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Microsoft Extends XP To May 2009 For OEMs
beuges writes "Microsoft has announced over the weekend that it would allow computer manufacturers to receive copies of XP until the end of May 2009, shortly before Windows 7 is expected to hit the market. This should allow users to skip Vista entirely and move straight to 7, which has been receiving cautiously favorable reviews of pre-release and leaked alphas."
unbelievable.
it would take a butt the size of mount everest for any company to take the plunge and trust anything from microsoft again, after the stunt they pulled with vista.
and what happens to the poor sods who DID trust microsoft and upgraded their entire office to vista, again ?
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The optimistic view would be that Vista is more like Windows ME, which would make Windows 7 more like XP. If that's the case, maybe Windows 7 will actually be fairly stable and we can try to pretend Vista never happened, sort of like how we try to forget Windows ME.
More like Windows ME 2, do they really think people will buy it when they haven't sorted out the problems with vista.
Do you actually use Vista? Or is this typical ignorant slashdot drivel? I use Vista at home, I use Vista at work. I have had absolutely no issue with it. Let me qualify this by saying until a couple months ago I also used OS X 10.4 at home, and I also currently dual boot into Ubuntu. Vista has been far more stable than both of these, and the support is no contest.
Now let me ask again, do you actually *use* Vista? Or are you regurgitating tired old perceptions because of a fanboyish allegiance to a free operating system?
Similes are like metaphors
My gripes about it are typically more about unneeded UI changes which hurt usability. For example, what the hell was the justification for renaming "Add / Remove Programs" to "Programs and Features"? I've been a Windows user for over 15 years... there is no reason in hell I should spend 30 seconds scanning the Control Panel for a single icon.
This may sound like a petty rant, but I run across issues like this *all* the time! The mass storage driver is also flaky for my motherboard (I can't use any mass storage devices!) but that's more Asus's fault than MS.
All in all, Vista isn't terrible, and definitely usable but suffers from some very poor design decisions.
My gripes about it are typically more about unneeded UI changes which hurt usability.
But what about KDE? Dude, they scrapped a desktop that was popular, flexible, and working. KDE 3.5 was already better than even Vista's shell in some ways, as is gnomes. You can do a lot with the doc bars/task bars, and in KDE you could change even the clock type to one of 40 different types, and instead of just polishing that up, they went and junked it.
Unbelievable! Really, what was in KDE 3.5 that was so terrible that the whole thing needed to be junked, from an end user perspective. Plasma might wind up being cool, but its gonna need some time to gel up a bit. And, in the meantime, I'd like gnome to just do -something-.
And, along the way, I've actually got Vista growing on me. The only thing I really don't like about it is that the start bar doesn't have "run" on it the way XP does, but other than that, Vista is better.
As bad as Vista might be to some people, Microsoft won this round, again. This time, it was because while MS made mistakes with Vista, the KDE and Gnome teams made some big ones too.
This is my sig.
If that's the case, maybe Windows 7 will actually be fairly stable and we can try to pretend Vista never happened
Except Vista already is stable. Maybe it's because I only use my PC for games and the Internet, but Vista (SP1) has been nearly flawless.
Why? Why should an increasing number of computer literate people have to cater to the needs of an increasingly small group of utterly non technical users. Why not make them catch up, instead of the rest of us slow down.
Good interface design is not synonymous with "The user is stupid, make the interface for stupid people."