Slashdot Mirror
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.
I still use it for my kids games and educational software....the newer ones DON'T WORK...hmmmmm
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.
It's not like upgrading Windows is free. If you were a small company who's focus wasn't IT would you upgrade? Hell no. Why would you? Your existing solution of Windows Crap is working just fine.
Just wait a few more years, 2098 is just around the corner - you can make it!
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
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...
The alternative is to throw everything out, buy all new hardware (do you really want me to try to run XP on a Pentium 200 with 64Mb of RAM?), get stuck with a lease on the software, and then to get locked into whatever upgrade cycle Bill thinks is best for Micro$oft.
Microsoft has chosen the greedy path, and eliminated themselves from the list of viable true upgrade paths. I'll upgrade those machines when RedHat (or someone else) gets their act together, supports the still functional Office 97 standard, and does it for less than $60/machine/year. All we need are bug and security patches!
--Mike--
Back in the 80s and early 90s, desktop machines were still by and large a new thing for many companies. Not only did many not really have a USE for them, they upgraded because they believed the marketing that said "Thou shalt need this upgrade"
Now, most people (managers especially) have a decade or more of computer use experience under their belt, perhaps even two, and can get a good idea for themselves of what a computer can actually do for them. Ten years experience seeing that a two-yearly upgrade cycle just leaves you with More Of The Same instead of something really new means people are seeing computers as just the tools they are, rather than something awe-inspiring that can solve their every problem
It's like Graphic User Interfaces - they're a hell of a lot more complex now than the original Mac, but that's OK. The original mac was introduced to people who'd never seen a computer before, let alone a GUI. Nowadays, by the time someone buys their first computer with their own money, they're buying a machine with an interface they already have YEARS of getting used to using, and the extra complexity has been learned into them from age 5.
I'd bet the reasons users retain the older operating systems have more to do with familiarity and the difficulty of upgrading than with the pricing (which was my first reaction) -- although Windows 2000 and XP offer a stunning level of compatibility with older hardware and a greatly enhanced user experience, the ability to migrate applications from an old system to a new system leaves something to be desired when compared to the DOS days where one could simply copy an application over.
Microsoft may do well to adopt practices that increase the ability for users to upgrade painlessly, such as by doing away with their authentication system and promoting a means of moving a software package (with its associated configuration and data files) to a new Windows installation or to a different computer.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I read somewhere that lately the market price of original Win95 and Win98 CDs have been going up for the first time... um... EVER! (They're going like hotcakes on Ebay too.)
The market's a funny thing. Give your customers crappy features like DRM, and they'll find a way to tel you they're not interested... like back-grading to your previous versions.
You watch... i predict that soon Microsoft will find some way to prohibit the sale of these original CDs. A law will get passed, probably under the guise of national security.
prof. h.
A lot of Mac users are on Mac OS 8.x or 9.x as well, or using the Classic environment to run applications for OS 9.x under Mac OS X.
It seems that when people buy a computer, they expect the software to last as long as the hardware.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
The only way to get Windows running on middle-class hardware is to install W98 or such...
I've seen in many stores computers with config like: 2GHZ CPU, some Radeon gfx card, DVD, 5+1 audio card and to all that 128MB RAM (DDR). And of course Windows XP Home Edition. How fast will all that run when it has to use swap memory all the time?!
Solution 1: Install more ram. And void warranty by doing so, because there's a warranty sticker on the case and no internals can be changed.
Solution 2: Install some OS for which 128M RAM is more than enough. Like W98SE or such.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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/
I've tried WinXP, and found it very frustrating. Rather than learning how to configure things, such as installing software to be accessible to all users, disabling that damn "You've got too many icons on your desktop" message and dozens of other annoyances, I decided a WinXP computer was not for me and instead kept my older machine.
Of course, I do understand that some people need certain features that are available only in better operating systems, but let's face it: productivity software has very little new to offer, and sticking to an older version is not only cheaper, but also more efficient, as the user is already used to that particlular interface and features.
Windows 98 is 70% of why I have a job.
If companies realized just how much money they dump into fixing all of the problems Windows 98 is privy to, they'd all be on Windows XP.
When I upgrade users to Windows 2000/XP I immediately stop getting Operating System related calls. Suddenly my only work is occassional malware, "my network is down", etc..
Windows 98 is a horrible product, and it's a liability to most small businesses. Most of my clients would have saved hundreds of dollars to make the jump.
Clif
clifgriffin > blog
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
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
I work for an ISP. I see alot (well hear) of companies still running on Win95 and 98. When I ask why the answers I usually get are "Why? This is working for us just fine!" and "We would love too but shelling out thousands for new hardware, the OS, upgrading the current programs, and training just isn't worth it."
/. seem to forget that a good 90% of users only know how to run certain programs in windows and thats it. Once they deviate from that, forget it, they are totally lost. The cost in training someone to use a newer OS and the programs associated it can sometimes run into the hundreds of thousands depending on the size of a company.
I think alot of people on
One other thing to keep in mind is that most mid to smaller level companies do not have onsite IT people. They will either higher outside integrators who charge by the hour or just wing it and hope that the existing set up continues to work for as long as possible. In both situations the company is very very hesident to upgrade as it will cost a ton of money to effectivly get the same results as now.
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.
it only makes sense that they're running it somewhere.
;)
Well observed, CowboyNeal.
MS OS/2 1.0 was not EOL.
It was abandoned by MS at 1.2 so that 3COM's 3+Open and IBM's PC Server OS's that built on top of it would have to react and lose market share.
MS was in an agreement with IBM and 3COM that allowed them to take advantage of the developments of the other two while leaving them in the cold. IBM tried to pick up development of OS/2 (including WARP), but that is a different story.
NT, Win2K, and XP all use the "net xxx" commands that were the heart of 3COM's OS even before the "alliance" with Microsoft. I think this is why Bob Metcalfe seems to hate Gates with such a passion.
"Come into my den said the spider to the fly."
~8^]
Don't laugh, it works. Despite all the whizbang marketing from Redmond, most busineses are extremely pragmatic. If all you need is a {print,file,login} server, linux will happily work on hardware later Microsoft OSes have no hope of running on.
Prediction: there'll be huge uptake of linux when Microsoft kills off support of nt4 server, because no one is going to want to take the double hit of replacing all the hardware and buying all new OS licenses. Not to mention new and different security headaches due to exponential increases in complexity, increased lock-in, restrictive EULAs, etc.
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.
With 192MB of ram or more Win2k will run fine on a P2-300. I ran it on a desktop with a P2-233 w/ 256MB and a laptop with a P2-266 and 192MB for several years at my last employer. Sure there were times when running the bloated Java frontend to Remedy that I would have liked a little beefier machine, but for 99+% of what I did it was fine.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
No freggin duh. The 1990's were filled with a bunch of "faster, bigger, better, smarter, k3wler. Brownnose browwnose brownnose" then oop, outta buisness. We hit a mini-depression, companies got a bit tighter, started questioning weither or not spending all that money was neccisary and many who were frugal before decided that their systems are just find and work allright now. When and if they've got the money later on, they'll upgrade and they'll do it right. The critics and wall street fanatical idiots are in their high chairs rattling their books getting all exited over a boom that'll never happen because if corperate america learned anything in the 1990's, it's that a good technician is hard to find, and that spending copious amounts of money on IT equipment that you don't need will put you out of buisness.
Eventually, computers will break down and die or get too slow for their owners needs, or finally drive them insane, and that's where I'm seeing the majority of the market coming from in the coming years; upgrades and repairs. We've got the infastructure, now we've got to maintain it. Few if anyone is going to go for bleeding edge stuff, they want perfected, mature hardware and software. We're also going to see a lot of old people working, since the baby boomers who make up a large percentage of our economy are going to go into retirement and the companies they're going to be getting pension checks from are probably going to go under.
I'v also noticed a trend in the computer industry; MS's software has been getting more expensive. In 1998, a copy of win95 went for about $99, upgrade ed of win98 $99 and full ver of win98 $149. Now, in 2003, winxp home ed costs a whopping $199, and the corp edition costs $299 which for some computers is half the price of the machine. Is longhorn going to cost $499? I MS wants to know why sales of their latest OS is dismal in the corperate and goverment enviroment, mabye it's because it's too expensive to justify.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
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.
It may be the same as abandonware, but that doesn't mean you can copy it. Abandonware is still copyright violation, just with a different justification from normal warez.
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.
Had the organization stayed with Win2K, this never would have come up.
Realistically, Windows 98 is probably the last version of Windows that can be reasonably kept from calling home, and has a higher probability of not having some kind of government back door. You think MS got a slap on the wrist in the antitrust action for free?
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
In alot of cases in the business world, its not just about price or features. It comes down to answering a few questions:
Does the current system work
Will the current system work in one year
If either of those are yes, and in some cases both, the will to upgrade gets shot down the tubes. It makes little to no sense to upgrade a station if it is doing its job, before the argument ever gets to money.
Features are one thing that can supercede both the Is it working / money arguments, but that is a fine like that argument walks. If a feature is desired, but not entirely needed, would in some cases, money allowing, provide the urge for upgrading, but in alot of cases just fall to the way side in the interest of office stability.
I use it on my PARENTS computer, a top of the line k6-350 with about 180Mo RAM.
...)
It took me years to get my father from Multiplan under DOS to Excel with Win98. And some more to get my father trained to 98.
For the sake of my Sanity (already quite low), I don't want to retrain my father to use XP or 2000.
+It just works !!! I don't upgrade what's not broken...(yet...8) I mean I don't fiddle with the computer, and neither do they
Of course, if my parent where to get a P4 (or, more likely, an AMD XP) I might get to install XP or 2000 for them. and get a new Debian server to replace my poor P200 for free...>
Don't tempt me, you insensitive clod 8p
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
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.
This came out in the "anti-trust" trial, remember?
Windows is supposed to run slower with each new version, so you will have to buy current hardware to run it, at new-technology prices, so that the cost of the Windows OS, as a proportion of the total price of the delivered computer, will stay below a level they figured is likely to trigger a consumer revolt.
There's nothing accidental about it.
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.
This is very true and I think it will come back and bite Linux in the ass eventually. Most people switching to Linux from MS right now are knowledgable. They are the people that know how to set up a proper network and keep it running. As the common people switch to Linux, they will encounter many of the same problems they encountered on Windows, except they won't have any idea how to deal with them. They will end up switching back to their Windows boxes because they at least have an idea how to deal with things on that.
I think we'll see a lot of people switch to Linux, but then we'll see a decent portion of them switch back as they realize their problems weren't caused by MS, but by their own lack of knowledge.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
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
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Windows 2000 is usually better than XP on machines like these. I run Win2K as part of a dual-boot with Linux on my ThinkPad 600E (PII 400MHz 224MB RAM) and it is as comfortable as a broken-in pair of jeans. This includes Avast Antivirus, ZoneAlarm and the Palm Sync Link.
2000 is what the 600E was designed for. It shows in how well it performs. I'm sure if you killed a lot of eye candy XP would be just as nice, but I'm lazy.
Linux also runs beautifully on this machine...this was the one and only machine IBM was going to get certified for Red Hat Linux. It's running Knoppix/Debian and very happy.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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.
Spare me the explanations of the poor starving software developers; I am fully aware that a software developer seeks renumerations for one's labors, and charging license fees and upgrade fees is a way to amortize the effort required to develop a complex piece of software. That doesn't change the fact that license fees are a kind of economic rent (i.e. money you can rake in because the law grants you a limited monopoly -- you can say that software won't get developed in the absence of such a monopoly, but that doesn't change the material facts that "intellectual property" law has the intent of granting limited monopolies to facilitate collecting economic rents).
I prefer the term tribute money to "Microsoft tax" because "tax" suggests governmental power and some sense of the consent of the governed. Microsoft is not to be dignified by considering it a government -- it is more like such extragovernmental entities such as high-seas pirates, Mafia bosses, feudal lords, and Delaware corporations in that money payed to them to avoid punishment (i.e. lawsuits, getting wacked) is to be called tribute and not a tax.
I also differ with the common usage of "pirate" to denote someone who avoids paying tribute money. I use the term "pirate" to describe contruction contractors that you bring into your house for remodeling and repair work. The reason contractors are pirates has less to do with the amount of money you pay them than the part about when you let them into your house they control every aspect of your life. Yes, it is about the money because whatever contract you sign, there is some uncontrolled eventuality that you have to agree to spending more money once work commences, but even if you are rich enough that the money spent is a minor concern, you become their pirate-hostage regarding letting them in and out of the house at their whim and work schedule.
So construction contractors are pirates simply on the basis that their clients are pirate hostages, and money spent for the XP upgrade when 98 was working just fine for you, thank you, is tribute money.