Ask Leo! #556 – Book 2nd Edition, The CTRL+S Habit, Un-sending email, website mistakes and more…

Probably the best reason for not upgrading from Win 7 to Win 10 is the hassle and cost. Like XP to Win 7. All drivers had to be replaced, printer, scanner, camera, etc. Other than MS Office, most other programs needed to be replaced with the Win 7 version. Quite costly if one is running many programs. There is a saying 'If it ain't broken, don't fix it!'

I don't expect a lot of program or driver updates (if any) will be necessary when upgrading from 7 to 10. The architecture of XP was very different from 7, whereas when upgrading from 7 to 8, most programs drivers simply worked. I expect something similar with Windows 10 upgrades.

The thing with Windows Media Center is that two groups of people use it.

The first group who use it because they think it's pretty or intuitive or works well on a big screen or with a controller, have alternatives if WMC was ever taken away from them. Other programs can do the same or more, sometimes better, sometimes not.

The second group use it because it allows them to use cable cards and record live TV whenever they want. They're a niche group and Microsoft is cutting the support due to licensing costs, similarly to how they recently removed built in DVD playback (if I remember correctly)

To my knowledge there are few, if any, software packages out there that allows you to interface with your cable Card (I think it's to do with encryption, or Microsoft being a "trusted" company being allowed access by cable providers) and those people have Little choise but to continue using their current OS if they want to keep their home Theater systems functioning.

I think the reason Vista is not a part of the free offer, is because it's not "upgradable" in the same way 7 and 8 is.

Microsoft is pushing 10 onto the large demographic of hesitant 7 users, because they're a large group and the upgrade is easy to install for even novice users. Giving it a price of free for 1 year, they hope many will jump to 10 without second thought.

The Vista userbase is far more limited in size and Microsoft perhaps doesn't consider them worth the effort. Vista users will also need to do clean installs of 10. When I purchased my Laptop it came with Vista, but I immediately upgraded to 7 for the price of sending my physical upgrade media (5-6$). I upgraded to 8 for a favorable price of ~20$ shortly after it was released and am upgrading it to 10 over the course of august.

I'm hopeful Microsoft will issue some favorable upgrade offer to Vista users, maybe offering cheap physical media. After all, it's fully in their interest to get every person on Windows 10 as soon as possible.

The correct idiom is "champing at the bit", not "chomping".

Both are considered correct: http://grammarist.com/usage/champing-chomping-at-the-bit/