Microsoft Training: Windows 7 Better than Linux

News
By Marcus Yam
published

Microsoft up to its tricks.

Many companies across many industries partake in some form of evangelism (though some would call it propaganda) for its products. Some of the best evangelism starts at the retail level, where employees can 'inform' the buying consumer while trying to sell a life-saving in-store warranty policy.

A Best Buy employee, who happens to also be an overclock.net forum poster, recently partook in a Microsoft ExpertZone training exercise (with the incentive to be able to buy Windows 7 for $10) encountered materials from Microsoft that push certain superiorities that Windows 7 possess over Linux. While some points were valid, others were untrue.

One of the slides that Microsoft used (above) is fairly misleading, as World of Warcraft is supported in Linux through WINE. Windows Live Essentials are indeed a Windows-only product, but there are many other free alternatives. Video chat is also supported well on Linux through Skype and Pidgin. See here a mirror of the original thread.

It seems that Microsoft is trying to fight off Linux machines that are sold through Best Buy, which if any, are netbooks only. We can't imagine that there will be many customers who will wander into Best Buy without a clue of which operating system he or she should go with – the new and shiny Windows 7 or the mysterious, counter-culture Linux.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
96 Comments Comment from the forums
  • cryogenic
    Well it's true, dunno what Microsoft said, but I definably believe myself that Windows is better than Linux (unless you're doing something Linux worthy like a web server or some cluster or anything).

    For gaming, entertainment, day to day stuff Windows is better, has more apps, more options, and usually not a big deal finding drivers or configuring some weird stuff.
    Reply
  • Winly
    windows 7 for 10 dollars?? where so i can take that lol
    Reply
  • deltatux
    Microsoft FUDs about Linux again, quite typical. Not really news anymore. It's true that Linux has limited software support but a good chunk just ain't true.
    Reply
  • Supertrek32
    Every other company does this type of marketing on a daily basis, I don't see how it becomes news when Microsoft does it.

    ...and with Core i5 released today you can't even say it's a slow news day...
    Reply
  • AMDnoob
    does anyone here use Windows Live Essentials?
    Reply
  • rooket
    screen shot looks true enough to me. I don't think wine is part of linux. It may be included in some distributions but it afaik is not built into the kernel. Also I lack knowledge of the other features but I would assume that limited on all that stuff is true. They aren't saying not supported for multimedia, just limited. Meaning that there are programs just not as many as for Windows which more than likely is true.

    When I go to a popular download site such as download.com and search for software, the majority of the results are windows based. hence why it generally makes little sense to go out and buy a mac and rely entirely on mac osx (which is a modified beos, a type of unix). And yeah I know you can google for linux software. You guys writing this article think that most Windows/mac osx users would be able to install all the hardware and software they want? Think again, linux is not a newbie o/s and most people aren't going to put the effort in all the training involved in setting up linux. At least M$ isn't going on here claiming that win7 is a better solution than linux for use as a server o/s so I don't really see much point in why this article was written.
    Reply
  • rooket
    AMDnoobdoes anyone here use Windows Live Essentials?It was installed on my coworker's home computer but mcafee forced me to uninstall it. It seemed like a decent piece of software but between mcafee and ms live essentials I'd want to check other vendors besides those two. M$ has been a total slouch about their malware protection over the years and mcafee as well. Norton right now is the best one but even they don't catch everything.

    And yeah I know the other features in live essentials such as automatic defrag and such. That stuff is cool and all but how often do you realy need to defrag a windows drive? once a day? no, I didn't think so. it is very rare for me to need a defrag and it generally has no performance benefit on anything I do it on regardless if the drive is 22% fragmented or 11%, once it is done defragging the PC runs exactly the same.
    Reply
  • branewalker
    I'd give Microsoft the benefit on gaming, but media playback is a wash, especially with MS incorporating new DRM in its operating systems starting with Vista. Windows almost always requires a codec pack, and without 3rd-party software, it's not easy to tell which codecs are installed and which are not. In Ubuntu at least (probably one of the more media-friendly distros) just add Medibuntu repositories, and you're good to go. Adding repositories could be more straightforward, but it's by no means "hard."
    Other than gaming, the only thing keeping me on Windows is Adobe Creative Suite. I can't build and customize my rig if I go Mac, and that's the only other platform Adobe supports.

    As for hardware, I've had more hardware troubles with Windows than with Linux. XP still won't find my Brother wireless laser printer. Ubuntu was happy to install it on both my desktop and laptop without complaint. Maybe that speaks more of Brother than of Microsoft, though. I'm not sure.
    Reply
  • doomtomb
    The only reason Linux is still afloat is because it is free.
    Reply
  • knight9413
    This shows how much of a threat linux is to windows. I still think Windows is a better OS for personal use and single user mode. Linux is also very good, but it's free (the ones I used) which means a lot of the software is very unstable. In terms of features and stability, Openoffice.org still has a long way to go... but... it's getting closer and closer.
    Reply