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.

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...

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.

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...

[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: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"?