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Windows XP Starter Edition Snubs P4, Athlon
Apu writes "CNET is reporting that Microsoft's Windows XP Starter Edition operating system specifically checks the result of the CPUID instruction on bootup and fails to continue if a Pentium 4 or Athlon processor is detected."
It is of course, an arbitrary decision manufactured by the marketing department as to my knowledge, there is no real functionality that is enabled on the "Pro" version of Windows with the Pentium 4 or Athalon chips. So, it seems like a fairly simple hack to get around this issue, as there is likely no real difference in the codebase of the Starter Edition other than some features that marketing has decided to disable and of course the above mentioned check, yes? (likely to violate the license terms)
So, quick question: Windows has appeared to evolved into a seriously fragmented OS. How many different versions of Windows are there? There is a Mobile, Embedded, Server, Pro, Home, Starter, Handheld......What else?
Oh, and Microsoft......If you cant make Windows more stable, you might want to do something about those error messages that crop up on computers running things like displays at airports. Almost every time I fly these days, at the airport, I see a computer running an information display that has crashed. Either a bluescreen of death (soon to be redscreen AND bluescreen of death in Longhorn), or a fundamental error message. This never looks good to customers and is bad advertising in large traffic areas. One of these days, one of these systems is going to get hacked and something truly embarrassing is going to be displayed on all of those big displays.
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it is designed for low-cost, entry-level desktop PCs running value-based processors
This is fine as long as MS provides a patch when P4 or AMD64 is considered low-cost and entry-level.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
On your second point, I think that Microsoft ought to have an option for screens to go black on errors.
Microsoft Operating Systems are used daily in environments where it really isn't useful to display large blue screens with technical error information. Printing that information to a file crit_error.dat and displaying a black screen will be much less obtrusive and obvious in what you call "high traffic areas", and probably wont add much tech time.
Just a thought I had upon reading your post. It doesn't really *solve* the problem, it just makes it more "friendly" to these sorts of microsoft displays.
thats stupid .. i mean atlhons started at, what, 500mhz? ...or what if someone ends up upgrading their machine from a duron/celeron?
This UID is 7651 digits too high to subjectively infer IQ from.
I think they would be wiser to give away this crippled version on the hope that as India's economy develops they will capture some market with the full price Windows XP at later stage.
It's the same as having MSDE being a crippled SQLServer that limits the nubmer of threads it can run. Surely the CPU could handle more threads; but they cripple it so that more people buy the bigger one.
This Pentium4/Athlon decision makes perfect sense - if someone can afford the higher-end processor, they can afford the higher priced OS.
This just reeks of some hush hush deal with a hardware vendor to keep people locked in to older hardware in a bid to get rid of over stocked parts.
I'll be the shoe thanks.
At the risk of sounding new here, I am amazed at the mindset. Whatever happened to making the best product you can and trying to sell as much of it as you can? The idea at Microsoft appears to be to sell your product as much as you can by making it perform poorly compared to itself. Or something like that.
Imagine being the engineers tasked with writing the feature that disables the OS on "advanced" CPUs. What pride they must have in their work.
Then consider the conversation between the marketing guru and his twelve-year-old son. "So, Dad, what did you do at work today?". What pride they must have in their work.
Then consider the poor sap who buys XP Starter Edition and finds out that it won't start. He can't return it, having opened it. All he can do is put it on EBay and hope he doesn't get sued.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
This is just another example of why OSS is the way to go in developing countries. I even think that this move is condescending from microsoft (and it isn't the first time).
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
Seems like an interesting way to price their product. The faster your CPU the more you should spend on the OS. Similiar to taxes in most places the more you make the more you should be able to give in taxes hence the higher your tax rate. Hopefully it will be available stateside also. It would be nice to set up cheap computers, running windows, around my house that could control my home automation. Be simplier then the terminal based version that I have been looking at. http://www.zanware.com/
I remember when MS introduced Windows 3.0 in 1990 (the first "working" version of the OS), it ran on DOS - or any of the competing DOS-compatibles. However, Win3.0 was hardcoded to fail (quit with a vague error) if it found that it was running on, I believe, "DRDOS". Because DRDOS was the #1 competitor to MS-DOS, and part of Microsoft's strategy was to use demand for Windows to compete (unfairly) with DRDOS. Such bundling leverage of market dominance has made MS what it is today. AMD gets dissed because its popular with Linux, the only credible competition to Windows (Apple doesn't use AMD, so it's immune to that competition). I wonder what exactly MS has against the P4?
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make install -not war
But I think it's a bug, not a feature. Haven't you ever tried opening a Windows program and had the screen go black or the computer reboot?
I think even the average user takes this as a "something is REALLY wrong" hint.
Tech Public Policy stuff
... sometimes, doesn't it help to design Hardware and Software as a single 'experience'?
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Not to be confused with Col.
Joe public, whether in india or america or afghanistan hasn't a cluebie the difference between XP starter edition and XP pro.
Trust me, they do. I know it's wrong to generalize, but here's a fundamental difference between a PC buyer in the US and a PC buyer in India. In the US, PCs are pretty much commodity items - people buy it the way they buy television sets, which means that many people just buy whatever the salesperson at Best Buy recommends to them.
In India, from my experience, people do a lot of research before spending a large part of their savings on a PC. Which means that the model is recommended by some geek friend (and in India there are plenty of computer geeks to be found all over the place) and trust me - no one will ever recommend XP starter edition.
The above statement is NOT intended to show how well informed the Indian buyer is compared to the American buyer. All I am trying to say is that the demographic in India that spends money on a PC is different from the one in the US.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
How will MS be able to recoup the expenses of researching IP related to expensive features like DRM and TC if they sell this so cheap?
You could argue that they saved money by leaving features out of the Stunted Edition, but actually it costs more to create a separate edition than to make identical copies of the same disks. Did they leave DRM out? I doubt it (CPUID support is in there...).
So, how low can the price go before someone claims that they are dumping?
I'm more curious about what the chip manufacturers may have to say about this. Would they have a legal case to stand on against Microsoft doing this? Would they want to?
I know it's in another country, but nonetheless, wouldn't it still negatively impact Intel's and AMD's markets in India in one way or another, in a potentially anti-competitive way even if Microsoft aren't themselves chipmakers?
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