Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Denies Call-in 'Save XP' Petition
CWmike writes "Gregg Keizer digs deeper on a report that said Microsoft was logging calls from customers who requested that the company extend the retail availability of Windows XP to find that some users claimed that they couldn't get through to the support lines. Microsoft denies that it organized any kind of call-in petition and pleaded with users not to dial its technical support numbers to ask for an XP extension. 'As a courtesy to customers in need of technical assistance, we ask callers not to call Microsoft Customer Support Services to request an extension for Windows XP,' a company representative said. Microsoft declined to comment on whether its support lines had experienced a call-volume spike starting last Friday, when the Neowin notice first appeared."
I like it. Hammer their switchboards until they extend WinXP. That'll larm 'em!
If they gave the extension to XP, they probably wouldn't need the support line as much.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Only problem will be finding zombies with phone skills.
Imagine that! The purveyors of DOS have been DOS'd due to the bad quality of their latest revision of DOS.
I'm sure the problem will go away now that this has been posted on slashdot...
but at least is there. The sooner XP and always-administrator users who use it disappear the better for the net at large.
I have been using Windows XP for years, and I have never had a need to use any other operating system. I've had problems with faulty computers, but not with the Windows XP system. On the other hand, Vista is really slow and buggy, it really needs some reworking. Hopefully Windows's next version might be something more like XP.
Learn about Programming (C++ ASM) and Web Design and Development (PHP, CSS, Photoshop) from InfernoDevelopment.com
If there were a petition to save Win Xp, with Vista as the alternative, I bet it would eclipse the petition to get Uwe Boll to stop directing.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
...and probably would have used it forever if Microsoft had only offered to continue supporting it. Technology needs to grow, I understand that, but that doesn't justify terminating a great OS less than a decade after its inception if it A: works and B: has the kind of market penetration XP has enjoyed for so long.
How can Microsoft NOT make money selling a time-tested, stable, popular product and perhaps spending a bit less on "the new" that winds up being crap anyway right out of the gate? Vista's a looooong way from being ready. Let's face it...it's Windows ME 2.0. Perhaps Windows 7 will be better. Perhaps not?
Bottom line? Don't kill support for a working product until you have a new working product to replace it with and then realize there's no to have the "out with the old" mentality right away.
As I recall, it took several years to phase out VCRs, a few years for people to ditch their old consoles and get into the current generation of systems, and nearly 30 years for personal computers to win out over plain ol' wood pulp. Even so, the former technologies are still in use and will be for a long time in certain places.
At this point I've moved on to Linux and as much open source as I can find therein. I'm tired of format wars, software moguls dueling it out using our wallets as their weaponry, and all the petty bitchiness that ensues because people associate success on the basis of numbers alone. Yeah, not a very captialist mentality of me but I don't care anymore.
If you'll excuse me, I'm going to just go read a book...A REAL FUCKING BOOK...NOT AN EREADER THAT COSTS AS MUCH AS A ROOT CANAL!
So where do you call to request an extension for windows xp? Who you gonna call?
As a courtesy to customers in need of technical assistance, we ask callers not to call Microsoft Customer Support Services to request an extension for Windows XP,' a company representative said. Microsoft declined to comment on whether its support lines had experienced a call-volume spike starting last Friday, when the Neowin notice first appeared.
Umm, if you ask people not to call, doesn't that strongly imply that people are calling?
doc
Customers: Hey company, we want to buy a product from you.
Company: No!
Customers: Um...please?
People who seemingly cannot get off Windows no matter what, not even move to OS X. I use Linux 90% of the time; I support Windows as a technician (one of my jobs). I can barely stand Windows any more, especially now with Vista. I recommend people things like OpenOffice, LaTeX (MikTeX on Windows), Firefox, Thunderbird, aMule (rather than eMule), FrostWire (rather than LimeWire), and why? Because these apps run on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. I try to explain the benefits of not being stuck on Windows. They may still be using Windows, but at least the day Windows loses dominance and/or the person simply wants to try something new (i.e Linux), their files will be readable on those OS's.
.docx!) and 2) Vista really is not a huge improvement over XP.
People need to stop thinking XP is going to last forever for one thing and they need to either completely switch to another OS or at least use applications that use open formats on Windows. Even preferences can be transferred from one OS to another for Thunderbird, Firefox, OpenOffice, aMule, and so many more (just have to be placed in the right folder). I am glad on Windows for my 'real work' I use applications that run on Linux and Windows.
Let's start with open formats. The two reasons people want XP to last forever: 1) They use applications that only run on Windows (and also think Wine cannot possibly match) and closed source formats (that includes
Full story.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Often times the need to have someone to blame is given as a perk of software sales models such as the one Microsoft Windows relies on. But what does that paid Windows XP license get you right now?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Let me guess...
That would be "there is no customer demand" again??
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Next month's headline: "Microsoft to revamp XP" due to customer demand and their focus on end-user satisfaction, followed by "Vista EOL 1Q 2010: 'Oops'".
Their stock will inexplicably rise on the news that they're doing, well, nothing.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Show MS the validation it craves, tell them you love XP. call now, your love operator is standing by. Tell them how you really feel.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Me: "Hiyas! Yeah. Having a little trouble setting the clock on my XP machine."
TS: "Is that all? Right-click the clock display then drag the hands around to the desired time."
Me: "Got it. Thanks!"
TS: "Is there anything else I can do for you today?"
Me: "Well, now that you mention it, can you extend Windows XP for me?"
Amazingly, I find myself believing what Microsoft say.
When ME came out I hated it and started using 2000, and after trying Vista I hated it and then recently Server 2008 a shot, and WOW, its as big a difference as ME was to 2000. 2008 is very usable for me, download the 60 day trial from M$.
You forgot 3) The games I enjoy don't work in WINE. Hell, they barely work in XP, but Vista completely breaks them. But thanks for playing, we have some lovely parting gifts!
Slightly different situation, but back in the mid 90's Netscape used to have a webpage where you could submit feature requests, and have it displayed to their developers using an electronic marquee. At one point, a significant number of the requests submitted were for an OS/2 port of Navigator, which prompted Netscape to modify their page with a message akin to the following:
It would seem to me that Microsoft is finding itself in a similar situation with Windows XP, and is following the spirit of Netscape's response. However, as good news for XP users, in the end Netscape relented and released OS/2 versions of Navigator and Communicator, and to this day Firefox is built for that now unsupported platform.
So don't give up, XP users! Let them know what you want and how you feel!
Yaz.
Use whichever OS you like. Use whatever OS does what you need.
Does slashdot have a way to filter out any article that mentions MS, MAC and Linux? Seems that any article that mentions all three probably isn't worth wading through the comments.
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
ROFLMAO offtopic as all fuck, but that's some funny shit
I don't know what I was thinking, but I am quite underwhelmed by it. I installed it on my new AMD spider system that I made, with a Phenom-X4, Radeon HD 3870, AMD 790FX motherboard, and 8G of DDR2.
Windows 2000 was great! XP-x64 was pretty good too, but Vista 64, bleech... It took me a couple weeks to debug it to keep it from crashing constantly, and even still, it crashes *a lot*.
This system just flys on Gentoo amd64, it is wonderful and rock solid. Never crashes at all, ever. But reboot into Vista 64 and I'm lucky if it can go a couple hours without a hard lockup or a blue screen.
Luckily, I've been around the block with Windows, and I know how to diagnose crash problems. I would not give Vista 64 to a newb though, its extremely buggy and just doesn't provide the experience that XP-x64 does. Vista is really nice and pretty, very slick and polished and it does run well if you throw enough hardware at it, but the crash bugs are inexcusable.
Bottom Line: I wish I had put XP-x64 on this new system, but I don't really use Windows for much other than World of Warcraft and Jagged Alliance 2 anyways, so I can deal with the irritating instability. X3 and Steam also seems to run somewhat but also crashes and locks up the system much more than XP-x64, which doesn't crash at all.
Vista 64 might be ok in a year or so, its getting better, but its definately not production quality.
Clickety Click
I take it your company doesn't have many software developers or accountants (using obscure/internal accounting packages). Seriously, I gave a half hearted attempt at not running as an admin, but it makes my life impossible when I'm constantly writing code and testing things.
This morning I got to work and had to update VMWare (I work at a small shop as an intern, if I'm not using VMWare server to test stuff, then I'm playing Russian Roulette with my desktop being a testing grounds). Before I could install the new version, I had to uninstall the old version(requires escalation). After installing the update (requires escalation), it screwed up all my network settings and I had to manually set my network adapters (requires escalation). Moving on to testing my Latest And Greatest idea, I had to uninstall an app or two (requires escalation) to have enough room to create one more VM (requires escalation) to model a three computer network. I fell back to working and controlling all three VM from the VMWare web GUI (requires escalation) and tabbed terminals inside of one of the VMs. To test what effect my idea would have on files from the backup archives (requires escalation, but that is by design). Finally, I had to create a subversion repo (requires escalation, but that is by design) to commit to.
Unfortunately, I have to do things that normal users just don't do that often. And, "run as..." isn't much of an option for several reasons. As a side note, it is fun to watch automated "run as" jobs clobber each other's roaming profile on the hour as ntuser.dat gets locked and you end up with AdminUser.network.1 - AdminUser.network.12 on each desktop during contention. Furthermore, my choices are to leave a weakly hashed NTLM2 (what are they, unsalted MD5?) admin password on my harddrive or type in a mixed case, alphanumerical, finger contorting password once or twice an hour. I'll pass.
I run Firefox, keep my patches up to date, run spybotSD every morning, spyware blaster about every other week, moonsecure (clamav with real time protection for windows) and I try to be very careful when browing and opening emails. For what its worth, I'd rather waste an eight hour block of time reimaging a hosed machine than have Windows and Clippy breaking my flow and concentration every few minutes. I'd almost suspect that the aggregate time I would waste would be about equal. But, as it stands my XP install is over three years old now (although, it has 'character' after how much its been messed with). My boss is on his fourth or fifth install in that same time period, however, and he also runs as an admin...
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
There is a problem with that statement. Windows can flatten the market. Like the guy in the post above. "There is no reason for anyone to use anything but XP." And this was part of my speech I wrote Earlier. If you believe some of the posts here, (which I do not.) there is no reason to run any OS OTHER than Windows. so. "Use whichever OS you like. Use whatever OS does what you need." is a recipe for Windows monopoly.
TS: "Is that all? Right-click the clock display then drag the hands around to the desired time."
Me: "Got it. Thanks!"
TS: "Is there anything else I can do for you today?"
Me: "Well, now that you mention it, can you extend Windows XP for me?" Battletoads?
Why doesn't microsoft just announce an XP extension program that lasts as long as people are willing to PAY for updates.
That is, after a certain date, Microsoft would continue to allow you to update XP, you would just have to pay $20 a year or something for the privilege.
With this money, they would port over Direct X 10 and make other essential changes so that XP could be used until at least 2015.
From Microsoft: ' "we ask callers not to call Microsoft Customer Support Services to request an extension for Windows XP", a company representative said.'
That reminds me of a line from a movie: "What we have here is a failure to communicate."
Customers should not ASK Microsoft for anything. That assumes that the customers have power. Customers should do what Microsoft says and believe anything Microsoft says; that's the social position of customers, judging by the way Microsoft acts.
Microsoft is making a transition, from being badly managed to being even more badly managed.
Mmm, trollicious.. and if I might feed further- I switched from Ubuntu to Vista Ultimate on a 2 year old laptop as my primary home computer.
I'll probably switch back, or to something else, but I've been pretty happy with Windows for the last few months. It all depends on your needs, expectations and resources.
"When XP first came out... it was uber slow, crashed apps constantly and tons of HW and SW just wouldn't run on it."
What XP are you talking about? I bought XP on release day and it was great. No hardware issues, a very few software incompatibilities, and it was much faster and more stable than 98SE which is arguably one of MS's best consumer OSes ever released. XP raised the bar several notches out of the blocks, Vista lowered it.
InfoWorld are running an online petition to extend the life of XP, with (at the time of writing) several hundred thousand signatures. Sign the petition here
That shouldn't be hard for people running XP ;)
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
Vista is XP
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
Badly written apps are not the fault of the OS. It's a rare day I see UAC on my boxen.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Well, isn't it the same thing that Microsoft FUD used against, say, Linux? Basically, "OMG, you'll need to learn a different GUI and, verily, as a company retrain everyone from CEO to janitor, if you switch from Windows."
Mind you, I use the term FUD here rather loosely, because I think that, while MS's propaganda did include a lot of exaggeration and fear-mongering, the underlying idea _is_ true. Most people don't think that learning a new OS, just for its sake, is fun. The computer is just a tool, and they want to just do their job with it with a minimum of extra effort. That includes that once they learned a skill set, they want to keep applying it all over the place. It's not even a MS invention, it's how we got the Common User Access spec from IBM. MS just adopted it (and mistreated it like the stereotypical evil stepmother;)
I see you even answered your own concerns at the end of that phrase.
If you're a Mac guy, you have a lot of disposable income to blow on hardware. Now I won't get into whether the Macs are overpriced or not debate at this point, but let's just say they don't cater to the bottom end of the market. There isn't really a new Mac that's equivalent to the 300$ boxes people buy at WalMart. Again, I'm not debating whether the hardware is worth the price, but I'm saying that it genuinely _is_ higher spec than most PCs people have at home. And than what most moms and pops on minimal wage jobs can afford, PC or Mac.
Vista _is_ a resource hog, and it crawls on most new computers. Aero alone spanks and tortures a cheap shared-memory GPU like a bad dominatrix, and once you disable it, you're left with something which, for most normal people's needs and understanding of it... still acts like a bloated and slow XP. It doesn't really offer much that Joe Average would need on his home PC, or even notice the difference, and XP didn't have.
The memory requirements alone are a problem on a cheap 512 MB RAM PC, and make stuff swap that ran perfectly well on XP... especially after half of that RAM gets filled with crapware. (And I don't mean just viruses, but also all the idiocies from RealPlayer to, yes, OOo who think it's a great idea to default to keep themselves loaded in RAM all the time to seem faster-loading. You can end up with a 500 pixel wide tray nowadays without doing anything special.)
Vista's constant indexing can make many computers crawl, especially after you install an antivirus. Which ends up basically scanning each file again and again each time the indexing accesses that file. So basically it's like running with a full antivirus scan in the background at all times. Poor or sometimes wrong IDE drivers also don't help, as they can make any version of Windows basically sit and wait for IDE transfers. Now neither of those is a MS problem as such, but the combination is deadly anyway. Vista essentially amplifies what would have been a minor problem (it's ok to wait an extra half a second when you open a file, while the antivirus scans it) into something horrible (it's not ok to have your computer busy virus-scanning all files in the background, as a result of that indexing.)
Again, that won't seem much for you, if you have a couple thousand dollars to blow on a top-of-the-line Mac, and it wouldn't seem much to anyone who can blow a comparable sum on a l33t PC either. But it can be horribly annoying to someone on a $300 beige box.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Only a few weeks ago Ballmer said:
http://www.google.com/search?q=ballmer+if+customers+want+xp
So yeah, let's ask him for it, big time. If you know a news agency get them involved, etc.
No sig today...
They just need to adapt their voice response system to cope with the extra calls.
* Press 1 if you have Vista and need support
* Press 2 if you want XP extended
2 (beep)
* Thanks for your vote.
I expect this will save about 50% their human resources.
It only takes a couple of zealots to make somebody's "marquee" unusable.
OTOH the XP thing is tens of millions of people.
No sig today...
Not gonna happen. Politicians, salesmen, etc. never ever admit they were wrong about something.
Well, not unless they have a "better" product to sell you instead.
The best thing they can do now is keep their fingers in the dyke until Windows 7.0 reaches beta.
No sig today...
If a few people hate a product, they can be ignored because they are too small a segment to bother about. And there's always SOMEONE who'd complain. Probably FOSS zealots.
If lots of people hate a product, they can be ignored because they must all be sheeple following the current bandwagon of "hate X".
So please tell me what the optimum number of people to complain about a product is deemed an acceptable number? Or is asking this question invalidating an answer because the complaint is then just cynical manipulation of numbers?
Now, this is odd - we just had the article Windows XP Lives, Thanks to Linux
and now it seems that Linux will be pretty much kept alive on computers amongst ordinary people thanks to Microsoft's aggressive policy towards phasing Windows XP out.
The real reason for this?
New, flash-based computers like the ASUS eee will for a couple of years still have limited resources of disk storage and RAM, and will obviously not work well with Windows Vista. ASUS eee can be delivered with Linux and Windows XP, and if Microsoft phase out XP, people WILL move over to Linux, since ultra portable PCs really are popular on the market today.
99% of the buyers would like to use that PC just to check their mail and browse the web, since the screen is to small for any great PC-games to be played comfortably anyway, and checking mail and browsing the web can be easily done with the ASUS eee with its preinstalled Linux.
Seems like ASUS have done Linux a great favour, since they during the last days of Windows XP, even have managed to sell lots of eee-PCs with Linux, and the word of mouth is spreading - if my neighbour or regular college can browse the net with a Linux PC, so can I!
Here in Norway, it even seems like you only can get the Linux version of the eee. Even my girlfriend has bought one, and it can even be used with internet banks here in Norway.
I'm guessing your 'needs' often involve whips and dominatrix types? :p Just because you can afford good resources doesn't mean you should fritter them away on something like Vista IMO - and worst of all is that even if Vista was as good as XP (but not better), it just encourages Microsoft to keep releasing sloppy software with little innovation or improvement.
which is totally what she said
You forget, they can install as user (no admin rights) because it only needs access to the users home directory.
The user doesn't have access to standard ports.
The firewall stops access to non-standard ports.
No Botnet.
An additional problem for freeze.com is that (unless the idiots who demand that there be Only One Linux Operating System or it will NEVER fly get their way) so many versions of OS with no way of breaking that works across all of them the volume of infection is so low it isn't worth the effort.
Think about how many Win98 virii are still out there? Why? Because the latest and greatest use holes and insecurities available on later Windows systems. The old exploits are still there but they won't work on newer systems and the number of 98 machines is so low it's not worth the effort.
Don't dismiss the lowly .ini file so quickly. Sure, xml is a better approach. But if one has to make incompatible programs work together, I bet I can find more programming environments that 'out of the box' can read/write data to .ini files than any other similar format.
Microsoft did state they were working on a trimmed version of XP for computers such as the Eee btw, so its a moot point. It is phasing it out for desktops.
Go back and look at Slashdot's articles from the day XP came out. It is not -as- bad as what you see about Vista, but the theme is similar. People saying its bloated, runs games slow, take a ton of memory, with a couple denying it thrown in.
I've had Vista since it was available on MSDN (so before the general public release), and I had no hardware issues (Creative not withstanding...those asses don't count, since they scrap support on every freagin new windows release on purpose or almost), no software incompatibilities, and it is much faster and stable than XPSP2 (oh, benchmarks suck for it. But real life usage? Rock solid), and it is zippy on my 3 years old PC with 1 gig of RAM.
Compare that to XP back then, where I had to upgrade my lap-top that I had purchase the same year because 128 megs of RAM and 366 mhz, while it worked, was unbearable... that (I was a tech support back then) had to reinstall Win98/ME (ME!!!) for -hundreds- of people who couldn't play their Win9X games and whined non-stop, and the flood of people saying how much better Win2k was... and you have exactly the same situation you see with Vista.
Its just to a lesser level, because Win98, WinME, Win2k and WinXP were released very close to each other, so people expected more issues, they were used to it. With Vista, not so much.
Why doesn't microsoft just announce an XP extension program that lasts as long as people are willing to PAY for updates.
Because they want to be able to tell the MPAA and RIAA that Windows boxes with enough power to play videos have all the cool encryption technology in the Vista core that keeps people from ripping videos with modified drivers. Or at least makes it slightly harder.
They could get the same effect by making Windows Media Player pop up a dialog saying "you need to install Vista to play this video", but given how Microsoft refused to back down on the almost criminally insecure "active desktop" with its insecurity zones even when it looked like they were going to be broken up by Judge Jackson, don't expect mere customer demand to budge them from their course.
Perhaps you should read your own tag line...
This is their wheel upgrade cycle since there was a Windows 95 (bad) then you had Windows 98SE (good). Then you have Windows 2000/Me (bad), now we have Windows XP (good). Now Microsoft is pushing Windows Vista(bad), until they are able to release Windows 7(good?).
IMHO Farscape said it best...
Crichton: "My grandmother used to say life is a great wheel. Sometimes it grinds you down into the mud, other times it lifts you up into the light."
D'Argo: "Are we strapped to this wheel?"
Crichton: "That's a given. The point is, is that most times you get a second chance. You just gotta wait for the wheel. "
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
Spyware, what Spyware (i.e. Mac OS/X)
Please give examples of actual spyware that is easily accessible or heavily promoted for OS/X.
I have never run into anything.
On the other hand I don't go around promiscuously trying every new "free"/trail software version that happens to be mentioned either. But then that is stupid in the first place!
The only reference to a specific thing I can find is the infamous Sony Rootkit but despite the statement that it affected OS/x at the time I don't think it is a very good example of a current "stealth" spyware situation (which is the real problem).
I had linux on my server for 10 years, and on my desktop for six, and I did in indeed go back. Even go Windows Server 2003, to replace what had never been a windows server..
Repackage it as "Windows Classic"
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Shucks... I can only mod you up so much. We few who have installed Vista on old hardware and have a good experience need to band together!
Our numbers here grow thin as the Linux beasts hunt down and slaughter our members with vague GRUB errors!
It's not a "Save XP" petition so much as it is a "Spare us from Vista" petition.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Lets face it, in 2, 5, even 10 years from now will anyone still be using XP. Yes, I know there are still computers running 95, but on your desktop at home or in the office unless under special circumstances it is very unlikely you will have XP. It was an awesome OS imho but everything must die eventually. Fortunately for me wine supports Everquest 2 and I can find native apps for almost every other thing I do with my computer. So this last January I installed ubuntu and have not looked back. Microsoft has made enough mistakes to push me away as a customer and because Linux can do what I need it to, Why would I need vista? By the time Microsoft releases an OS that is as good as XP if not better it will be to late for those that have recently moved to Linux to go back.
I agree the themes were similar, and people are less used to this kind of nonsense now. But they should be less tolerant with 6 years of technological advancement and the higher prices of software. But I had a different experience to you.
I loaded XP onto a 2 or 3 year old computer without upgrading anything and XP ran faster and more stable than 98SE. I don't game on the computer and never personally ran W2k, so I don't have opinions on that.
My brother got a Dell laptop with XPSP2 and a couple months later my girlfriend got virtually the same laptop with twice the memory and Vista. The Vista laptop is a horrible dog with terrible usability characteristics.
Common actions like startup, resume, logon, file operations, printer operations, opening and closing programs like Firefox, rendering web pages, take from 50% to 100% longer on the Vista laptop than the XP laptop. Vista also has random problems like dropping printers then refusing to reinstall the same printer.
What did I say that disagreed with my tag? For one I said it was my opinion, and secondly this guy even said he'd probably switch back. Certainly some people think Vista is okay, but I think those people are most probably morons who have no idea what is going on in the background and only like saying "ooh, new, shiny!" at the interface.
which is totally what she said
I actually tried getting in touch with Apple to find a way to "upgrade" to Tiger... but they said I was stuck with Leoptard. And also that my Apple's BSoD didn't exist, and they'd sue me if I told anyone.
Oh no... the Apple police have found me!! Pray for my soul...
both of our Vista users need constant support and cannot reach us if you're keeping the lines busy.
I just ordered another Dell with XP Pro.
Invenio via vel creo
I have used Vista a little bit and at first I didn't even realize that it was Vista. I'm so used to having to hunt around for the gawddamm network wizard in Control Panel, that I didn't even notice that things were a little different. I can't even say that I found the system to be noticeably more sluggish than XP either. In any case, whatever it is that is troubling a Vista system and chewing up cycles, can probably be turned off in similar fashion as on an XP system. The main thing is that most people have come to understand that whenever MS brings out a new product, it's performance is a little bit worse than the previous one, instead of better and consumers are revolting against that. Most consumers are not stupid and many know that Apple and Linux systems are improving and they are beginning to realize that you don't necessarily have to drink the MS Kool Aid. When a new product is worse and more expensive than another, then most consumers will eventually question it.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
you don't need to slurp up twitter's cum here, he's already posting at -1 with this account.
Autodialers come to the rescue.
After transferring you a few times they put you on hold and then change the music to RICK ASHLEY!
I work for a Fortune 100 company, and they're finishing up the transition to Windows XP THIS WEEK. In fact, my PC is getting upgraded this evening.
We've been using Windows 2000 for 5 years now, and before that we used NT 4.0 for almost 6. Windows XP will be around in this office until 2012 at least.
The only reason why we upgraded, honestly, is because some newer applications had compatibility problems; Windows 2000 was a fine OS. Will Windows Vista force another upgrade on us? I'm not so certain. The application developers love the upgrade cycle, love to sell us new shit, but at the same time, it's hard to add value on to software that already works quite well.
In the end, it will probably be the memory barrier that forces us to upgrade more than anything else.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Microsoft's best OS to date: Server 2008.
The software isn't expensive btw. The equivalent editions in Vista to XP are either cheaper, or are priced the same with more features, and that doesn't count inflation since XP's launch which makes Vista actually cheaper, just fyi.
XP was definately more reliable than 98SE, but faster? Of the hundreds/thousands of computers I had to upgrade over time, I've never heard anyone say that until you...not even online. I guess millage vary, but... o.O
As for the bad experience with Vista... I have 2 experiences in particular that can explain the issues... My first Vista computer was my couple years old machine that had XP on it, and that I wiped clean and installed Vista from MSDN from scratch on it...flawless, even with unsupported hardware, faster in every possible ways (after the 2-3 days that it takes for Vista to analyse your usage pattern.), etc. Then, me and my girlfriend bought 2 exactly similar gaming machines, cuz ours were not up to snuff for the latest games anymore.
Out of the box, slow and buggy. It didn't make any sense: the hardware was better supported, the machines were easily 5-8 times faster than my original one, etc. Turns out the OEM (Dell/Alienware) used slightly tweaked XP images for Vista. Result? Incompatible codecs, outdated version of Nero, chipset drivers that were years old, our CPUs were -underclocked- by -50%- in the BIOS (wtf?!?! not related to the images, but still, wtf?), and I'm skipping some. The codecs alone were part of most of the performance issues, since Vista uses them everywhere... upgrading them with versions that had been out for over 6 months fixed 80% of the problems.
Clean Vista installs are great. OEMs are -awful- with it, unfortunately. I also mentionned it, but to repeat: Vista cache aggressively and analyses usage patterns... so when you get a brand new computer, or a brand new install, for the first couple of hours (10-15 I think, maybe more), the hard disk will be trashing constantly, and performance is sub par. After a few days, it becomes worth it though, things get seriously zippy (Visual Studio opening at near notepad speed on a decent machine). Just make sure everything is up to date (and not just drivers). Oh also, McAfee, Norton, AVG, etc are known to bring Vista to its knees, because they're not written properly for it. NOD32 and others work fine.
My last job was with a Vista-only company (yup, a business with tons of Vista machines), and everything was sweet... now though I work at a XP-only multi-national corp... it is seriously painful, even though my new workstation is significantly faster.
The public doesn't hear about the trimmed XP because it doesn't exist yet. XP is supported for a -while- still, the trimmed one will be out before its phased out. Once the "new" XP comes out, you can bet Microsoft's marketing machine will boost it in full force.
that must be also the toll-free number for the open sores zealot hotline you operate out of your mom's basement
Speaking of 'copyright' issues...*cough*.
Isn't one of the biggest reasons for Vista non-acceptance, the load of *bull* *excrement* that MS put into Vista to degrade the user's equipment or abort recording of 'legal-to-record' shows, that set the ignorable 'broadcast flag'?
As far as I remember, the broadcast flag never passed any final approval stages, but MS went ahead and voluntarily put in code to detect it and disable Windows Media based systems (as happened recently, when NBC tested market penetration of the flag, "accidentally"). On top of that example of DRM-joy, studios publishing Hi-Def format DVD's (ala Blu-Ray), are mostly biding their time before activating the 'Hi-Def' flag, that will require new, encrypted-only, monitors to play the "protected media" -- and will either abort any image (or optionally sound) or degrade the picture, if the user doesn't have a movie-studio approved display or sound reproduction hardware.
Some industry pundits claim customers are waiting for Windows 7 -- but the elephant is already in the room -- not only has it been said that Windows 7 won't be that much different than Vista (I guess they getting rid of some of the fancier desktop features to lower the requirements of their high-end OS), but it seems it is a 'given' that they aren't going to go back to non-DRM compatible drivers from XP.
As near as I can tell -- the major slow-down in Vista was due the required driver and i/o path rewrites to disable or degrade video and/or sound on the fly. So any Windows 7/Vista++ product would still have the same cpu playback requirements -- and still have the general, OS-wide I/O path slowdown(**1). It certainly won't make it easier to accepted on the lower-end machines that linux has dominated in (and XP, has, at least, temporarily been 'green-lighted' for continued availability).
But it's not just the low-end that benefits from XP. It's across the board in terms of CPU usage. 10-15% extra
'slowness' on the CPU path translates to higher overall energy consumption (unless you are using a very low-power, 'Atom-like' CPU) -- making Vista less green than XP(**2).
The crappy user-interface problems with UAL are only part of the Vista experience.
Something that hasn't been given much press, is MS having 6 different platform solutions -- 5 OS versions and an optional 'Desktop Optimization Pack'. Developers of platform-wide solutions need to test up to 6 different delivery platforms for some programs to ensure proper end-user experience. They'll potentially need to 'degrade' their platform-wide solution, 'gracefully' depending upon what OS features are available to them. This would seem to be a nightmare waiting to happen...
I don't know that marginally informed or intelligent customer will want to move down to to the degraded Vista experience -- which appears to be scheduled for inclusion in Windows 7.
Doesn't this indicate the XP issue may be "an issue" for "a while"?
Notes:
**1-Vista fixes a wireless-networking protocol bug that caused unnecessary slowdowns on XP. So far, they've only put the fix in Vista. The result is wireless file-transfers can be faster on Vista than XP, despite the global inefficiencies and slowdowns in the I/O layer.
**2-MS touts Vista as being 'green' because they now allow desktop-power-saving settings to be controlled by network Administrators in companies -- allowing those Admins to 'save power' on their network regardless of users' individual machine settings. This may result some overall saving in a corporate environment -- but doesn't address the additional power consumed by the I/O layer inefficiencies across the board.
Look where BeOS, an operating system that most people agree was much better than Windows at the time, ended up.