I picked up some various Windows 9 rumors from across the Web yesterday.
In no particular order:
- It has a reasonable Start menu
- The preview will be released at the end of the month
- I’ll be trying it out
- It will be finished by the end of the year
- It will be available for purchase in the March-April timeframe
- They may do a promotional price early in its release, like they did for Windows 8
- If they do a $40 promotion like they did last time around, you probably want to buy it, even if you wait a while to run it every day
- It will be more liberal about allowing reinstallation than previous versions but will be harder to pirate (which sounds contradictory, but we’ll see)
- There are still rumors it will be free or really cheap for consumers, which sounds really hard to reconcile with the above
Like I said, I’m going to give it a shot when it drops in a couple of weeks. I’ve got a machine running Vista that can’t stay at Vista much longer–and I have no great love for Vista–and I have a machine running Linux Mint. I’m impressed with Mint but I’m curious about Windows 9 so I may very well load Win9 on it, then reload Mint on it after a month or so. I like having a Linux laptop around too much to go without one for too terribly long now.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.