Upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for only $39.99!

[B00tDisk]

Some system sellers are offering a free coupon as well if you buy a Win7 system now. I saw a few of those promotions as I was recently shopping for a laptop.

And I observe the following pattern as far back as my experience with MS Windows goes:

98SE good
ME BAD
XP good
Vista BAD
7 good
8 ...

Did you use Win2k?  It was pretty solid.

[B00tDisk]

I can get 8 (and 7 and whatever else I want) for free from the school (MSDN Dreamspark library), but I'll be damned if I'll give up Win7.

No, MS, **** you, I do my computing on a computer.  Not a phone, not a tablet, but an actual computer workstation.

[B00tDisk]

Back on the topic of win 8, are there any reliable info on how long new versions of direct x will support win 7?

This is what I'd like to know.

I think once MS realizes that 8 is a dead pigeon they'll start forcing people off Vista and 7 at bayonet point with DX.

[B00tDisk]

A.k.a. "the DX10 gambit." The sad thing is that it's worked once before...


9, actually. 10 was the carrot to get people who wanted Bioshock to look as pretty as possible to switch to Vista.

I hacked 10 onto XP while that option was still available for the faint-at-heart; of course I also had hacked SLI drivers running (nVidia bought the Epox technology and ****canned it).  You just had to write the mobo ID where the latest Nvidia drivers looked (they looked at the registry for the motherboard ID, not directly at the BIOS)...hee hee, it was a terrible kludge but amazingly it was rock solid most of the time.  Every once in a while (and ironically, every time this happened I wasn't gaming) the system would unload it's own video drivers and I'd have to spend a while convincing the computer I actually had cards that were more than "Standard VGA Adapter(s)", but that was extremely rare.

Then I got an Asus board and nVidia quit being dicks anyway about SLI, but I still sold the board with a CD with the hacked DX10 driver and hacked SLI driver...

Sorry, I do go on.