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Microsoft Extends XP For Low-Cost Laptops
Ian Lamont writes "Microsoft says it will extend the sales of Windows XP Home to OEMs by several years, but it's not in response to the SaveXP petition. Microsoft is supposedly making the move in part to ensure that Linux doesn't dominate the market for certain types of 'ultra-low-cost' laptops. XP will be available for OEMs until June 30, 2010, or one year after the availability of the next client version of Windows, whichever date comes later. This greatly extends the earlier XP deadline of June 30 of this year (which was an extension itself), and means XP will potentially be installed on new computers nearly a decade after its original release. The author of the article suggests that the post-June 2008 release of Atom-based laptops encouraged Microsoft to extend XP, even though Intel says Atom can support Vista. Intel also claims that 'Moblin' Linux will be available on Atom-equipped mobile devices starting this summer."
As hardware progresses does this mean in a way that Windows XP could become the new Windows CE??
Shh.
Is keeping their product in front of the customer.
This is going to make a lot of people unhappy. Lots of OEMs are going to have a little chat with Microsoft about this whole death-of-XP thing I think.
If Vista runs well on a MID I will be shocked. If it ran well, the things would ship with Vista and we wouldn't be having this 8-year-old OS discussion at all since these devices weren't even announced until Vista had been out for a year.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Is this a self admission that Vista didn't do what they thought it would? What happens when Windows 7 doesn't ship on time? Will they come out with XP SP5?/>
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Microsoft are doing the right thing(extending XP sales) for the wrong reason(competing with Linux in the cheap laptop market). XP may very well be the last Microsoft OS that many of us will use. It's reasonably tweekable, fast, stable, supports a shitload of wide-ranging applications, and it dosen't have DRmware integrated into it(Windows media player dosen't count :P ) -- remember that network utilization problem that Vista had while playing media files? That's like turning on the kitchen sink only to have the toilet flush! Lesser of two evils...and calm down, all you Microsoft-haters out there: WINE exists for a reason :)
We are not talking about upgrades here, but new purchases. If you are using XP in your current PC than you are perfectly right. But if in a 2008 brand new PC computer I will get an old OS, than you are wrong, because I am not upgrading to anything. 2008 hardware needs a properly designed 2008 OS.
I'm honestly confused as to why Vista was designed to require substantially higher system requirements and consume more resources. It's obvious XP is still the platform of choice because there's crap-all that Vista does which justifies the extra requirements. Yes there are some nice features such as easy resizing of Windows partitions and superfetch, but that doesn't excuse the hangups I feel when pushing my system hard because it's got less to play with than it did with XP.
Did Microsoft really think people would just stop using older, but perfectly functional hardware and buy new gear? Were they totally nuts? They could have had so much more success if Vista was designed to scale well with various grades of hardware. But it doesn't without a lot of work, and you could just as easily save yourself the trouble by slapping on XP (or Linux). Let's hope for their sake Windows 7 will have a readjustment in their perspective.
Mainstream support for XP is set to expire on April 14, 2009 according to http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-gb&x=16&y=12&C2=1173 Which is obviously before June 30, 2010. Does that mean they'll extend Mainstream support as well (I'd assume so). If so, it'd be the second time they've extended support (originally 5 years after release, or Dec 31, 2006).
AccountKiller
We've been using WinXP or Win2K on dual-boot machines (I have one of the few single-boot WinXP machines) due to problems with excessive CPU cycle usage by WinVista - and had to request WinXP "downgrades" for a number of new PCs with dual and quad core CPUs for our statistical genetic analyses we run.
If they only do this for "low-cost" PCs, then we'll have to completely move away from the Office suite and go to OpenOffice instead. Be a shame, but if they don't want us to use Windows, that's their problem.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm buying one (or two - must think of mom) Asus eee PCs. I've never felt so good about buying a computer in many years. I was very close to buying it online the past week but finally I decided I'll buy it locally in Helsinki.
The straw that broke the camel's back was the problems I had with formulas in Word for Mac on my brother-in-law's iBook. Nice machine but OO.o works much better for me - and since it runs on Linux, and I always wanted a LIGHT notebook... eee PC just won out as the logical option for my on-the-move needs. If I could run a Matlab equivalent on it (and I will definitely look into that) this little gem might replace one of my desktops as well.
By the way, this is my first experiment with Linux as a desktop OS. I have a router with CentOS at home, but as my WinXP-running desktops die out, I'll be replacing them with Linux. Sorry MS, no Vista for me.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
no great shock here.
Eee Pc opened the floodgates - the future looks to be low power, SSD, minimal RAM long battery "laptop" style devices that will never run Vista in a million years.
This is about containment of Linux - as this is the OS of choice for this new breed.
I bet MS is shitting bricks over this, I have an Eee and the Linux flavor on it is very nice indeed. I still have not put Ubuntu on it.
I keep hearing that 70% of PCs in a year or so will be laptops, if 50% of them are low power devices then that 1/4 to 1/3 of PC in a few years that will not run Vista - you can kinda see why they are doing it.
However, when customers are told that they can only have Vista on their desktop or XP on their laptop they will be annoyed. Even more when XP is being phased out but new SPs are available for the "laptop" version of XP. I can understand what MS is doing, but I think it can (and will) go wrong for them in many ways. Interesting times ahead.
"Now, the next version of Windows will come on a hardware-upgrade cycle for a lot of companies, so it will probably sell better."
What? This makes no sense -- business hardware upgrade cycles are not 0 upgrades for several years, then all the machines the next year, and so on. If they use a 5-year cycle, they would replace roughly 1/5th of the machines each year. Businesses are not "upgrading" to Vista because it is expensive; Vista needs 2-4GB of RAM, a gaming video card, and a dual core to get decent performance? Forget about it. Businesses, espeically big ones, buy machines by the hundreds to thousands... XP (and any Linux distro, which is what's scaring Microsoft) runs fine with 512MB, integrated graphics, and a single-core system. That saves SERIOUS money.
"Slipstream" is a somewhat noxiously overblown word for "updated installer image", don't you think? And all the while you scoff at those who don't care to complete the mind-bogglingly long number of steps needed to "slipstream" basic updates into an installer, Linux users have cast off that albatross entirely and simply install the right versions the first time around.
Windows still needs some really remedial rehabilitation of its package management "capabilities", and what you lot call "slipstreaming" just sounds like some long-abandoned ritual to us. I've even heard that Windows guys still primarily use the "executable installer" method of software distribution -- is that actually true? It sounded made-up to me when I heard it; probably just an exaggeration from some half-cocked Linux zealots!
Think about it, some of these low power devices are easily in the power/performance range of ARM and PowerPC chips and a couple already run them on the very low end. The Nokia N800 for example. There's no way Windows XP can run on these and Windows CE is not up to competing against a full OS like GNU/Linux. So what could Micrsoft do and why for instance don't these vendors like Asus bring out ARM and/or PowerPC versions of devices like Eeee PC? They both have MMU's now-adays and are clocking up to the GHz range and GNU/Linux and OSS port pretty easily to these platforms. Getting drivers might be alittle more of a push but isn't the ball for Linux drivers rolling along nicely already?
IMO, it would shut Microsoft out of this market and give the hardware vendors the profit margins they can build a business on. Bulking up the devices so Windows XP will fit on them and taking money from Microsoft to put Windows on them is not a sustainable business. Microsoft will pull the plug when they've limited choice to Windows and Windows only and then pull the plug on the payola for being a Microsoft supporter.
Microsoft is not a hardware vendors friend and they should know this and be doing something about keeping control of their own destiny. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
You're right, the figure is bad. The number I was thinking of was actually in Australian dollars, based on my experience of the laptop market when I bought my Vista PC, which was about 8-10 months ago now. So yeah, things have probably come down some since then, plus the AUD has climbed a lot against the USD. I remember when the Aussie was worth less than half a US dollar; now it's over 90%. Anyway, my bad for not being clearer.
:)
Still: the (AUD) $1000 price comparison was more intended to contrast a "full featured" Vista Premium capable notebook (why would you bother with Vista Basic?) against something like the Eee PC or bargain notebook which I suspect would not be blazing fast with Vista even today.
And yeah, I don't get the DRM hype either.
KDE4 uses more resources than KDE3, the bad benchmark was quickely corrected but this myth seams to have spread anyway, the resource increase is minimal it could run on 1.6GHz and 256MB. I can better 1.6GHZ with 512, it ran aceptably on 256 ( i just couldnt run firefox and compiz with all the bells and whistles without a slowdown, this is on kubuntu, not the lightest distro).
I got vista when i smashed up my laptop (without a screen itll make a good PVR tho), i played with it for about an hour before trashing it while installing kubuntu. I found it ran like my 256mb system on 512MB, everything would get done but stuff tended to freeze up for abit when doing anything intensive (ironically other than using firefox, which performed fine). I think that it has moved towards being like gnome, run everything though 1 program and it figures out what your trying to do, or in the place of one program 1 interface.
The 'eye candy' was well completly lacking, its about level with kde3, but cant touch KDE4 or compiz.
The control pannel, i found actually suggests usefull wizards now, which is nice for newbies, but the price it paid for this is even making the navigation even harder, the adress bar would take me to seamingly random places while all i wanted to do was find the defragmenter. I suppose they're going after the newbie users thier loosing to the mac crowd, much more than the geeks their loosing to linux.
My short experience was not as bad as expected, even my non-geek friend(s) were abit too harsh about, but it was unimpressive enough to tell my dad one of the "I cant switch to linux, I NEED office" crowd, to stick with xp indefinatly. Theres no point him relearning how to manage his system when theres nothing to be gained (same reason im not switching him to ubuntu).
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Those were significant improvements for a single company back in the 90s, but free software has completely blown them away. Most people also associate the porting of browsers and other programs to Windows with the general progress of the 90s. Since 2000, besides UI, free software hardware abstraction and device support has finally caught up to the non free world for practical purposes.
Free software portability and architecture support had already eclipsed Microsoft's ability by 2000 and totally dominates now. Slashdot started it's life on a 64 bit DEC Alpha while Microsoft was struggling with everything Intel had to offer. Today, you only have to look at BSD and Debian architecture support pages to see just how far you can port free software. There's hardly anything free software won't run on and that makes Microsoft's 32 bit accomplishments look petty.
Stability? My software is more reliable than my hardware. Now that I have a few good UPSs and drastically lower power requirements, my computers just about never go down unless I'm putting in a new part or kernel. Having used Microsoft from the DOS 3.2 days, I can say that Microsoft stability has remained about the same. It's better to just turn the old box off.
No calls now, I'm
You're looking at it sideways. Microsoft's overbearing presence will now create a completely new market of out-of-the-box-little-old PCs that are quite adequate to run XP. This is actually a major market opportunity for makers such as Lenovo who are already interested in low-end machines.
The way things are going, I'm hoping to leapfrog completely over Vista... If my employer makes it possible, I'll land in Linux Land and perhaps never have to use Microsoft products at all. (Dream on, Mr. Adequate.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Actually, Vista's also the best thing that's happened to XP in quite a while too. Even SP2 didn't drive XP adoption the way Vista has...
And while yes, that's funny on the surface, it's no joke.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Well a lot of these devices like the Eee don't have physical hard drives which means less vibration but those flash chips will produce heat for sure. Also, Vista will probably wear out those flash chips much faster especially if they are MLC chips.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
Please, PLEASE don't lump Windows 2000 in with XP & Vista. It's still one of the best operating systems around as long as you use windiz instead of windows update (to keep the DRM & crippleware out). it plays all the games written for windows, and with VirtualPC, everything else. OpenOffice runs on it just fine. and it has a tiny hardware footprint.
It's not as secure as Debian, but Debian has never been a Prime Target of every virus writer in the world, either.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Now of course that includes a lot of other software, to make it all usable, but still... I wouldn't call it small. Nor with any lack of bloat (three web browsers, five window managers, two windowing systems, three kernels, two desktop environments, a dozen text editors, etc).
As a developer, I say your post is utter bullshit.
No one creates software because "Windows is such a great platform". The only reason why we can't afford to drop Windows support -- in most case, SOLE support, is that 100% of customers run Windows. It's a chicken and egg problem, with developers (the more technical people) wanting to get away from Windows the most.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I know it would never happen, but if MS wanted to pretty much annihilate linux all it has to do is make a service pack 4 for XP to provide enhanced security and functionality and most importantly efficiency for XP and then release XP as open source (or more likely 'shared source'), accept user patches and work with the community just like an enterprise Linux distribution. With OpenXP, why would anyone need linux? (Note: I don't use windows. I'm a linux-only user, and the above is my sincere opinion. For the love of god, don't mod me troll because you think I'm an MS fanboy, an OSS zealot, or a /. troll. I'm being quite serious.)
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
I've been trying to explain this two people for quite some time. Dual Core Processors does not mean if you have a dualcore 2.4ghz system that processor works at 4.8ghz, thats what a dual processor system works at. Since its two cores on one die they share resources so a 2.4 is comparable to 1 processor working at 3.6ghz. So no, your 3ghz core duo is not 3000 x2 x2 its more like 3 x 1.5 x 1.5 (if its 64bit running 64bit software using hyper threading and SMP) and thats still not accurate.