is an extension / evolution of XP.

Nope. I can point you toward the engineering history of Vista, and I can also point you towards all the chaos that happened around the time of Vista's release that caused all the issues we have today with people not wanting to let go of XP. Had Vista been an evolution of XP (like, for example, Win98 being an evolution of Win95), we wouldn't be in the situation we're in today.

Vista was the product of the Longhorn development cycle. It was arguably unfinished, and broke a lot more compatibility rules than any preceding consumer Windows release.

Windows 7 is a replacement product that allows some compatibility and many incompatibilities. Optical drives for instance. Most old ones will not work with the write mode with Win 7. Win 7 works well now, with new hardware, but the question wasn't for new Hardware.

Given the increasing irrelevance of optical media, you will forgive me if I do not take that as a serious issue. Also, you might want to substantiate your claims, or make claims easily substantiated by trivial google searches. I am unaware of any SATA/IDE compliant drives that actually had issues with not working on 7 that did work on Vista.


The point is, for a given piece of consumer hardware, chances are that it is going to work better under Windows 7 than it would under Windows Vista. Anything produced during the runup to Vista will work correctly with a high degree of probability under both OSs, and 7's reduced performance overhead does make it a good upgrade target for an XP machine.

Lord Skimper wrote:

The E wrote:Yeeeeaaaaah, you're completely wrong there, mate. 7 is more efficient (about as efficient as XP is on the same hardware), and can run anything that XP can (which isn't guaranteed for Vista).

(For the record? Win 7 can actually be made to run on a Pentium 2 with 80MB of RAM. Not well, mind you, but still)

You really have no idea what your talking about. You "mate" have it backwards. Vista is an extension / evolution of XP. Windows 7 is a replacement product that allows some compatibility and many incompatibilities. Optical drives for instance. Most old ones will not work with the write mode with Win 7. Win 7 works well now, with new hardware, but the question wasn't for new Hardware.

You sound like a kid who has never built a system.

Don't be a jerk.

The E is actually right, mostly. I've used both systems fairly extensively. Vista is most definitely not just an extension of the old XP, although it was initially developed that way. Windows 7 is actually an extension product of Windows Vista, it was designed to make updating Vista to 7 as painless as possible. It was intended to increase functionality of Vista as well as performance because of the numerous complaints about the buggy, incomplete and RAM sucking program that Vista was when it originally came into being.

In fact, Vista was so despised by consumers that many computer manufacturers re-listed new computers with Windows XP rather than Windows Vista or skipped Vista entirely. The current (as of Feb. 2014) market share for computers using Windows Vista is around 3.5 percent. Take that number and compare it to Windows XP, it's predecessor, holds about 29.5%, and 7, its successor, holding the lead at around 47%.

Vista is quite a bit more functional with the final patches, but it isn't what I'd call an amazing OS. It's definitely not worth installing over Windows 7. Windows 7 uses similar amounts of memory and CPU performance, but consumers prefer much of the functionality over Vista. As well, Vista is no longer an updated and supported product, except if you purchased an extended support option for businesses. That ended somewhere around 2012. Windows 7 support will expire in 2015, though considering the awful market share that Windows 8 currently has (around 10%) that'll probably be extended like XP was for years.

As far as the hardware incompatibility issues, this isn't a new feature of Windows 7. Every new version of Windows has incompatibility issues which are usually built in. Vista actually had quite a few more "legacy" listings than XP had to 2000, and Windows 7 didn't add as many being a bare three years older than Vista. Again, though, it isn't new. It is partially a bid to get you to upgrade your hardware, and it is part because it is a headache to write up new drivers for outdated hardware. It happened with 3.1 to 95 to 98, to 2000, to XP and so on, and it'll continue happening.

If you want to know, I've been building computers since I was about 7, and my first OS was actually DOS, followed by Windows 3.1. I've built every system I've had except for this laptop I have now.

There are a few things that were removed in Win 7 that can cause compatibility issues(mostly with very old or very unusual software), but overall it is far superior to Vista.

I went to parent's house early to do some tech support on the home/business network and received a call about technician responding to windows problems. (This was an Indian phone scam!) (No one called them!)

1) He would never identify what company he was representing.

2) My dad told the alleged technician that he would have to go downstairs and log on to the family computer. My dad asked for a return # and employee # in case of disconnection. Meanwhile, I dialed the # that the technician gave my dad and found it was a Magic Jack # that was not accepting calls. Second, the phone number was totally different area code than the one listed in caller id. The technician figured out he was being scammed back and hung up.

The phone runs through the cable modem. Is their some type of software I can either purchase or download (trial offer???) to run a trace on this type of call(legally of course)? This is the third time that these scammers have tried this approach! I would like to able to forward this activity to the FBI cyber division with a nice big red bow attached.

smr wrote:The phone runs through the cable modem. Is their some type of software I can either purchase or download (trial offer???) to run a trace on this type of call(legally of course)? This is the third time that these scammers have tried this approach! I would like to able to forward this activity to the FBI cyber division with a nice big red bow attached.

There's a good article on malwarebytes.org about this: http://blog.malwarebytes.org/tech-support-scams/

I went to parent's house early to do some tech support on the home/business network and received a call about technician responding to windows problems. (This was an Indian phone scam!) (No one called them!)

What people should really remember is that normally, MS does not know your name, does not know your phone number and does not know who has their OS installed.

The phone runs through the cable modem. Is their some type of software I can either purchase or download (trial offer???) to run a trace on this type of call(legally of course)? This is the third time that these scammers have tried this approach! I would like to able to forward this activity to the FBI cyber division with a nice big red bow attached.

It has began to become really annoying yes.
In just the last year i think those idiots have tried at least a dozen times.

Last time it happened i played answering machine "You have reached Microsoft windows support center, there are 19 million calls before yours, please hold" then put the phone next to the speaker and turned some music on.


Time before that i managed to get the idiot to swear at me for almost 20 minutes.

The one before that i casually noted that "well that´s an interesting claim considering that i run Linux here..."(which is true, as i didn´t specify anything beyond that).


Anyway, i´ve already taken it to the police and they are working on it, or more like trying to do something about it, but any time they get local police where the calls are coming from to act, the phonelines used have already traded owner once or twice and the business it was used by is long since gone with the wind.


Considering taking it to my phone provider instead, simply blocking some international numbers out. It´s not like i have anyone that will call me from India or Pakistan(they use email).