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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
"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.
By july 2009 Windows XP will be 8 years old! Because they extend it till then, both Microsoft and the market agree that this 8 year old operating system is still relevant and not hopelessly outdated despite its age.
In those 8 years, Windows has hardly evolved. Honestly, Windows Vista doesn't add too much groundbreaking stuff to Windows XP, the only real technological novelty is the graphics.
Eight years is a lot in computer history, and if you look at what it was 8 years before Windows XP, that was 1993. So Windows 3.11 is to Windows XP, what Windows XP is to Windows Vista, but the difference between XP and Vista is much smaller than the difference between 3.11 and XP!
why does the evolution of desktop operating systems like Windows go slower now than a decade ago?
As an african american, I am outraged by your use of the deregotary word samba. We're on the verge of electing the first black president by a landslide but some people refuse to give up their racist attitudes.
I have seen the future: Windows $NEXT_VERSION Milestone $MOCKUP.
I tried it on a low-end laptop with four Core 2 Duo chips and only 8 gig of memory, and trust me: $NEXT_VERSION is shaping up to be one heck of a product.
WordPad and Paint have seen major overhauls to their user interfaces. Forget the freetards and their "distros" full of all sorts of useless shovelware like "FireFox" and "OpenOffice" and, haha, "GIMP"! - the bundled software with Windows $NEXT_VERSION is clear, simple, sparse and to-the-point. The much-loved $HATED_VERSION user interface from Office $HATED_VERSION is now part of WordPad and Paint!
I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows. It will go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, those are all fixed in $NEXT_VERSION. And they're finally ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF.
Also, there'll be $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM. It'll be awesome!
I wonder how $NEXT_VERSION will compare to $NEXT_NEXT_VERSION.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Well- this is Slashdot, so...
Look at how much Linux desktops have evolved over the last 8 years. Actually- just over the last four. Also- look at how Apple's OS has evolved over the same time period.
The only company that seems to be having a hard time evolving a desktop OS is Microsoft.
The bees seems to love it...
Any operating system that our crop-pollinating overlords prefer is all right by me!
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
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.
I've had a very mixed experience with it myself...
I've got a tablet running Vista that probably shouldn't be. It was never designed with Vista in mind and the hardware is just barely supported. It runs, but not well. I'll likely go back to XP again with it fairly soon.
At home, I've got several machines running Vista Premium and I've had absolutely no issues with them at all. They're used extensively for gaming and the performance is just fine. No complaints.
I've also got several workstations at work that we're testing out with Vista Business and have had no trouble with so far. A few people are having issues with the GUI changes, but that's about it. They're generally as stable as XP was.
Then we've had a number of clients buying new computers and getting stuck with Vista. Their experiences generally range from bad to just plain horrible. Lots of incompatible hardware and software. Unexpected learning curves. Lots of complaining about strange issues. Repeated service calls.
I think a large part of the problem has been that this is the first major OS change that a number of people have had to deal with. Folks have been using XP for a number of years now, and everything has more or less worked the same. Now you've got folks just ordering a random computer from Dell, or picking something up at Best Buy...assuming that everything will work the way it has been...and suddenly stuff doesn't work. Their printer won't work with the new computer, their old software won't work, the buttons are all moved around.
Most of the issues I've seen are with people who didn't really expect Vista on their machine, or didn't actually research what switching to Vista would mean for them. For the folks that have intentionally upgraded to Vista it has, more or less, worked.
Which certainly doesn't make it a good OS... Or even much of an upgrade in a lot of cases... But I don't think it's as horrible as a lot of people are claiming either.
It's a Microsoft OS - anyone who expected rock-solid stability and bullet-proof security needs to have their head examined.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
So Vista sucks because your father (who must be what? 60? 70?) can't install a printer driver?
Yeah, my father, who worked for IBM, who programmed mainframes to do accounting and payroll for companies with thousands of employees (think GM, etc), who has had every imaginable kind of PC since the 70's. He can't install a printer driver for his HP All-in-one. So your point was? Not every 60 year old is computer illiterate.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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
Vista 32 can only see 4 gigs MINUS memory address space reserved for hardware (video card(s) and other hardware that require reserved memory). This typically results in 3 to 3.3 gigs being available in Vista 32 with 4+ gigs of RAM installed on the computer (same thing with XP 32). To see more than this with any Windows flavor, you must use the 64 bit version (XP or Vista).
Right. No, your other right. No, the other other right.