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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."
Ha, still using Windows 2000 here.
I think Vista will be fine for most people once powerful hardware becomes more common. People I know who have it pre-loaded on their new laptops seem to be okay with 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.
31 June 2008, 8:00 AM EST: Nasdaq and NYSE both crash as the big three PC vendors and their suppliers discover nobody's willing to buy a PC any more.
Midmorning Bill and Steve get a call from Ben Bernanke.
Afternoon DHS executes warrants on One Microsoft Way. Attorney general reopens antitrust investigation. Steve gets a call from the IRS regarding the structure of financing for one of his sports teams.
Evening: XP gets a reprieve! We're all friends again.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Try PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu or Fedora and let me know if you still think composting window managers are slow or that you need 10GB for an OS install.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
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.
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
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.
I'm sure he means that he runs W2K in a virtual machine. That won't solve the Pownabilty problem but it will run with reasonable speed after you reload your snapshot. Runs great on PCLinuxOS using Nvidia drivers and VirtualBox.
Yeah, yeah, I know Nvidia is non free. So is Windows! If you must run it, and I can't imagine why, this is a way to do it.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
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
Unless MS is really going to *sell* users on Vista, trying to force them off XP is going to represent an opportunity for someone else, among them:
(1) Microsoft Systems shops that have the ability to provide support or
(2) Competition that's open source ("Don't like being moved off your platform when your *vendor* decides it's time, not when you decide it's time? When you have the source, you can maintain or hire someone to maintain it as long as the cost is worth it to you.")
Tweet, tweet.
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.
Given that the article sites June 30 as the cut-off date for pre-installed XP from the likes of HP and Dell, does anyone think that these guys are going to see a bunch of sales right before that date? I know that my brother's business needs about three more laptops and that when he hears that June 30 is the drop-dead date for XP machines from Dell, he's probably going to start ordering.
I wonder if XP will get a reprieve before or after the 30th of June. It _will_ get a reprieve. That's my bet. I just don't know for sure when.
Of course, I'm feeling a bit smug typing this on an Eee PC without Windows and knowing that my wife is about to buy a MacBook. I use Windows at work, but in every place where we make the decisions, we've given up on it.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
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.
Oddly enough, quite a few people still have Windows 98 running (I have a Win98 machine in my basement doing my CDEX ripping).
When Microsoft turns off the activation servers, that basically REALLY means the end of WinXP... or is there a chance, any chance, that Microsoft will release a super-secret "unlock all" patch in 2014 that will allow XP to be activated. I am pretty sure the answer is NO, but I can still hope.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
Nope, Windows 2000 native on Opterons and Athlon64s, with a variety of Nvidia video cards, works fine and runs plenty fast. There is no malware of any kind. Seriously, I've audited the crap out of everything, it's clean. (Auditing in this case means: Hard drives physically removed and attached to non-networked machines with fresh OS installs, run the latest malware scanners from the CDs. Always comes up clean.) The Windows machines are behind Linux firewalls and basically get nothing installed beyond a few commercial 2000-era applications, plus the latest Firefox.
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.
I'm still running Windows 2000 professional and have no desire whatsoever to migrate to anything. I'm 25 and hardly ever play games anymore and mainly use my system for fairly mundane things like email, finances, sound recording, porn lol, and burning cds/dvds. With a gig of ram and a 2.2ghz amd processor my system is very fast when running a minimalist windows 2000 setup as my system only uses 128megs of ram for base processes. My system never freezes or locks up unless I'm playing some buggy game like Half Life 2: episode 1 or 2. In terms of security I use truecrypt to encrypt a partition with all my sensitive data. It's annoying that truecrypt does not support system partition encryption for windows 2000 but I found a workaround by placing all of my sensitive data on a non-system partition including my firefox and thunderbird profiles. I have a fast backup routine using ghost that only takes me 15 minutes to back up my system. I don't really need anything else as long as programs like firefox and thunderbird continue to be updated for win2k systems which I don't see why they won't. I went through a linux phase where I ran red hat, then slackware, then debian. It was interesting and fun as a kid but my career does not really involve computers so the time consuming tinkering that came with running a linux system had to go. So far it seems only games utilizing the newest version of directx are out of reach by running windows 2000. As long as I can run the newest versions of popular programs like skype, firebird, thunderbird, open office, I don't see myself changing until my hardware dies and I can't purchase equivalent hardware to replace it but I don't foresee that happening for at least another 5 years.
FTFA:
Booom, that was a 486. BOOOM, that was a PI. BABOOMBA, that was a PII with a chrome-spoiler VGA card. How we lived through all that, no one knows.
TFA goes on about Microsoft's problems supporting "a tangle of versions and upgrades" which is almost as funny given when you consider how well DOSBox, Wine and virtual machines deals with all the same problems with none of the inside information. No, it's not new because IBM did Win3.1 inside OS/2 very well. Me thinks the "support" issue is created rather than natural.
But yeah, Windows is dying.
No calls now, I'm
Oh, well, here we go:
DOS is a new-fangled OS. Run CP/M. Completely malware free, since none of the malware is compatible.
You know who benefits from this? Apple. Expect Apple to really crank up the "move to the Mac" ads.
Vista's reputation is justifiably bad, and I'm never buying a copy. If I suddenly need a new Wintel machine, there's always someone like tigerdirect that has overstocked machines with XP pre-installed, and they'll probably be selling them for a year after XP is pulled from the shelves. But I think MS is only going to cause customers to truly hate their guts for this. They'd be smarter to allow XP sales until Windows 7 is ready (assuming they don't fuck that up.... a big if).
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Not backwards compatible?
At work (I'm a PC game developer), pretty much everyone has upgraded to 64-bit Vista. Here's a rundown of some of the software we're using:
Visual Studio 6, 2005, & 2008
Visual Assist X
3D Studio Max
Maya
Photoshop
Perforce
Various PC games (including ours, our parent company's games, and various competitors)
Various in-house tools and utilities
All this with zero (that I'm aware of) compatibility issues. Note that these software packages are 32-bit binaries as well. We've been using it for a number of months now, and it certainly hasn't slowed us down at all.
Maybe if you're talking about drivers and low-level software like virus scanners / other utilities, sure. Or 16-bit Windows apps. But nearly all standard 32-bit Windows applications work just fine in Vista.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I have yet to run into an app that runs in XP and not Vista that I see as a useful app. It's like the XP/SP1 to SP2 "killing" backwards computability. Well built applications didn't suffer, but poor built ones and ones that used short-cuts and quick-and-dirty coding techniques would often fail. Like the proper ways to call DLLs and the lazy way some people do it would break apps in SP2.
And of course Microsoft is forcing a time line on XP. Do you expect them to sit around and make constant improvements for every OS they've ever built? Of course they're going to phase out something they've made their money on and not put money where it wont benefit them.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
It seems very obvious that the people who developed Windows Vista don't never to use their own product. What else can explain some of the stupidest fucking product decisions ever made? It's just unbelievable how Microsoft's latest and greatest operating system took a giant step backwards from Windows XP. The fact that network transfer speeds from Windows Vista over gigabit Ethernet averages around 5MBps for me when similar transfers from my XP machine if six times faster. This is after I installed SP1 and I'm not running multimedia applications in the background. Before SP1, the transfer speed would sometimes go down to 1MBps. Just unbelievable. WHAT THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING? I've got a couple of notebooks running Vista. Whenever I first turn them on, their hard disks whir away for 10 minutes or so doing the shadow backup/system restore thing it does, WHETHER IT'S RUNNING ON BATTERY POWER OR NOT. Way to go, dumb fucking shits. This is after I figured out how to stop its incessant disk defragmenting. The tech. press has said it much better than I could: Microsoft broke tons of existing applications without adding any real innovation to Vista.
I started working with Ubuntu pretty seriously a couple of years ago, and at this point I can say that Ubuntu is my OS of first choice, and I have no plans to adopt Vista. Ever.
I may get forced in the Vista direction at some point, and I'm pretty sure that at some point I'll be forced to at least support it, but so far I've been able to pretend it isn't there and just hope for it to go away. My company is the main locus of such possible force, but they are so far mostly avoiding Vista. Unfortunately the in-house Linux that they prefer is Red Hat... It might be more secure, but I feel Ubuntu is much closer to being ready for the masses to work with.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
First I'd like to preface by saying if you LOVE Vista and you truly believe it's better than WindowsXP, then good for you. You are a minority according to everything I've heard and seen. (Does anyone have any studies, polls or surveys backing up either position?)
This is no classic example of market demand guiding any invisible hand to deliver. People want it, Microsoft says "too bad!"
Would anyone care to speculate for logical reasons why Microsoft would take this approach? I'm really out of ideas on this matter. Most people can agree that they dislike the idea... even people who LOVE Vista can't actually approve of Microsoft forcing people out of something they like can they? (Don't answer that, I know they can...)
So why are they doing this?
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.
Long live ReactOS!
Well, at least I'm confident that by the time Windows 7 comes out, ReactOS will be in a usable state.
The key is to install FireFox, never use Internet Explorer or any of the apps that use it (like Outlook), and don't ever expose it directly to the Internet. (The one time I did, it only took an hour or so to get clobbered by the Welchia worm.)
My wife runs XP, but mainly because that's what came on her laptop. The only real advantage I see to XP is the fast user switching. But she's never going to be a Vista user: she just bought an iMac, to run Final Cut on for her video artwork.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
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.
Find coupons in Greeley
"Auditing in this case means: Hard drives physically removed and attached to non-networked machines with fresh OS installs, run the latest malware scanners from the CDs. Always comes up clean."
:)
Well, if you remove the network and add a fresh OS, of course it is going to come up clean. Especially since you have no data to worry about.
So have we decided 'yay or nay' if I need to adopt a new screen name?
;)
No, I think ill still be administering XP boxen for until 2010 at least
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
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.
That is why you should always either build your own or have someone build one for you.Not only do you get to choose EXACTLY what comes in your pc,but even the $199 Athlon special I built for a guy last month came with a cd that had Win2K,2K3,XP,and XP64 as well as Vista drivers.I would much rather build my own and decide what OS I want,than get saddled with Vista.And if I can still get motherboards with Win2K drivers without even having to hunt I have no doubt that I will be able to get XP drivers with my motherboards for many years to come.Hell,it was only a couple of years ago that I finally saw the motherboards stop shipping Win98 drivers.But that's my 02c,if you want Vista,just buy an OEM.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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
Cisco Systems VPN Client doesn't. That's (one of) the deal-breaker(s) for me.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
One could say we in the free software business are our own enemies. We shoot ourselves in the feet all the time. Imagine...after all this time, with the [free] availability of specs of every kind, there is no decent ODF application beyond OpenOffice.org...which at version 2.4, still sucks bigtime by the way! Do not think I blindly support KDE because KDE's KOffice is a joke!
By the way, some author outlines ways for that other environment to improve.
Well built applications didn't suffer, but poor built ones and ones that used short-cuts and quick-and-dirty coding techniques would often fail. Like the proper ways to call DLLs and the lazy way some people do it would break apps in SP2.
.Net 3.5 libraries on 2.0 using Windows 2000...and they all work. Microsoft is now reaching the point where they're forcing upgrades just to force upgrades. Despite the fact that the computer that you now own should *always* be powerful enough to run the latest webcam, word processor, browser, and GUI (and even do amazing things with Virtual Machines), and could easily support the latest apps that do these kinds of things faster and better, you can't be sure that you'll be able to use it for that forever.
I take it you don't use any applications that require access to hardware that doesn't have a Windows driver model for it, or for which the Windows driver is crappy (such as, for example, sound cards and cameras)?
Those have perfect excuses for not working in Vista. But the other point is forward compatibility.
I've tried a lot of the
You may have to throw it away simply because the monopoly that makes most of the software on it won't sell you what you want from them - better apps.
Seems like as a monopoly they shouldn't be allowed to do this kind of collusion...
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
you know, I wonder about that. Wasn't there some story about "pre" D10 dev kits being made available to various select developers that ran on XP?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I too am using Windows Me, and as long as I can continue reading Slashdot with it, until December 22, 2012, I'll be happy.
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.
When Microsoft moved from 2000 to the spyware platform (online registration first, then what?) of XP, I decided not to move with it. I never found a reason that really forced me to upgrade. Because I decided to move to Linux, and put the W2K box in a closet running a VNC server. I hardly ever need to fire up the W2K machine at all.
These Microsoft "up"-grades pushed me to using Linux full time. I bet that I'm far from alone.
--
make install -not war
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....
and you can turn the eye candy shit off.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
EQ is the only thing holding me to Windows now.
Openoffice 2.4 has added the features I wanted and seems to mangle my existing huge documents very little so that I can patch them in a few hours (these are 150 page documents with hundreds of pictures). The smaller documents I only need to change the table of contents and indices column count.
P2P- Azureus.
Sound- Audacity.
Graphics-- still an issue- but Draw looks decent. I need a good pixel editor tho.
Browsing-- Firefox.
Just do not see the point in upgrading again and paying money again. I guess I'll get some $399 PC with Vista or Windows7 but no more $1899 (heck last XP pc was only $1199).
Focusing my dollars on retirement, boardgames, my house--- do not see putting out $3k for a computer each year like I used to.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Win98 actually supports the Windows Driver Model (WDM) so in theory it should work with Win2K drivers.
Although why you would want to use Win98 is beyond me.
Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game
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.
VMs and emulating the A: drive doesn't help if the auditing office insists on receiving the data via snail-mail delivered floppy (no joke!)
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Moved to Vista Business back in November. Runs perfectly on a 2.5 year old X2 4800+ system (Vista 32-bit) and a new Q6600 system (Vista 64-bit). Once I showed people how well Vista runs they stop spouting off on how bad it is. Two friends asked me to build them Vista gaming boxes over the holidays. No issues so far.
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
At the risk of trolling, who cares? Microsoft has been doing this sort of thing since Windows 3.1.
By now, I think people have figured out the proprietary software game. You pay for gloss, for the "privelege" of upgrading every few years. People who run Windows by choice do so because they want to have the latest thing. They don't care how well it works; they don't care if it's slow, or needs constant updating, or has umpteen million security holes.
It's what everybody is using. Period. And that's reason enough to use it.
You know, we could go on a rant about other operating systems that are more secure, run faster, have better legacy support, more features and options, etc...
But it doesn't matter. The kind of people who run XP by choice don't care that Microsoft is going to discontinue support. When that happens, they'll just shell out another few hundred for a brand new PC. Why? Because it's new, and therefore better.
It doesn't matter. Nobody cares. Linux will still be around for those of us who actually care about the quality of the software we run. And Apple will still, gladly, cater to those who are fed up with being abused by their technology vendor. And no one will care - not Microsoft, not Apple fanboys, not Linux zealots, and least of all, Windows users. They've become so accustomed to computers as slow, unreliable, and insecure, that honestly, they won't notice any difference.
Because Vista is new, and therefore more advanced....
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
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.
XP will live forever . It may not be supported with service packs, but you will still be able to use it, and purchase it.
:)
http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/useterms/default.aspx
XP licenses can be transferred indefinitely. You don't have to ever buy another XP license as long as you are getting rid of the older machine. As for drivers, there will be drivers for XP for at least another 10 years. I can still download Windows 2000 drivers; it's a safe bet there will be Windows XP drivers for quite a long time.
I also find it ironic that XP is about to be "dead" and certain manufacturers still don't have XP 64-bit driver support.
Activation has to be provided by Microsoft for as long as their are stickers out in the "wild". There are no contractual provisions for Microsoft to NOT provide activation. At some point, Microsoft may elect to just allow any request to be activated. Those service centers which run 24/7 giving out activation codes when too many activations have been performed on the license don't run cheap. There is no alternative however. To not provide activation denies a customer the ability to run the operating system that they paid for.
Unless I am really clueless, which is possible since I do have some pretty spectacular "DUH" moments, the EULA does not provide a time frame or conditions for them to discontinue activation.
It will be even worse in corporations, since there is a pretty good rebellion going against Vista right now in the workplaces. That is just what I can see, I am not trying to start a war here
My point though is that corporations are even more aware, and more sophisticated about licenses, COA's , CALS, TS CALS, etc. and are far more likely to transfer a XP license from an older machine to a newer machine rather then purchase a newer OS like Vista.
So no, XP is not going to die. Far from it. This is just another article stirring up blogs like rocks hitting a wasp's nest.
Let's not pretend this is something specific to Microsoft. Apple, Debian, the BSDs...everybody phases out old versions of the OS after some time. Microsoft actually supports their operating systems for a very long time.
On the other hand, an upgrade from one Microsoft OS to the next is often much more disruptive (to your system and to your wallet) than upgrades to some other OSes. For example, Debian upgrades are free and usually very smooth.
Plus, the free operating systems are largely mix and match. You don't have to accept the package as a whole. With Apple and Microsoft, for example, if they decide to litter their new OS with DRM or other junk, your choices are to accept it or to not use the new OS. With, say, Linux or OpenBSD, you can just leave out the parts you don't want (usually by simply not installing them. in the very worst case, you will have to edit the source and recompile - but at least you _can_ do that).
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I'm assuming POS in this particular sentence does not mean Point Of Sale.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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!
The DirectX SDK comes with a "debug" software driver for both DX9 and DX10. Essentially, you use this driver to test your application to see how it's supposed to look - since it's entirely done in software, random graphics glitches caused by drivers aren't a factor, so you know if it's your fault or nvidia/ATI's.
The debug driver supports DX10 and works on XP, you can install the SDK right now and try it out for yourself. Catch is that you'll get about 0.0001FPS rendering little more than a rotating, untextured cube. Still, you want DX10 on XP? You've got it.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
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!
I use W2K on my home and work PC. Security? As long as it is supported by MS(security patch until 2009) and behind my via epia linux firewall(heavier one at workplace) it is pretty safe from being pwned. That leaves just two security hole, the 'malicious ActiveX' problem and 'user installing random crapware' problem, which is not just W2K's problem(and I'd rather say, it is not the hw or sw problem. It's 'something between keyboard and chair' problem) and can be mitigated by education and providing Limited user accounts(My wife is power user with privilege-escalated IE icon(used in internet banking with ActiveX plugin) in menu, My son's is just an user with limited privilege).
I don't do serious gaming, but I'm content with mame(including that 3d hw accelerated game starts with 't'), warzone2100(3d accelerated too), dosbox(MOO, MOM, settlers etc.), snes9x, freeciv, wesnoth, UQM, Privateer remake, starcraft. My little sons are pretty satisfied with flash games, UQM, and snes9x too.
Drivers? This PC is AMD 690G based, not that old PC. Though they aren't officially supporting W2K(they didn't mention it at ther web support site), the driver CD included in the mainboard just installed amd graphic driver(catalyst ver 6.12 or something with DX9) fine. Yes, generally W2K is pickier than WinXP on CDROM on newer IDE chipset(especially non-intel chips such as highpoint, marvell) when it is about to be installed, but it can be solved by copying install files when it is on previous OS(win98 etc) or copy it directly in dos mode(I386 directory) or sata-to-ide adapter(I've bought 1 for $5) if you have IDE cdrom and intel chipset board.
Workplace? We've standardized on Office2K on W2K too. With firewall, automatic update, Limited user account with some exceptions(those nasty ActiveX my customer requires) and AV product they are pretty safe too. And I can freely relocating OS, App license to machine to machine due to non-activation status of these OS/APP. My desktop PC OS is debian. But I use W2K as KVM guest OS when Internet banking is needed(those fscking activeX plugins!). The only application I've encountered that can't be installed on W2K is CATIA V5 R18 which is fairly new.(It could've been installed on W2K until R16). Even if W2K in office use would become obsolete, there are many older PCs 'waiting with honor' to be installed with W2k on working area in my plant.(they are pentium-PIII era w9x based pc managed with PXE network booting and dd imaging. Funny? they works pretty well if they are used for their dedicated purpose with their own legacy apps and restricted net access)
Conclusion? MS can theoretically grab WinXP OEM from your live hands when your motherboard dies, but they'll never be able to pry W2K OEM from my cold dead finger. By that time, it'll live on virtual world created by my penguin god which MS can never dare to touch on.
Disclaimer: I work for M$ft (but in no way should my comments here be considered representative of Microsoft) Windows 2000 was pried from my cold dead fingers only because XP is required to VPN into work (some days it's nice to just work from home), but XP isn't as bad as I'd expected. Vista on the other hand, well, I crawled through a lot of broken glass working with IE7 Beta2 and I will NEVER willingly install it on any system I need to actually do something other than run office and surf the web. Windows7, on the other hand, looks very promising. Although, the WinMin kernel and such strongly reminds me of something some Finnish guy slapped together when he was in college... Enough background, to my point. One of my biggest problems with Microsoft is how as soon as there's a new platform, all development and marketing effort is put into it. Currently I'm working as part of an application development team for a Windows Mobile product. We're targeting WinMo 5 + .Net Compact Framework 1.0 because that's the largest existing install base out there for Windows based SmartPhones and PocketPCs. When we run into problems and post questions to mailing lists we're regularly getting called idiots for not using Compact Framework 3 or WinMo 6. Sure, what we need to do would be easy using those platforms, but NOBODY sells a phone with that already installed and it's asinine to expect users to upgrade just to run our application.
You can still buy phones with WinMo 5 and .Net CF 1.0, yet there's no internal support to speak of for either technology. I shudder to think what hell 3rd party developers must be going through. The platform teams at Microsoft tell us to use .Net CF 3, when .Net CF 2 isn't even standard on the market yet.
For that reason, I've decided to go for upper management rather than technical individual contributor just so I might have a chance at changing some of these fscked up ideas, or at least attempt to give developers some room for better practices and refinement of technologies rather than jumping to the latest and greatest when there's still lots of room for improvement on what's already in the market.
DONT PANIC
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.
PITA. PAIN in THE ASS. You read me. First I wanted to install an application. I tryed to fudge with the network things to get it work with my german t-online dsl. Did not work. After roughly 10-12 hours of googling, trying, rebooting, I gave up. So I used my XP PC tzo download .tar and / or .deb files. Then with an USB transmit it to the Ubuntu PC. First application was cdemu. I tryed the .deb did not work. Googled. Oh so the vhsa whatever is not working has to enter cryptic command to restart it, then restart a daemon. Did nbot work. Then somebody commented in a CDEMU forum to just do a freaking mount -o whatever with the ISO. THAT did work. Then I tryed to install the application on the ISO. Spent hours. Did not work. Then finally found some post hinting that the app is not supported in any new kernel stuff (I guess I can give that in being my fault for not googling first to see if the app I got was supported or not). So I started installing an alternative instead. Have to compile it... Right now I am trying to find out why there seems to be some problem with it, some dependency with libgcc whatever. I left it for next week end. I thought, of playing a few of my oldies. I have on my XP box DOSBOX. Installed it worked like a charm without fudging anything. But with ubuntu .... Could not get-apt (remember : no network, meaning I am screwed). Turn out after installing a few app, that i have NO FREAKING MIDI SOUND! WTF ! I am now in the process of downloading timidity and some freepats.
I might be a rare bird to install some of those app, but plain freaking dosbox was runnning out of the box in windows, and I have to install and download third party stuff in ubuntu. Argue as much as you wish, but I am nowhere to recommend ubuntu to anybody without a lot of time and knowledge.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
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;
My own PCs (including a year 2007 dual core) are still running Windows 2000 (Professional), because I really dislike the idea of an operating system with "product activation". On this one we might actually agree, given your general attitude toward Microsoft ;-)
But otherwise the oldie holds up better than you suggest:
-With current patches and a DSL router using NAT, I had no intrusions for a few years.
-After updating a few registry settings and libraries, most current software runs fine. Here Windows 2000 shows its age, but it is still manageable.
Nevertheless, Windows 2000 will probably not be on my next PC a few years from now. Reasons are:
-expected lack of drivers, but I can't really fault hardware vendors for that. Windows 2000 is dying out.
-inability to fully use modern hardware. My current rig is pushing the limits of Windows 2000, the next one will exceed them.
-Linux is improving year by year. I'm already keeping an eye on Ubuntu Linux and consider the operating system as good as Windows or better. If it wasn't for a few Windows games Ubuntu might already be my main OS.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Company I used to work for is STILL shipping product based on DOS 6.1x! Granted this is an embedded use of the OS in a turnkey system. I think they bought the rights to ship as many copies as they wanted. (From IBM not M$).
Now, if you manage to shield a Win98 box from the external world so that it doesn't need these 3rd party tools running, then sure, you'll have a "GDI load" similar to what such a machine saw on 1998, and it'll be usable. But that requires discipline and tons of good sense on the part of the user. Anything else, and it's either too risky or quite literally impossible.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
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. I really don't mean to nitpick. I fully agree running an Antivirus on a compromised system is definitely not to be trusted. Even if the virus doesn't interfere or play with the results, Windows probably won't let you clean it if it is in memory. Symantec disagrees Says it doesn't support NTFS. Mcafee disagrees. Says it doesn't support NTFS. AVG disagrees. Runs Windows PE (Pre-installation Environment?). I assume this means it'll do NTFS, but I can't say anything here.
I remember a few years back (pre-Windows 98) a bunch of friends and I had a boot sector virus. I don't recall what it was called, but it transmitted itself by floppy disk. If you simply accessed the disk you became infected. We all had AV software, even if it wasn't 100% up to date, it was harder to do since none of us had the internet at the time.
We knew about the virus, but we couldn't do a damn thing about it because when we had AV software to clean it, it would not go away since it was already in memory!
The fix was when one went out an bought a new copy of McAfee which included a system boot floppy to scan at boot time. Cleaned it up in a jiffy. Passed this around (with the write protect tab switched to On) to clean up. Once we had it off the hard disk, cleaning the infected floppies was done by the resident scanner whenever it encountered one.
Speak for yourself. Short term thinking based on so-called 'Free Market' philosophy not only created the very villains featured in your story, but also the stupid rules by which they were forced to self-destruct.
The Free Market, as I understand things, is basically the tag-line in the philosophy whereby one takes no personal responsibility for anything except the short-term pursuit of money while blissfully believing that nature will clean up all our messes for us. Perhaps I'm wrong. --After all, when it boils right down to it, the Free-Market is about as followable a 'philosophy' as Evolution or Gravity. I don't really get what the big deal is. --Except, of course, that it is used as a means to whip people into an emotional fervor so that they ignore fiscal improprieties and criminal activities of very rich people.
I prefer to think that we were gifted with intelligence so that we can take the time to measure the landscape and make plans so that we might more rationally navigate the socio-economic realities which make up our world. Market forces are going to have their effect no matter what you do, so why do people trumpet them as though it were some sort of religion? I find it baffling that people often make this mistake with regard to evolutionary forces; Just because we see such forces functioning in the natural world does not mean that we should abandon our higher intelligence and run back to the jungle. Our higher intelligence gives us the ability to project possible future outcomes and attempt to work toward those which promise greater collective satisfaction and community health.
The Jungle really is an excellent example of a free market system which rewards and compensates with great efficiency, and that's fine, but I would prefer to use a bit of planning and human ingenuity and social conscience in order to find collective solutions. --Solutions which are a little more beneficial than those which would have us living naked in the trees while the fiercest tiger hunts us with impunity and tells us that this is the way it should be because the Free Market decided it so. Selfless collective community planning is considered highly offensive to the greedy, (the tigers), who use the idea of the so-called 'Free Market' and its links to evolutionary theory to champion their greed, but in the end, they're just using key-words to push everybody's 'stop-thinking' buttons. Selfless collectivist thinking is where tiger-killer software like Linux came from, so I think perhaps there is a flaw in the cultish ardor of the Free Market proponents.
Singing the praises of the Free Market is rather like singing the praises of Gravity. Yes, we Get It, but it shouldn't stop people from thinking rationally.
-FL
You would have to be awfully ignorant to think that HW makers stopped supporting W2K in 2000. W2K has essentially the same kernel as XP. And XP is still the most popular desktop OS, by a wide margin.
Besides, W2K is very fast even on older hardware. I have a 1ghz/512mb box running W2K, and it's very snappy. It runs all my HW and SW, and has no problems with stability or security.
So why should I "upgrade?" It would just be a pointless expense. And why would I want to fight with all of Vistas horried DRM, and other annoyances?
Check out
http://thedailywtf.com/
They have a whole section on screen captures.
That feature is called Windows Update.