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.

Comments

Another reason to run Windows 95

[boutell]

I gave a little mini-talk at a Philly Linux Users' Group meeting recently on lightweight web browsers. It was based on my experiences converting my wife's old laptop to Linux when she decided, for political reasons, that she was not willing to upgrade to another Windows product when Windows 95 finally became unstable and unusable on the machine.

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.

here: google survey differs from the 'news' survey

[Janek Kozicki]

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

Re:Windows 2000

[Peeet]

"The interface is clean and simple -- not like the fruity looking XP default one. With a little tweaking (and a good firewall, of course), you can make it relatively secure too."

Well with a little tweaking, you can make Windows XP look like Windows 2000 as well.

"Yes, I know MS sucks, but they did a great job with Win2k."

I have been running Windows XP Professional for a while now and although I am, as well, not too fond of the way Microsoft goes about business, (I hate them with a particularly fiery passion regarding their purchase of Bungie Software...) I admit that Windows XP, if used correctly will work better than Windows 2K, dare I say, even good enough for me to get stuff done, and even on a regular basis.

My computer is a custom build, I leave it on all the time, and I do all sorts of wierd things to it. It has survived - there is life after Microsoft. My ability to do this (leave it on, have it work under stress) actually increased after upgrading to XP (and a bit more when upgrading to XP pro) and increased a lot when I ditched my HP Laptop and went to this custom rig.

Of course, I also get MS Windows XP Pro from my college bookstore for $6.00, so if it weren't for the piracy busting price, I would be all over linux like a bum on a ham sandwich.

XP to intrusive

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for an organization with 13,000 employees. There are 300 workstations in my division. Most still run Win95.

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.

Re:you can run netscape in winxp?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.