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."

Comments

Downgrade

[Jedi Binglebop]

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

Re:It's nice to share.

[Gr8Apes]

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.

Tried it lately?

[symbolset]

And Linux has certainly had issues with looking pretty, which is understandable as talented designers aren't as generous as programmers,

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!)?

They'll put up with a bit of slowdown for an OS that feels powerful, looks pretty and has lots of neat little toys.

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,

talented designers aren't as generous as programmers,

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.

Re:Satisfying

[EdIII]

"disabling activation"

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.
 
 

4. TRANSFER--Internal. You may move the Product to a different Workstation Computer. After the transfer, you must completely remove the Product from the former Workstation Computer.

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

Re:It's nice to share.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ideally I would run the scan by unplugging the network cable and booting from directly the malware-scanner CD. Unfortunately nobody makes such a thing -- it's like the "antivirus" companies don't really care about reliability. Symantec disagrees

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.

Re:It's nice to share.

[Hal_Porter]

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.