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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."
I've been defending Vista for some time now since it worked just fine on my laptop. Now, however some sort of incompatibility between Vista, Firefox and Zone Alarm keeps freezing my browser. It's not happening on my XP systems. And suddenly, within the past couple of weeks, even IE is freezing. So I'm building a new system for my wife and be sure that I'm going with XP.
(everyone who Knows Better will know I'm talking about most users, IT shops, etc - not the technical "merits")
Microsoft is finally getting bit by cultivating and preying on the culture of Good Enough. XP supports current hardware, runs current apps, ISVs are still writing for it. Users are comfortable with it, it handles games well (hey, check out the number of Big Name Games that require DX10), and while it's a security nightmare, most competent shops know enough to be able to keep their machines STD-free.
Vista is a host of new problems, support issues, and sucks on the same hardware XP zips on. Windows 7 isn't officially out yet... and when it is, most IT shops are going to wait. They'll poke it with a stick, sniff it like a dog, and rather it's a genuine improvement or not, they're not going to hop on it until they have to.
XP is the new BSD. It'll be "dying" for the next five to ten years. It's going to take a massive paradigm shift* in computing to get rid of it.
* I don't mean quad cores or eight-way cores or 64 gigs of ram for a nickel. I mean something equivalent to a massive rendering farm running an OS with a pile of APIs that'll securely handle every windows (and mac, while we're fantasizing) application ever written, with a battery life measured in decades. Said hardware would be the size of an iPhone, even easier to use, and you'd be able to buy them in vending machines at bus stations for $1.25. I mean that kind of paradigm shift.
Where I work we just started taking pre-orders on Windows 7.
An elderly gentleman came in (today) and was ecstatic to place an order. His son installed it on his computer and he said he has never been happier. He stated he hated Vista and had kept his XP until the beta. I bombarded him with questions and the jist of his satisfaction came from the simplicity and speed Win7 had.
In my opinion this guy was a prime example that Microsoft might have a winner, both in the eyes of people who are technologically savvy as well as somebody who is anything but.
I personally still run 32-bit xp on my Core i7 (Except for games, damn DX10), and I have been bitterly against an upgrade for fear of hidden DRM treats down the line. Only time will tell.
Any perceived "speed" improvement in 7 is misguided. You will hear many people say that their PC has better performance after removing the included Vista installation, and installing XP/7/linux. This is actually because of the amount of additional software installed by the hardware vendor.
This software can be divided into two categories: applications from the vendor that manage updates, backups, connectivity, media handling, recovery, you name it (even though Vista has all of these things already), and applications from third-parties that are trials/demos/upgradable that gives the hardware vendor a kickback if purchased by the end user.
I've used Vista for a short while and also some users (bought new PCs preloaded).
I, as the support person, hated it because it took me longer to find my way around it. It is not intuitive for people used to where MS used to place things. I'd say it was similar to going from OS9 to OSX in Mac userland. After a handful to users buying into Vista and then coming to lots of problems in terms of figuring out how to use it, I started recommending downgrades for their and mine sanity's sake.
Then I landed a corporate job, and our policy (I set my own, with advice from HQ in the UK) is to stick with XP. My primary reason is that my users are mostly set in their ways, and Vista from UI perspective will be a disaster. The other reason in that some legacy apps will probably cause problems to run. They even cause problems in XP.
So, when I order a PC from Dell, I always specify XP as the OS. It comes pre-installed.
On a side note, I also downgrade Office 2007 to 2003 Pro, again for usability reasons. I have Select Licenses, so I am "legally" entitled to.
Long live XP.
I had the same experience when change from Vista to Vista on my laptop. I formatted the machine and installed a fresh copy of just Vista, without all the crap ware, and boot times went from 2 minutes to 30 seconds. Also, the entire machine is much more responsive.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Casual end user observations may be misguided, but there were a number of performance reviews that clearly showed Win7 as being faster than Vista, and generally much closer to XP, and even faster on occasion (weirdly enough, in some Direct3D games).
32bit is a dead end. How much RAM would you stuff into your computers if your OS and applications could use it. The price of RAM is through the floor and nobody buys the stuff because more than 3GB is completely useless in a typical Windows PC due to architecture limitations.
Someone mod this man UP.
What he speaks is 100% the truth. 32-bit is at an end and it's only lazy program and [especially] driver developers that are keeping us using it. Vista 64-bit functions almost transparently running 32-bit applications -- I've never had a problem -- it's only drivers that it gets stuck up on (not everyone is coding 64-bit drivers). Over the lifespan of Vista, however, I've seen that problem slowly decline (been using 64-bit Vista since the day it went gold), and now (with Windows 7) I think it's time that they went 64-bit ONLY.
I see Microsoft embracing 64-bit fully internally. Forefront TMG is 64-bit ONLY, and Server 2008 R2 is going to be 64-bit only also.
I call bull.
I can't run vista on my eee pc... it chugs to a halt.
Windows 7 RC runs without a hitch.
Time to internet is significantly reduced (measureable in minutes), by timed tests w/ stop watch, and I can run many more instances of excel / word / chrome without alt-tabbing causing pagefaults (about 5 more tabs in chrome, and 4 instances of excell/word, before the page faults start to go up).
It may not sound significant, but it makes using the thing practical. I can take it out and use it without having to wait.
It is comparable to XP, but it vastly more usable out of the box.
This is coming from a highly optimized Debian install. I even wrote my own custom ram-drive loader for it... I still have it on there w/ dual boot, but Firefox sucked compared to chrome (i could barely keep 4 tabs open without it taking 30 seconds to switch, whereas in chrome 15 tabs and switching is instantaneous)
The only thing that's faster is the xandrox OS that came with the thing. But it feels so gimped compared to win7.
"Infecting minds with my own memetic virus, one post at a time." Ultimape
I used to love XP.
Not anymore.
Once i installed Windows 7, i have no intention of going back to stupid XP.
Windows 7 for me is more stable, faster and less crashing.
Benefits:
1) Windows 7 installs faster and less intrusive than XP.
2) Windows 7 networking is far more advanced than the usual XP crap.
3) Display drivers crash do not cause a BSOD. Hell my nvidia beta driver crashed when i was running CoH:ToV. Windows 7 quietly told me the situation, restarted the driver and asked me if i wanted to roll back to previous version. I did.
4) Windows 7 is faster than XP in many ways. Multitasking, file operations, USB access, etc., all are much faster.
5) Device Manager shoots XP out of the water. I can pin point exact problems, roll back only those that are needed, and more.
For me, Windows 7 is a god-send. I haven't used Vista, but i love Windows 7 and would definitely pay good money for this.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Agreed. There is plenty of published benchmarks to show the tuning in Windows 7 to be significant compared to your typcial service pack patch-up. maybe foss advocates don't read those kind of articles *duck*
A closer look at 7 and you see how some of the speed was achieved, pretty much a backtrack on a shortlist of Vista mistakes. Part of tweaking Vista was to disable or delay the start of all the frivolous services Vista would start at boot. If you look at Windows 7's default services settings, you'll find many set to manual start or to delayed start by default. Infact it looks just like a tweaked vista installation.
It's almost as if microsoft scrutinist the how-to-guides on common speed-up-your-windoze sites to see what people were disabling. Indeed Microsoft actually pay attention to the modding commuity is a unprecedented thing.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.