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Retired Microsoft Operating Systems Still Popular
Decaffeinated Jedi writes "Despite Microsoft's recent retirement of Windows 98, News.com reports that many users continue to cling to the company's older operating systems. The study cited in the article suggests that 80 percent of companies still have machines operating on Windows 95 or 98. While Windows 2000 was the most common OS in the study, just 6.6 percent of the desktop machines included in the survey were running Windows XP." The results aren't too surprising. I get a lot of user mail from Netscape 4 users, and it only makes sense that they're running it somewhere.
Complain all you want about antiquated equipment - both hardware and software - but I volunteer in a high school that would make you weep. Their physics classroom has ten computers. Ten...Apple IIc's. I don't know if they're going for "retro" or "we're poor, so pass the referendum," but it's absolutely appalling. I don't even know what a physics class would be doing with Apple IIc's.
Being the last Windows that let you do this easily, I have a feeling that in a few years W2K will be going for a mint on eBay.
Until just recently (read: months), our standard desktop was still Win95! They just finished switching everyone to Win2k. However the KUKA robots we use to build cars still run Win95 for the GUI, and probably always will, as the hardware won't support much higher...
Her machine had 32 megs of RAM and a P166 MMX processor.
As it turned out, Windows 95 plus Internet Explorer ran blazing rings around Debian Linux plus Mozilla, which was almost unusable, even after I switched her over to icewm and rxvt rather than the much heavier KDE environment. Eventually I found Skipstone, which made her machine usable again, but only barely. To be quite honest, there is no Linux/browser combination that compares with the performance Windows 95/Internet Explorer can offer on that class of hardware, and there's no good reason to throw away a perfectly nice older laptop.
Eventually, though, she upgraded to a Dell Latitude XPi which runs Linux much more comfortably -- although I still switched her to icewm and streamlined her startup drastically to get a reasonable boot time.
Check out the Apostrophe open-source CMS: http://www.apostrophenow.com/
Yes, I know MS sucks, but they did a great job with Win2k.
here you can have a look at google's statistics - statisctics of "who is using google?"
I think that major difference 6.6 % of XP users versus 38 % of XP users is caused by a very simple thing: win95/98 users are not connected to internet thus, they are not using google.
based on this, news's survey is very likely to be true
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Johnson and Johnson, the huge medical/health conglomerate, had all of its employees running Windows 95 on their desktops until last year. It was a painful thing for us, living with that OS' instability (which led to rules like 'you must reboot your business computer every day'), but their policy is to keep all desktops standardized among the many J&J companies. (All our business PCs are IBM, which also says something about our conservative IT policies.)
They rolled out Windows 2000, during 2002 and 2003, with a lot of thought, using its administration features for IT to gain much more control over individuals' machines--Administrator access to one's own PC is now a rare privilege. At least our desktop computers are less wonky now.
There's no way the company will "upgrade" to XP; probably we will migrate to Windows 2005 in 2008 or so, if there is some compelling reason to do so.
Here a tidbit for you...
Corperate still has a outright BAN on windows XP. It is not allowed, we are not migrating to it, they deemed it a waste of time and money as it offer's zero value.
they may upgrade to it when MS EOL's Windows 2000. but they are also looking at alternatives, there are 2 groups testing Linux in the corperate environment with using wine and wineX to run the vertical apps that are windows only we rely on.
Most companies are pissed off at Microsoft, and users are pissed at microsoft because it seems that at every turn it's microsoft's fault for a problem they have.
90% of the time that precieved fault of microsoft is really something that is misconfigured, or a under engineered network causing the trouble... but MS get's the bulk of the blame.
Windows XP has nothing that Windows 2000 has for the corperate environment that is worth a damn... and that was stupid of microsoft to do. They had an opportunity to make a corperate OS that could have solved many of the problems out there.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
As the economy picks up, win XP (which is a far cry from the miserable ME experience) will start to be adopted more and more. MS has to overcome the bitter taste left in the mouth of consumers when they tried to foist ME on us. Oh yeah, and businesses REALLY didn't like ME (I know of at least 2 companies that would purchase dell laptops, and would wipe and reload 98 on them when they arrived).
A couple of axioms for the MS marketing people to remember
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
It's scary how many NT 4 boxes I come across in the work world.
You know, the last couple of years haven't exactly been an economic cakewalk. Lots of companies have better things to do than spend money on new computers when their existing ones are working just fine.
For the record? I still use NT on my desk. Actually, I have two machines - the second runs Linux. Why can't I upgrade NT? Because the machine only has a P2/300 processor in it, and I'm fairly certain that a 'newer' OS will slow it down to something unbearable.
Why don't I care? Because I do all my real work on the Linux machine. The NT box is merely for Outlook, and testing our app using IE. I don't need anything faster, and frankly if the company was spending money, I'd rather have a raise than a replacement for that box.
I figure most people who are still using NT or 9x are probably using it for similar things. If all you're using is Office, why do you need to upgrade when everything works just fine on the machine you've got? And yes, I get irritated that our sales folks always have the newest, shiniest computers on their desks while I have old machines on mine trying to do software development, but I've been able to make do just fine. Perhaps I could use a new machine more than they could, but it's not a battle I would win.
At least for Linux we can use OpenMosix to get some improved performance. The suckers using Windows don't have anything like that.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
No, he's saying it's stupid.
I have a house. The dirt that surrounds that house works quite well. It's good dirt, and grows stuff I want, quite nicely. But, it's old dirt. In fact, it's as old as the planet. Should I upgrade it? Will new dirt somehow "add value" to my dirt-needs, even though my existing dirt fills those needs (and is more than I need) already?
I have a hammer in my basement. It's a nice one, pounds nails quite nicely. Perfect balance, excellent weight, comfortable to use. It's also about... 80 years old. A new hammer will somehow "add value" to what I need it to do?
I have NT all over my shop. We have these machines in our shop because of some specialized software that we need, and the software works quite nicely. The stuff in the racks all run NT, the majority of desktops all run NT. Upgrading will somehow "add value" to what I need them to do?
Not hardly. The biggest problem with NT is that 70% of the crap it comes with is completely irrelevent to what we need. Worse, this 70% is where all of the exploits lie... so I can't just ignore it, instead I'm forced to maintain this "baggage".
AS2003 is even worse. Internet Connection Wizard? Where's the option for being a quad-homed box with multiple DS3 lines? Ooo! MSN! On a rack mounted box! And LookOut Express! Irrelevent, and unwanted. Let's see... we're now up to an OS footprint of over an entire gig. And, I'm gonna actually need to use... uh, 20 megs of it to pound these nails in. And the nails end up pounded in exactly the same as NT does it. Yep, that's value...
Don't confuse an OS with an Application. If "everything that comes with the OS" is all you need... you probably don't actually need a computer. On the other hand, if you need to drop a few million for a real application to run on that OS, then you'll quickly discover how f*cking irrelevent that specific OS is.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
It took about two years and $5M dollars in hardware costs and MS License fees, plus the costs of 3rd party software replacements, to switch our organization from Win3.11FWG. Currently we replace a couple of PCs a week, and they come with W2K pre-installed, so our Win95 counts are dropping as our Win2K counts rise.
Our XP count remains minicule. We cannot use XP on most workstations because of its EULAs which demand that MS and certain 3rd party vendors be given remote access to our hardware to 'add or remove any software' they wish -- for 'security' reasons, of course. A very big Federal agency refuses to allow us to allow that, not suprisingly, so that their data remains safe while in our keeping.
That means that when the EOL for W2K has passed, and the channel is emptied of W2K shrink-wraps, our new PCs will come naked or with Linux pre-installed. Our bulk licenses allow us to move Win OSs around, but the new PCs will have hardware for which no Win95 or Win2K drivers exist. When that day arrives Microsoft will have truely locked themselves out of our shop. That scenerio would change over night if Gates modified his EULAs and didn't require remote access, but I doubt his greed or paranoia would allow such a policy change.
Windows XP has nothing that Windows 2000 has for the corperate environment that is worth a damn... and that was stupid of microsoft to do.
My company is standardized on windows 2000. When we evaluated XP, the only real benefit was the built-in terminal server which allows the helpdesk to connect to the clueless user's computer to see what is really going on.
Aside from that, no upside. The downside is large (software cost, activation hassle, necessary hardware upgrades) so we're sticking with win2k.
From the parent post:
"90% of the time that precieved fault of microsoft is really something that is misconfigured, or a under engineered network causing the trouble... but MS get's the bulk of the blame."
I think there are huge problems with Windows XP that are the fault of Microsoft. For example, the Windows XP file system is crippled. Unlike Windows 98, which can make a bootable full hard disk copy with the XCOPY.EXE program, Windows XP cannot copy all of its own files: Experiences w/ Drive Imaging Software?
Can you accept an operating system which does not allow you to make a full hard disk backup? Yes, I know about third-party tools and Sysprep. They ALL have verified problems. The version of Sysprep that comes with Windows XP sometimes causes failure of the Windows XP Recovery Console: 'The Password Is Not Valid' Error Message Appears When You Log On to Recovery Console in Windows XP.
Even when using the "Recovery Console", you cannot access some files on a hard drive. Windows XP is very crippled.
Not only that, but do you want to run the risk of using an operating system that puts most of the configuration settings in one file of more than 20 megabytes (the "Registry")? If something goes wrong, it is necessary to re-install ALL of your programs and patches and updates, not just the operating system.
Everything mentioned here has been verified several times by Microsoft tech support employees.
At one stage I was given the task of writing a some data collection software for a casino. They had a very old program, that they didn't want to change, that could spew the data in raw format down a socket. My company was going to take the casino data and pump it into our software to do pretty visualisations. That meant we had to read that raw format coming of the socket, and process it into something useful that we could visualise.
I knocked up a quick program to read the raw data off the socket and just log it so we could get a wfew days sample of data to make sure it was conforming to the format they specified and check for unforseen glitches (of which there were, in the end, many). I left that running, but when I came back the next day the "constant stream" had cut out at 6am. I had only written a very simple logging program to collect, so I hadn't bothered t o handle the case that the server was going to close the socket connection on me, so I had no data after 6am. So much for a days worth of collection. The reason, I found, was the the "very old program" that they were using was a DOS program, which didn't run properly on Win2k (so they claimed) so it was on Win98. The reason I kept getting holes in the stream at 6am (I fixed the logger to handle socket closures, wait till it was back up and start logging again) was that they had to reboot the box every morning at 6am. Well, not had to - but they felt a regular scheduled reboot was a lot better than the slightly less regular unscheduled reboots they used to get.
In the end We wrote our proper socket collection code to just shut down at 6am, which was when we fired up our data processing on the nightly collection, then picked up again at 6:02 when the reboot was done.
Jedidiah
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Joe Sixpack doesn't care about keeping up with the latest and greatest. Take my parents for instance. The use their pc for browsing the web, e-mail, AOL instant messenger, word processing and CD burning. Their current system is fast enough for what they need to do, all the software runs fairly well and they have no real reason to upgrade anytime soon.
I'm sure a lot of corporations, especially small businesses, are the same way. If the system runs the software they need at an acceptable speed there is really no reason to upgrade. I service a lot of small businesses happily running Windows 98 (I don't see too many systems with 95 any more) on several systems and they don't plan on upgrading anytime soon. The larger businesses I service, on the other hand, are largely running Windows 2000 with some XP systems in the mix mainly do to the additional security and for group policy.
If your running Windows 98 and everything is working alright for you, there really isn't any incentive to upgrade to Windows XP IMHO. I can't think of any single must have feature for the average computer user. If corporations are using Windows 2000 or 2003 Server there are some incentives to running Windows 2000 or XP on the client end.
I do feel that your going to see more and more users upgrade, albeit at a slower rate than Microsoft is used to. There are applications being released (iTunes springs to mind) that simply will not run on Windows 98 and Me. I have a feeling that this will increasingly be the case. Eventually users will come across an application they need, or an upgrade to an existing application they run that has some new feature they want to use, that simply will not run on 98/Me and they will be forced to upgrade.