Time To Dump XP?

An anonymous reader writes "Gartner is saying it's time to plan your migration now (if you havent already done it). I for one know my company still has loads of users still on XP, citing training costs (time and money) rather than software license fees. Is my company alone in wanting to stay in the 1990s or is Windows 7 the way forward?"

Comments

XP is the 90's?

[jamesborr]

Could have sworn that XP was not available before Windows 2000 -- but what do I know...

Re:XP is the 90's?

[Maxo-Texas]

I don't even see how this was offensive enough to be downmodded.

And: Windows XP Release date was August 24, 2001 so it's informative.

We are staying on XP

[yakatz]

I would live to migrate on of my offices to Windows 7, but then they would need to buy all-new hardware, sinc ewhat they have will not support Windows 7.
Also, they use an old version of Navison Axapta (since renamed to Microsoft Dynamics AX) which has issues on newer OS versions.

90s?

[Moridineas]

Windows XP came out in late-2001...hardly "the 90s"

At my small office workplace we are down to one remaining Windows 2000 computer, majority XP, no Vista, and one Windows 7. It was a pain to convert our roaming desktops from 2k/XP style to Vista/7 style (samba server). I personally really like Windows 7 though it of course comes with the assortment of upgrading pains and things that make you slap your forehead and say "WHY?!" -- example, out of the box Windows 7 runs a maintenance task that deletes broken shortcuts. Unfortunately for whatever reason it believes shortcuts to documents and programs on our network shares are broken, and so they repeatedly disappeared until we figured that out. Why can't I pin a network share/document/application to the start bar? etc

We also have an OS9 computer that doesn't get used often anymore (though did up until about 3 months ago), OSX 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6.

Why upgrade if it still works? (of course barring any major security vulnerabilities that can't be protected against)

Any concept of what's involved in migration?

[kenh]

Windows 7 has hardware requirements that many, many otherwise capable WinXP boxes can't meet either technically or economically.

It's easy to say well, upgrade your 1 Gig RAM 2 GHz P4 desktop to 2 Gig of RAM, but if you have to pitch 2x 512 Meg sticks and buy 2x 1 Gig PC3200 sticks it can get expensive fast. And that IDE drive will suffice, but it won't be very speedy - an upgrade may be in order, but unless your desktop includes a SATA port, will it really be cost-effective? Oh, and you can toss in a ReadyBoost USB flash drive to improve performance, but this is starting to get expensive...

PC3200 RAM is about $40-50 a Gig, a 4 Gig ReadyBoost USB flash drive will cost another $10 and where does that leave you? With an investment of $100/desktop plus labor in performing the hardware upgrade, or half the price of a new low-end Dell OptiPlex which will blow the socks off the 5-7 year old P4 you are investing in.

OR you could just sit on WinXP boxes for another year and start saving up for a forklift upgrade next year...

Lack of application and hardware support

[tepples]

Would that same benefit be provided by other operating systems?

Wine runs a surprising number of Windows applications, including Microsoft Office. But it still doesn't run everything, especially intranet web applications that rely on IE 6 and/or ActiveX. It especially doesn't run drivers for specialized peripherals or for some hardware that might be in a company's existing, paid-for PCs.

Re:Pfff...

[arb phd slp]

I am not the typical idiot user. I'm the guy most people come to when they have a question.

I didn't realize that the circle with the Windows logo in upper left was a menu for almost a month.

Re:XP is productive

[mspohr]

I migrated my business and home use from XP several years ago. We now use Mac and Ubuntu Linux everywhere. Benefits:

- freedom from worry about malware (80% of XP malware runs on Win7, no malware in the wild for Mac and Linux)

- runs on my existing computers (except Mac OSX, of course)... no need for expensive computer upgrades

- Office software compatibility... we standardize on OpenOffice.org and have been pleasantly surprised that it is more compatible with MS Office than all of the various MS Office versions are with each other.

- other software... we have been pleasantly surprised that we have been able to find good quality software for everything we need. We were worried about the FUD about open source software but haven't had any problems. We have been pleasantly surprised with the quality and availability of Office, Web, eMail, graphics, video, audio, utility, etc. software. We have found everything we need. We don't have any legacy applications tied to XP or IE6.

- powerful unix utilities... we have also been pleasantly surprised to discover a wealth of powerful genuinely useful unix utilities such as rsync, dd, grep, etc. which have made our lives much easier. - training has been a minor expense... this is just not a problem... most people can transfer their Windows skills without problems or a simple introduction.

- support is easy... upgrades from repositories have been a joy...

- Peace of Mind... priceless

Back to the original subject...

[mollog]

I work at a company that every reader of slashdot would know, and we are still using XP in the development environment. I suppose that Microsoft would have to stop supporting Visual Studio 2008 on XP to force this organization off of XP and onto 7.

Vista is loaded on the 'corporate' PC but XP is on the development PC. XP works, it's stable. End of story.

Re:Back to the original subject...

[SpryGuy]

XP is on the development PC. XP works, it's stable. End of story.

We do all our development on Win7. Win7 just works. It's stable. It's faster and feature-rich and up-to-date. It has a lot of great short-cuts and productivity enhancers in the UI. End of story.

Re:Back to the original subject...

[shutdown -p now]

Wow...so, did Vista and 7 get Unix style folders?!?! No more C: drive and the like?? Cool, I'll have to check that out!

Both yes and no.

You have been able to use slashes in file paths since DOS 1.0. All Win32 APIs that take filenames understand them. All GUI applications do, too (try navigating to e.g. C:/Users in Explorer and see what happens).

Command-line tools do as well, but the problem there is that leading "/" is also treated as an indicator to start a command-line option, and furthermore, as an option separator. So if you write dir /foo/bar, this will be parsed as argv[1]="/foo", argv[2]="/bar" to begin with, and then those will be treated as options (unrecognized, so you'll get an error) rather than paths. If you put quotes around it, however - e.g. dir "/foo/bar" - this will be properly interpreted as a path.

(As a side note, you can thank IBM for this whole mess; when DOS has got directories, it was supposed to use "/" for paths and "-" for options, as God and K&R intended.)

PowerShell disposes with all this, and uses "-" only for options, so it will never misinterpret a Unix-style path. Of course, it also understands "/" as a path separator (though will still show "\" for NTFS and registry in paths that it itself outputs). It also understands "~" as a shortcut for home directory, and expands variables with "$...", not DOS-style "%...%".

Disk letters are still there, but can be largely ignored if desired. You'll still need one for your root, but everything else can be mounted in directories underneath it, including any removable drives, USB sticks etc. At this point, you can also start omitting it in all paths you input, and always start them with "\" (or "/"), since the current drive will always be the only one in the system.

Re:Gartner is shilling

[shutdown -p now]

For the problem software tho, it's going to be a rough road until the packages are rolled out (and that will take a couple years). At any point, our current software could be killed by an arbitrary microsoft patch since the language (vb6) is out of support.

VB6 IDE is not supported now (though a paid support agreement with MS is possible). It also has known compat problems with Vista and above. That said, it works perfectly in XP Mode under Win7.

VB6 runtime is a part of Windows 7, and will be supported for at least as long as Win7 itself is supported. So, no, an "arbitrary patch" won't kill your software.

See here for details.

Re:Not only...

[Pojut]

what the hell does this mean?
"My primary role is programming mail merge documents while maintaining all of the document templates we use within Siebel. My secondary role is maintaining validation documentation for new database releases."

you send spam?

I'll start with the mail merge.

Our particular business unit is a pharmaceutical call center. Patients contact us when they have questions regarding their medication. We also provide Patient Assistance Programs, conduct Insurance Verifications, and also assist in claim denials. Obviously, there are a lot of forms associated with this work. My job is to design these forms based on our clients needs (our clients tend to be Pharmaceutical companies), and then program them with the necessary code to pull demographic information, therapy information, diagnosis, and dosage from our database (filled with data that has been provided by patients or doctors over the phone so that patients and physician's don't have to fill out the whole form manually. Everything we submit is explicitly requested by a patient, physician, or medical office. Our business unit receives around 20,000 calls per day and makes around 12,000 calls per day.

We have enough trouble keeping up with stuff that is actually requested, we wouldn't have the time or resources to send out unsolicited documentation even if we wanted to.

Validation Documentation is the process of ensuring that our final testing of new database releases matches what our release plan was, making sure our release plan matches our functional design, and making sure our functional design matches our requirements. Basically, it's a glorified way of saying "making sure we don't miss anything we intended to build into our monthly Siebel releases." It's simple but essential work in case we have to retrace our steps due to database errors after modifications are made to the system.

Re:Gartner the other marketing arm of Microsoft

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

Indeed...

Gartner, 2001: "Gartner predicts that, by 2006, IPF-based servers will have a 20 percent share of the overall server market by revenue"

Gartner, 2001: '...for Windows Data Center Server and Enterprise Server, the question is not "Will it be [Itanium]?", but "When?"'

Microsoft, 2010: "Windows Server 2008 R2 to Phase Out Itanium"

Re:Pfff...

[ultranova]

Sadly you can get a comp sci phd without knowing how to properly work with a computer, it's not hard given how abstract and math centric the curriculum are at many schools and universities.

As well as it should be. Computer science isn't about using any particular existing computer, it's about the theory underlaying computing and algorithms.

"Sadly, you can get an engineering degree wiihtout knowing how to drive a tractor" doesn't make any sense, for the exactly same reason your statement doesn't.

In many of those schools graphics is relegated to reams of algorithms and theory and anything UI related is pushed off to the graphic design departments.

Good. That's where it belongs. Or possibly to a whole new department - "User Interface Science"?

And I call it

[Well-Fed Troll]

I call the classic start menus and such "I fear change" mode. Fitting, I think :D

And I call it the "I like standards" mode.
Microsoft keeps releasing new products that break their own UI guidelines. Microsoft way back released a small book that detailed the WIMP interface, and it's sad that they threw it out just for "oooh shiny". I think it's pretty funny that you think navigating as you describe an improvement. The problem with what you described is that if you add an item to the menu the previous keystroke sequence you memorized to run an application becomes ambiguous. I much prefer hitting a sequence of keystrokes identifying the menu I set up. Part of the problem with the start menu is the lack of standardization of the categorization of applications. Way too many application developers think I care what the name of the company is that created their app. Uhhh, No, sorry, all I want to see is the application name on the start menu.
I would love to go to a Microsoft demo and have them use their fancy new products blindfolded just to show how broken their apps are.