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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."
This will be very satisfying. I've had so many people tell me they absolutely HATE Vista, but they're stuck with it when they bought their new computer. They frequently ask me to put XP on, no matter what it takes (buy it, hack it, put their mothers key on).
Killing XP off finally, while I love the idea of killing Windows will really hurt Microsoft. Since people hate Vista so much, they'll start being more open to other options.
Maybe it'll mean friends and family will be asking me to do more Linux installs. I like those better anyways, they go a lot faster and they don't involve 2 hours of install plus 2 days of Windows Updates.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I doubt they know though if they would install XP or Linux on there the laptop would absolutely fly and that's why they don't seem to have problems with it, if they would install XP or Linux and compare it to Vista they would find Vista is a major slow down on their computer.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Microsoft should recognize the Vista fiasco and then put all the eggs in the Win7 basket.
I can not imagine all corporate users migrating to vista just because MS want so.
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Why not? Generally the reasons that people use Windows when they know there is Linux is because of legacy apps, if they don't work in Vista there is no need to move from XP and not move to Linux/OS X. On most other OSes unless there has been a major change (Like 9X to NT, major changes in scripting languages such as python, PPC to x86) you should expect backwards compatibility. With Linux you don't have that problem, most apps written 3 years ago for the first Ubuntu will work fine with 8.04 or any other distro. With OS X the OS had such a major change from PPC classic mac based to x86 Unix-based you can't make a claim of backwards compatibility but in general there's no reason to expect that NT X App shouldn't run on NT X+1. MS killing backwards compatibility is killing the entire MS monopoly and moving people to OS X or Linux.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
There's plenty of good reasons to bash microsoft; this isn't one of them.
---Dedicated Ubuntu user
Umm.... what about the Eee PC? It's creating a new, very successful niche in the computer industry in the last six months, yet it's not powerful enough to run Vista. Is Microsoft going to end licensing of XP for the system, and give the whole market to linux? That would seem like an utterly stupid move on their part.
This incipient consumer rebellion is a relatively new phenomenon, even in the short history of PCs. For most of the '90s, Microsoft couldn't bring out new products fast enough to satisfy customers.
This is sort of empirical proof, to me at least, for what I have long thought, and I'm sure a lot around here thought as well. The days of an OS revolutionizing or vastly enhancing the way someone, especially a consumer, computes are long behind us. The OS has suffered from feature bloat for forever, and for the most part, a successful new OS is one that just doesn't hinder the work to be done. For most people, their computing needs have been satisfied, but they are pushed into a perpetual cycle of upgrading for upgrades sake. This "rebellion" is a symptom of this. XP satisfied people, and some of them are starting to realize what the terms "lock-in" and "monopoly" actually mean.
We're coming to a point where freedom in software is gaining in market value. I know it's cliche, and people have been spouting it for a over a decade, but I suspect that the general populace has come to a point where they can see that dollars and cents are in favor of not being tied to a corporation that makes money by selling solutions for the same problems over and over again. I don't know what iteration of "free" software will fill this void, but this mess with XP is not good for them. It won't be the downfall of Windows, they are far to crafty and firmly positioned for that to happen. However, the old business model of theirs is losing its effectiveness.
I hope I'm right, but even more so I hope I'm not turning into a linux nut that shouts "It's the year..." every time MS slips up.
I got a catholic block.
I doubt they know though if they would install XP or Linux on there the laptop would absolutely fly and that's why they don't seem to have problems with it, if they would install XP or Linux and compare it to Vista they would find Vista is a major slow down on their computer.
Probably, but I don't know that speed is everything to the average user. They'll put up with a bit of slowdown for an OS that feels powerful, looks pretty and has lots of neat little toys. And Linux has certainly had issues with looking pretty, which is understandable as talented designers aren't as generous as programmers,
And yes, I could be talking about OS X here too; only in the last few years has it not been an OS that's slow as molasses.
A whole article, with very informative and concise information about support and sales cycles of XP, but in the end the conclusion is you can put it off but you will bend over and take it.
THIS is what's wrong with proprietary software. If Vista were better - more compatible with existing software, less buggy, less DRM crap, I would WANT to move. I don't, but in the long run I don't have a choice. If you'd told me 3 years ago I'd be fighting to keep XP, and buying older hardware to ensure support for it, I'd have laughed at you.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The only reason I keep XP around is for gaming anyways. I'm figuring by the time XP really goes the way of the dodo, the 3d support for Windows applications will be there. If that's some version of virtualization, or wine having DX9 support completely that's what I'll use. Both of these options are "mostly there" now. VMware does some 3D, and wine can run a lot of DX9 stuff, just not what I need.
I used Vista, and I don't really like it. I like Ubuntu, but there are some things like games, that it doesn't run. I feel choosing the OS, then the applications is like putting the cart before the horse. When I can run rFactor(a PC driving sim) in Linux, I can migrate to it. I fully believe I'll be able to do this before XP is dead.
I'm old enough to remember...
Here's what you're missing... Win95 did have a number of significant improvements over 3.11. Vista does not have significant improvements over XP. It's a few security fixes, lots of eye candy, and lots of DRM or similar protectionist practices that mean you have to contact MS every time you switch your hard drive.
There is no benefit whatsoever in switching to Vista. There are, however, consequences in terms of performance and in the freedom to change hardware etc. It might have been a different story if they'd delivered the Vista they initially promised -- the one with the new file system etc. The Vista they eventually delivered had none of that -- no significant improvements, no "must have" features whatsoever.
XP users will still get security fixes until 2014. By then MS will probably have put out windows 8 and everyone will be complaining about that. Just like everyone complained about 95, 98, ME, 2000, xp, and vista when they came out, and yet continued to buy MS's operating systems.
Be realistic 13 years of support is amazing long, and if that's not enough XP for you there isn't any rule that says you can't continue to use it after they stop patching it.
Absolutely. Backward compatibility is always blamed as the problem, but these legacy apps cost MONEY for new versions (if they are even available). This is one thing that always irritates me about Microsoft. Even on products they don't make any money on, like IE, they have to re-invent the wheel every time they release it.
With Linux you don't have that problem, most apps written 3 years ago for the first Ubuntu will work fine with 8.04 or any other distro. With OS X the OS had such a major change from PPC classic mac based to x86 Unix-based you can't make a claim of backwards compatibility but in general there's no reason to expect that NT X App shouldn't run on NT X+1. MS killing backwards compatibility is killing the entire MS monopoly and moving people to OS X or Linux.
Absolutely. The other great thing about Linux, if you are using FOSS, you can probably just download a version that works with your distro. A pain in terms of time, but at least it's not cash out of your pocket. If that doesn't work out for you, you next option is to modify the source code and recompile under the latest OS. Again, doesn't always work, and can be difficult for some apps, but in general a viable solution.
In general, Microsoft is an incredibly wasteful company. They spend millions of man-hours re-inventing products with minimal improvement. I have heard very little about Vista that is an improvement on XP, yet they spent a ton of work on it. Their whole business model is banking on the idea that software is continually obsolete, and that just isn't the case. A Word Processor is a Word Processor. An OS, as long as it's compatible with the hardware, is an OS. I can write a letter in Word 95 just as easily as I can in Word 2007, gets the same job done. Why would I spend thousands of dollars on all of the upgrades between now and then if Microsoft didn't periodically break all the backward compatibility.
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I got something that activated my XP system w/o Microsoft already. It's called a crack. When I purchased my machine it came with an XP key. At some point Microsoft felt that key was no longer valid and after a call in they informed my that my key was invalidated and I was probably using a pirated version (I doubt e-Machines did that) so I'd have to pay for a new one.
I went to Google, found what I needed and I've been happily running new installs of XP since.
That worked really well for Microsoft didn't it?
I'll bet he's not running any games past D9 on it.
Since DX10 is only available for Vista, I'd say that's a pretty safe bet.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Agreed, but as someone who has just painstakingly managed to install Windows XP on a Dell XPS 1530 (which is officially Vista-only) I can attest to the fact that it's not "a bit of slowdown" - it's an imprecise measure but I'd say my laptop now "feels" at least two times faster/more responsive. We are talking about a pretty zippy dual core machine with 3 gigs of RAM and a powerful video card, too (256MB DDR3 nvidia 8600gt), which ran like treacle with Vista on it.
I have since played with another, similar Vista laptop trying to figure out what is doing all the damage. The worst individual offenders seem to be the (well documented) user account control bullshit which interferes with every aspect of the operation of the computer, and "supercache", which would have to be in the top 5 worst Microsoft innovations of all time.
For the uninitiated, supercache watches everything you do and records a log of what you cause to be loaded into memory and at what time/date it happens (this automatically introduces an overhead into every single memory related operation because Vista has to spend some resources on surveilling you). It then attempts to predict what you are going to use at a given point in time, and pre-caches as much of it as it considers to be reasonable. So for example, if I played Quake III every Wednesday night between 7-8pm, Vista would start grinding away at about 7pm on Wednesdays loading the texture files into RAM. Supercache apparently considers about 1.5 gigabytes on a system with 3 gigabytes of RAM to be a reasonable amount of physical memory to use for this process.
The net effect of all of the above is that Vista spends a hell of a lot of time sitting there churning away using your disks and RAM to load "stuff" into memory that you "might" need. All of this for the 1-2 seconds you are likely saving by not having to load Word or Quake III or whatever from disk should you happen to want to use it.
Turning UAC and Supercache off (both pretty straightforward once you know where to look) improves performance a lot - but not enough. Vista still has an offensively huge footprint and runs like a dog compared to XP.
Which returns me to the original point - XP is already a challenge to get running with some newer hardware. But if hardware manufacturers have the guts to stand up to Microsoft and keep producing XP versions of their hardware drivers (which should be trivial if they are doing 32 bit Vista drivers) then there's really very little we need from Microsoft.* XP is a stable, solid, mature OS which does what it does pretty well. I for one intend to keep using it into the foreseeable future.
* This is the main issue at the moment - most laptop manufacturers in particular have abandoned XP support on newer machines.
Read Pynchon.
For non-networked machines, is there a need for a newer operating system? Software doesn't age you know.
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In 2014, Microsoft will stop all support of Windows XP. Oh noes!
You guys DO realize that this would be like someone running Windows 95 today, right? XP came out in 2002 and was replaced in 2007. A full seven years after that, XP will be phased out. There will likely be two major OS releases, plus Vista, by the time that happens.
Not to mention this has already happened with every other Windows release to date, including Windows 2000. In fact, Windows 2000 (Professional and Server) officially lost Mainstream Support in the middle of 2005, and its Extended Support (security updates only) will end in 2010. That's a 10 year lifespan.
The real story here is that Microsoft has committed to supporting an OS for 12 years after you paid less than $200 for it.
-David
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. Running the scan on the target system itself is pointless, since some system-level malware could be tampering with the results. That's why I take the hard drives out of the target systems and attach them to a known-clean system (fresh OS+scanner install, no network) to run the scan.
But really the elaborate malware scan is just window dressing so I can provide some tangible evidence that my systems aren't infected; 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.
It's because single letters don't work well as an abbreviation... and since Firefox is a compound word (fire and fox), people call it FF and carry the capitalization over when they write it as a single word.
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I think a bigger problem than Application upgrades for most people will be drivers. People are going to come with their latest gadget and try to attach it to their XP machine and there won't be a driver for it. I'm finding similar problems with Win 2000 now. Basic this has broken can I repair it reinstall it type issues there will still be plenty of support for. After all most IT guys will still remember how to do stuff from the XP days, and if there still is a bunch of corporate workstations that haven't been upgraded then there is still a bunch of IT guys tinkering with XP all the time.
I think EOLing XP is the way to go. XP is old technology, people still have another 5 years at some level of support, I think 10 years is plenty of time for supporting an OS. I don't agree with taking down existing documentation from your website though. It can't be more than a few GB's, heck lets say it is 1TB, wants the big deal? A few hundred dollars worth of disk. Your new product should sell itself, your old products manuals should still be available, but the industry should be giving a compelling reason to upgrade hardware/software.