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Microsoft Plans WinXP "Reloaded"
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Microsoft changed their minds and are planning a new OS release before Longhorn. They are calling it XP Reloaded."
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"Reloaded" is just an internal designation. It will most likely be released under a different name in order to avoid lawsuits.
And delayed. Point is, to me this indicates that Longhorn's release date just became slightly more tentative than it was before. Which is a good thing for alternative operating systems like the growing and ever-improving GNU/Linux.
And in the short term it's a good thing for Microsoft, as some people are likely to fork over the $100 (or whatever) upgrade.
Look, everyone knows (or should, by now) that the only part of XP that really NEEDS overhauling is IE. After the new stuff coming up in SP2 (security fixes, software firewall, built-in antivirus, etc.), that'll _still_ be the only thing that needs an overhaul. A popup blocker in IE with SP2 isn't going to cure the REAL ills of IE, namely, horrid CSS & PNG support. Merely fixing those two things would get me to buy an XP upgrade. As a web designer/developer, that is my number one, EVERY DAY biggest obstacle to computing happiness. Where do I want to go today, Microsoft asks. I want to go to that happy land where IE properly & fully supports CSS 1 & 2 & PNG. Is that so much to ask? Hell, just properly implementing what you started in the original IE 6 would be enough!
Screw Fermat's Last Theorem. MS spending time adding a _popup blocker_ to IE when the PNG & CSS issues remain is the biggest mystery of our time. If they add tabs and _still_ don't fix CSS & PNG, I'm gonna totally lose it.
How old were the machines? Bought new around the time that the respective OSes were released?
It may be a hardware problem - dodgy RAM, something overheating, etc. Seriously, it might be an idea to open the machine up, clean all the fans, heatsinks, etc, and take a look. Actually investigate the problem, rather than just shrugging and saying "Windows, huh?".
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Microsoft was already planning on a 64-bit release of XP, and even has a beta you can download and test if you have an Opteron or Athlon64 machine. Thus, my question is: why were you planning on waiting for Longhorn? Was it a lack of interest in paying for a 64-bit version of an existing OS, or just a lack of knowle3dge that a 64-bit version was comming?
s /upgrade.asp
0 03/64bit/e xtended/default.mspx
Honestly though, anyone who is surprised by the anouncement of a XP2 needs to pay more attention: with the delays in Longhorn and the delays of sp2, with the added functiuonality of sp2, I've been expecting a XP second edition to be anounced for over 6 months. It's par for course after 98SE and ME. The release of 64-bit platforms just adds another excuse to the pile of reasons to push a new version out the door - I doubt we'll see commercial releases of regular XP for 64-bit now, regardless of the beta program. Oh, and the 64-bit version will be more secure, thanks to the support for non executable memory pages on AMD64 (and later, intel 'IA32e', which is the SAME THING).
64-bit XP download: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/download
Note: its a 'customer preview' (Beta), it may crash a lot, and you may have fun finding native 64 bit drivers for your hardware, so only install on a test partition, don't use it in production or while drinking, blah blah blah - if you shoot your dog in the head with it, I won't be held responsible - and neither will MS.
Windows Server 2003 is also available in a 64-bit preview:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2
Same warnings apply as above.
And no, this post was not spell checked.
man is machine
Um, that would be longhorn.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
This is actually the scheme used, except the third number is the build number. This is a huge number that increments every day, but is exactly what you propose, in a sense: each day sees many small fixes and increments to the code base.
What Marketing calls "Windows XP" internally carries the product name "Windows" and the version number "5.1.2600".
One will note that this reveals that Windows XP is considered a minor release from Windows 2k, which was 5.0.2195.