Slashdot Mirror
One Year Later, "Dead" XP Still Going Strong
snydeq writes "Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows XP a year ago today, no longer selling new copies in most venues. Yet according to a report from InfoWorld, various downgrade paths to XP are keeping the operating system very much alive, particularly among businesses. In fact, despite Microsoft trumpeting Vista as the most successful version of Windows ever sold, more than half of business PCs have subsequently downgraded Vista-based machines to XP, according to data provided by community-based performance-monitoring network of PCs. Microsoft recently planned to further limit the ability to downgrade to XP now that Windows 7 is in the pipeline, but backlash against the licensing scheme prompted the company to change course, extending downgrade rights on new PCs from April 2010 to April 2011."
In fact, despite Microsoft trumpeting Vista as the most successful version of Windows ever sold, more than half of business PCs have subsequently downgraded Vista-based machines to XP, according to data provided by community-based performance-monitoring network of PCs.
That's not necessarily mutually exclusive. There have always been a substantial number of businesses which don't see a compelling reason to upgrade when a new version of Windows comes out. 85% of those machines are used primarily for word processing, after all, something which has been "good enough" for a couple of decades. I worked for a company which was still happily using Windows for Workgroups in 2001. Add the people who always wait for Service Pack 2 and you're at a pretty big percentage of the market.
Great story, except it is a KNOWN zonealarm issue. 20 seconds on google would've told you that. But this is slashdot, so let's blame Microsoft!
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=759555&sid=3ece4d689adbaac6cb9dd8a75d47843f&start=30
I've been using 64-bit Linux since 2006, and it's exactly like running 32-bit Linux, except you can use more RAM.
You can use more than 4gb of RAM on 32-bit Linux, too. All you have to do is install a Physical Address Extension (PAE) aware kernel:
sudo sudo apt-get install linux-headers-server linux-image-server linux-server
sudo shutdown -r now
It's probably related to the fact that you could pick up Windows 95 for about 90 bucks. There was no 'home', or 'home premium', or whatever. There was just a full version for 90 bucks. To get the 'full' version of the newest flavor of Windows 7, we must shell out almost 4 times the cost. This in just a little over 10 years. It's a bit ridiculous when you look at the rate of inflation. The product offers new features, but so do many software products on the market, yet they tend to retain the same costs. If I'm paying so much more for an OS, I expect much more value.
The full version of Windows 95 was Windows NT and it wasn't cheap.
Add/Remove programs was changed to: "Uninstall a program". It is even plainly displayed on the standard (non-classic) control panel view in Vista. Seriously dude, what is confusing about that? In fact it makes MORE sense, who on earth *installs* a program through the windows program manager? Further, in Win7 RC1, they *have not* returned to the XP naming conventions, the Win7 control panel features the same layout as Vista with good ole "Uninstall a program" listed under the "Programs" category.
What is it with this? Do you simply look at the new layout, fail to recognise anything because it has been renamed and categorised, then just throw your arms in the air and give up, declaring the new OS an utter failure? Microsoft is not reversing the changes made in Vista. As someone who has used Vista for nearly two years and has now used 7 a good deal, I find it belly achingly hilarious that people are falling over themselves to praise 7 for its sensible layout changes, speed, and better UI when all of these things are imperceptibly different from Vista. Win7 tends to not force you so deep into dialogue boxes as Vista does, but essentially they contain the same content, in the same places. The UI is exactly the same as Vista, barring the new taskbar. Everything is almost identical to Vista.
Its not that Win7 is bad, its more that Vista is actually pretty good.
That's strange, on my machine you can adjust bass and treble.
It all depends on the abilities of your sound card - some cards don't support tone controls, some do.
This is the same as XP.
Well, it depends on what you define crap - are service packs crap? What about device drivers, office suites, compression programs, media codecs, cd-burning software, development platforms? Shouldn’t i use my iPod because it requires iTunes and QuickTime?
Apart from these, I never install crap on my systems, yet all of my Windows systems measurably start up slower and slower as I use them. The time from the boot loader to the desktop changes from 30 s to 180 s. Other performances get worse, too: the time to launch a program, the responsiveness of Explorer, the time between right-clicking a file and seeing a popup menu, and so on.
(Yes, I defragged, scandisked, and I have no antivirus installed, so I think I have exhausted the range of my possibilities of intervention as a user.)