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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.
Imagine being the engineers tasked with writing the feature that disables the OS on "advanced" CPUs. What pride they must have in their work.
back in the old days of DEC and VAX/VMS, there were 2 models of VAX (780 and something else; forget the exact numbers). they were sold as systems that were 'fast' and 'faster'. what was the diff? every few machine instructions, there were NO-OP's inserted to slow things down on purpose! no other technical diffs. none!
but - if you bought the slower box and paid to upgrade it, it was 2 things - new skins (color change, I think; at the least it was a model # change in the labelling). they'd change out some/all of the backplane just to make it look (to the customer) like 'real stuff' was upgraded. but it was really just firmware on the cpu boards. ha!
maybe it was the VAX 750, now that I think about it.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
... sometimes, doesn't it help to design Hardware and Software as a single 'experience'?
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Not to be confused with Col.
I'll give you another example of this kind of thinking. About twenty-five years or so ago, my father was systems manager working on HP3000 systems (MPE, and all that) for a State of Illinois database installation. They had a ton of Hewlett-Packard disk subsystems there, and they decided to upgrade them ... I believe they ordered double their existing capacity on several of the units. Out comes the HP technician, and he just went down the line of disk drives, opened their rear panels, reached in and flicked a switch. Voila! Twice the storage. He showed Dad where the switch was, and said that they were welcome to switch the rest of them on the same way, but that HP wouldn't service them if they did.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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)