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MS Reportedly Adds 6 Months of Vista Downgrade
LiteralKa sends in a poorly sourced Reg story claiming that Microsoft has granted OEMs six more months to sell PCs using Windows Vista with the support to downgrade to Windows XP. OEMs can now offer such arrangements until July 31, 2009 — the previous deadline was January 31, 2009. The article claims as source "a Reg reader" without further details. Neither Microsoft nor any OEM has confirmed the rumor, and only a few scattered bloggers have picked it up.
Why is a poorly sourced, unconfirmed story from the Reg posted on the front page? VERY slow news day?
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
I can't decide whether The Reg is The National Enquirer or the Weekly World News of tech news sites on the Web.
Can someone help me with this? ;)
My blog
"Neither Microsoft nor any OEM has confirmed the rumor, and only a few scattered bloggers have picked it up."
Including Slashdot.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
"why does the evolution of desktop operating systems like Windows go slower now than a decade ago?"
In short, because Microsoft succeeded in killing platform independant applications.
HTTP/1.1 400
I have Vista Home and I like it.
I can do better than that. I pushed out 37 vista business installs about 4 months ago to all of our workstations here, and I've not had a single problem with it. The bees seems to love it and, for me, it's a heck of a lot easier to manage. I watch all this bashing going on and quite frankly, I don't get it. I understand that YMMV, but it seems like Vista is getting hammered but nobody's really tried it. I've heard a lot of "It won't run on my hardware" and "It won't run our winfax95" but c'mon...It's 2008.
You may now commence with the typical bullshit bashing...
You'll have that sometimes...
why does the evolution of desktop operating systems like Windows go slower now than a decade ago?
I think this is a decent question. You'll note that other OS's actually DO evolve at a decent rate (Linux OSX, etc). So why does Windows such a dog?
The answer, I think is really all the accumulated weight that Windows has to carry. That's not just "code bloat" as some would have you believe, though that's part of it. It's all the OTHER pieces of software that simply HAVE to work on windows for them to continue to exist. Microsoft has resisted pruning much out since the Win32 architecture first came out, for fear of losing market share to the competition. This has been a mistake, and is costing them now.
AccountKiller
Do you think it makes sense to upgrade the hardware without getting any additional functionality?
Just to show a different point of view, I have recently bought a Linux eeePC-900 and am loving it. It has more or less the same capability as a typical notebook of a few years ago: 900 MHz CPU, 20 GB storage, 1 MB RAM, yet it weighs less than one kilogram. That's what I consider TRUE progress. I have the same functionality I had before, but with a big gain in portability.
If you have to upgrade your hardware just to keep the same functionality, without any significant gain, then why do it? Why not keep the same old hardware and software you had before?
No one with any sense (and who doesn't work for Microsoft) claims Vista is a "must-have" upgrade, though. It's basically a replacement for XP with a few extra bells and whistles... not worth upgrading if you have XP, but if you're building a new machine, there's no reason to avoid it.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
...is simply due to the huge tactical error Microsoft has made over Netbooks & low-powered handhelds.
XP can be slimmed down relatively easily to run quite well on these devices but there is no chance with the size of Vista.
I'm sure that there is still a big demand for XP over Vista but I also understand (with my limited reading of MS product bulletins) that Windows 7 is being designed as a scaleable OS, presumably so it can run on these smaller devices. Therefore it makes commercial sense for MS to keep XP alive for their own reasons of getting onto Netbooks until Windows 7 is ready.
So it is not just because there is a continuing demand for XP from new PC buyers.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
linux with X/kde/gnome is developing features that windows has had for ages
Wait, didn't we just have a story about Microsoft releasing something to finally give Windows multiple desktops?
...and it apparently doesn't work very well, but that's getting off-topic.
B.S. If my HP all-in-one runs fine with OS X and Ubuntu, and ran fine with XP but won't work in Vista, it is Microsoft's fault. You have to remember, one of the main reasons Vista even exists is to sell new hardware . It certainly wasn't necessary to replace XP for any other reason, lots of people like XP just fine and it still does pretty much everything consumers expect a modern OS to do. No, Vista was designed to literally require people to have to buy new stuff, as well as to make the **AA's job a bit easier. Either of which is more than ample reason to reject it.
Caveat Utilitor