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XP Reprieve, Downgrade May Continue After Win7
CWmike writes "Gregg Keizer reports that Microsoft acknowledged today it has 'broadened the options' for PC makers to continue offering Windows XP as a downgrade from Vista — and potentially even Windows 7. However, the company would not confirm specific reports that HP has been given the green light to sell new PCs with Windows XP Pro pre-installed through the end of April 2010. 'Windows XP went into semi-retirement in June 2008, when Microsoft stopped selling it at retail and withdrew Windows XP Home from use on all but netbooks, though it allowed XP Professional to be installed as a Vista downgrade. Since then, Microsoft has extended the final date it will sell XP Professional install media to large computer makers and smaller systems builders to July 31, 2009, and May 30, 2009, respectively. Today, Microsoft denied that it had extended the life span of Windows XP, and intimated that those rights were built into the newer operating system — in this case, Vista — and did not expire at some arbitrary date.'"
Update: 04/07 14:36 GMT by T : nandemoari adds "Not only will users be able to keep Windows Vista, but they'll be able to step back in time two generations, all the way to XP. "We will offer downgrade rights from Windows 7 to Windows XP in the same way we did with Windows Vista," a Microsoft rep said.
Insiders speculate that the right to use this time machine might be reserved for those purchasing licenses for only two versions of Windows 7 — Ultimate and Professional. However, that's not yet been confirmed."
Same reasons many can't upgrade to Vista...
Spanners in the works:
-New driver model meaning much older hardware just doesn't work.
-UAC breaks lots of badly written apps. Causes huge annoyances at best in these instances.
-64bit. First serious 64 bit consumer Windows.
-No IE6. You wouldn't believe how many legacy apps require IE6 and/or ActiveX, it's quite sickening actually.
Any one of these can be a show-stopped for your app/system, and on older apps this can be a nightmare to have to work round that often isn't worth the investment until forced. I've seen many legacy business apps in particular that break because of Windows re-engineering (Vista). Same applies for Win7.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Microsoft can't smash the competition in the Netbook market without Windows XP, which itself is a product they can't make a profit on anymore and are desperate to get rid off.
I work for a small ERP ISV in Switzerland.
We run 90% internally, and have several customers that run 100% Vista. And none of those customers hate Vista - in fact, they don't understand what all the fuss is about in the Media, since it's working very well for them. A rather big customer started in June 2007 with 100% Vista.
The reasons behind these things are simple: Their most important application is our ERP software - which works very well on their machines. If they are using other software and hardware, we ensured full vendor support for Windows Vista. We also ensured that all the hardware they use is supported by Vista, and replaced that hardware that wasn't supported (mostly 50$ desktop printers).
Also, Vista was deployed on appropriate hardware - 2.x Ghz Core 2 Duo with 3GB of RAM.
Vista was mostly Microsoft trying to do the right thing, forcing their ecosystem to get current, especially in dropping the requirements for local administrator rights.
I would imagine that for enterprises with lots of applications developed by the lowest indian bidder, the result will be that most of their software won't run on anything except the Windows XP SP1 with Patches KB123 and KB456 installed.
Vista offers a lot of features for businesses that would otherwise require complicated third party solutions. Bitlocker is great for small businesses, as it allows full disk encryption that is extremely easy to use and secure enough.
What MS lacks is a compelling reason for people to switch from XP and I don't think they're ready to dare cutting off all support to force a switch. They're victims of their own success.
I played with win7 for about a month, became irritated at the difficulties networking with existing XP machines and failed to find a "must have" feature compelling enough for me to switch.
I also smell a screw job coming - either DRM or some other anti-consumer scheme built in to the OS that's going to offer me zero benefit and make my life more difficult.
OS's are becoming less relevant as computing becomes more browser-centric. Who cares what's under the hood if Firefox runs? The only real reason I still run xp is for gaming.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Now, get yourself a quad core 12gb machine with a 15,000rpm hard disk.
Put on Windows XP
Now put on Windows Vista or Windows 7.
It WILL be slower, period.
Not under heavy - particularly multithreaded - loads it won't.
Advances and improvements in schedulers, locking, memory management, and other low-level aspects of the OS mean that newer hardware is better utilised by a more modern OS. For example, pre-SP2 releases of XP are not NUMA-aware, so on architectures like Opteron and Core i7, will be at a severe disadvantage in memory-intensive workloads.
Benchmarks have demonstrated this. You're wrong, deal with it.