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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?"
Could have sworn that XP was not available before Windows 2000 -- but what do I know...
...is my company still using Windows XP SP2, but we are still using IE6. Feh...and they complained that Audacity was a security risk because it was "open source, so anyone could hack it".
Insanity.
Living With a Nerd
Another example of why companies like Gartner are useless. They're little more another source of advertising for computer companies.
Your decisions on your OS should be driven by your needs first and foremost. If XP is still supported, and it's doing the job well for you... why switch? Switch if YOU need to, not because someone like Gartner says "Hey you, get out of the past and get with the future. All the cool kids are running *insert OS here*"
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I am at a Fortune 500 and everything is still XP. Most companies I know are not migrating at this time.
Although, if they have to retrain (Citing time and cost) Plus the cost of a new license then why not move to Linux and at least drop one of the costs (Licensing)
Just to get the ball started... yes, I agree... it is time to dump Windows XP and change to OS X or one of the BSDs or heck, even one of the mature Linux distributions like Ubuntu.
Moderators: start your engines... am I Flamebait, or am I Insightful? Informative or Offtopic?
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
God no, you're not alone. We need stable environments for consistency of software development. We have a dozen home-grown tools, and 2x that from open source type things, and jumping service patches is a holy pain, much less an entire OS. We were still supporting Win2k machines until two years ago.
"Migration" is in Microsoft's interest, not yours.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Well, it's a way, but it may not be forward...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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...
Ken
so migrating to Win7 won't help your company. Stay on XP, keep trying to get by with IE6, and UPDATE YOUR RESUME! Oh yeah, have you pulled your money out of the employee stock plan yet?
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
Hundreds of employees each spending 20+ minutes to figure out where the fuck the print button went in the new version of Office, for example. No, clicking on the ball in the top corner of the screen is not even close to intuitive, and no, there isn't anyone that actually clicks on the take a tour of $new_product to find these things out. Even if they did, multiply that half hour to hour of tour across an enterprise, and it is significant.
The reason I'm not getting 7 is because.... I already have an XP license which works perfectly fine on my 6 year old P4. It's not exactly cheap to upgrade, since you say: "Just get more RAM". Assuming you want 2GB RAM, with a typical machine having 2 or 3 DDR memory slots, thus needing 2 sticks of 1GB at about 35.99$/piece (Quick search on newegg.com, you might find better deals).
Add in the license for Windows 7 (Upgrade is out, because you're on XP).... 99.99$ for the Systems Builders 32-bit version (source: also newegg)...
Total: 171.97$/seat and that's ignoring workhours....
Only to upgrade... Which has zilch benefit....
...but we just rebranded them as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.
-Brought to you by VMWare and Wyse.
The main reason, in my mind, to upgrade is being able to effectively use 64-bit machines fully--and have more than 4GB of RAM.
Yes you need new machines to do this, but really, if you are buying NEW machines, you should probably upgrade. The question then becomes a matter of whether or not new machines are worthwhile. Your old machines may be still serviceable, but would newer machines result in getting work done enough faster to offset (even partially) the cost of the upgrade.
In many cases, the answer is no--a LOT of secretaries & folks that mainly do word processing are better off just staying where they are--their machines are fast enough for what they do, and additional RAM & extra cores aren't going to make a difference.
That said, if you are doing statistical analysis, engineering, graphic design, programming (and compiling), and a number of other jobs, then you should ABSOLUTELY be on a very aggressive upgrade schedule. Additionally, 8GB of RAM is more than just a good idea for many of those jobs--some of them should be stuffing as MUCH memory as they can into their machines so that they can do their jobs more efficiently.
In any work setting the bottleneck for employee performance should not be the environment or resources, but rather human capacities. That's the ideal. Obviously cost of achieving that and other considerations prevent most companies from getting to the point where that's true--but it should be the goal.
So either move to Win7-x64 OR move to another 64-bit OS with lots of power & memory in the hardware. Staying where you are only makes sense if you are doing mostly word processing.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
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.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
I have a PhD in computer science and still use XP (when I'm not using Linux) because of the "training costs" of migration. Am I going to go take a class on Windows 7? No. But it's annoying and time-consuming to hunt around for things and figure out how they're done now, set up all the network printer connections again, etc., when I could be getting stuff done, or posting to slashdot :) After switching to Office 2007 about 1 1/2 years ago, I am now accustomed to it, but I *still* don't see what I gained by migrating to the Ribbon interface and re-learning where to find everything. If anything, I still think it's *less* productive than the previous straightforward menu system augmented by toolbars.
You might argue I'll have to migrate eventually so why not now. In the case of Windows 7 that's true, but I did skip Vista entirely and am very glad I did.
Again, I am not against keeping up with technology and retraining myself but only when there is a benefit to doing so.
I don't think anyone can confuse Windows XP with Windows ME. :-)
New things are always on the horizon
Another editor writes an idiotic title??
Let's answer this simply, since the article has a simple title: "Is it finally time to dump XP?" NO. It's 2010. By your own article's admission support ends in 2014!
FTFA: "IT departments need to dump Microsoft's Windows XP operating system (OS) before the software vendor ends support for it in April 2014"
Thanks, Capt. Obvious!
Also FTFA: "the sooner the better as many new versions of applications are not expected to support XP beyond 2012."
What applications? Do these people live in the enterprise? Vendor apps are the slowest to migrate to any new OS. That's one of the major reasons why migrations happen so slowly. The other is money. In a down economy you're simply not going to see wholesale adoption of Windows 7 when there's no funding and companies can pull profits from apps that are working now! This is all fun to sit and talk about and kick up some worry but the reality is when you go back to your CIO or IT manager funding will win out. They're going to wait till they get closer to EOL and hope the economy turns around and frankly that's what they should do.
Train for what?
Can people not just figure out where they moved the buttons you click on to?
As someone who does IT/support for hundreds of computers daily, believe me when I say training is always an issue. People tend to memorize the exact steps necessary to complete a task, including the appearance and location of buttons. If an icon changes or a button gets moved, they don't try to intuit where it might have gone or look in menus that sound like they're related to the function they're looking for. Instead they react as if their world has been turned upside down, and they just give up and call for help.
I can confuse Windows ME and Windows Vista. :)
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
No, seriously. What killer new features does Windows 7 have that are worth the time and expense of an upgrade from XP? The only one I've heard mentioned, that it sucks less than Vista, doesn't apply to XP users.
When it gets down to it, there are two main reasons to upgrade to Windows 7: Eventually, it will become impossible to get new machines running XP. And Microsoft really wants your money. Neither of these benefits the user.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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.
Best regards.
Why is it time exactly? What benefit would most companies exactly get from upgrading? If everything works and there is no foreseeable change in the software that the business runs to conduct business, why spend hundreds of dollars per computer for a new OS and maybe some extra RAM to do exactly what they are doing now?
All "fixed that for you" posts are not just redundant. They're also stupid.
I'd cite the same reason business will give: "Give me a single business reason to migrate. Tell me what Windows 7 will do for me that Windows XP isn't doing for me today.". Note: "XP's being EOL'd." is a very weak business reason. The primary benefit's to the vendor, my only benefit is ending up exactly where I started. Various features of Windows 7 itself aren't good business reasons either. I don't run Windows for it's own features, I run it for the applications I use every day that need Windows underneath them to run. "But your applications aren't going to support XP anymore, you have to upgrade Windows to run them." also isn't a very good business reason, again it's arguing that I need to spend a lot of money and time and effort getting right where I already am today. It's also circular, because my application vendors are going "Microsoft isn't supporting XP anymore, so you're going to have to upgrade to new versions of the applications that'll run on Windows 7.".
Now, "Windows 7 provides better security and you won't have as many problems with malware." might be a better business reason. Still weak, but better. But it'll get me to thinking: what makes me think Windows 7 really will be any better? Many of the vulnerabilities in Windows come not from Windows but from things like Internet Explorer and Outlook. I can eliminate many of them by just not having those things around, by using Firefox and Thunderbird and the like instead. Except, oh look, I can't because Microsoft doesn't allow me to remove IE. It's always there, it's always active and it's always used for certain things. And Windows 7 doesn't change that. Other vulnerabilities are caused by things like Windows' file-sharing capabilities. Except, why are my desktops even sharing files? They aren't network file servers, they've no business even having the ability to give other machines network access to their filesystems at all. Except that Windows won't let me turn that service off without crippling Windows itself, and Windows 7 doesn't change that. So why am I spending time and effort upgrading to a version of Windows that has the same basic vulnerabilities built into it's design that my existing one does, as opposed to say spending that effort convincing my application vendors to support an OS where I can completely remove the things I don't need and not have to worry about whether there's vulnerabilities in them anymore?
I'll probably have to migrate this year as a purely technical matter, because support won't be there and I can't afford not to have security updates and AV support. But it won't be because I'm deriving any real benefit from the upgrade, it'll be because a vendor needs more upgrade revenue and is in a position to twist my arm. And as a pure business matter I'm going to be looking seriously at ways to get that vendor out of a position where he can twist my arm anymore, because it's just not good business to be at someone else's mercy.
I'm not sure how 8 years of learning how to create your own computer software systems has anything to do with learning someone else's (possibly crappy) UI.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Every time someone talks about how great XP is working, I have this odd compulsion to point out the Linux equivalent.
If you ran Linux systems that old, you would be using a 2.4.18 kernel (remember LinuxThreads?). You would be using OSS, because ALSA was still incomplete and PulseAudio hadn't come around yet. Your system's compiler would be gcc-2.95, your python implementation would be 1.5.x and run none of today's code, you would still be on an XFree86 server that doesn't support any graphics card made after ~2004. Your web browser would be Mozilla, because Firefox hadn't come around yet (and today's Firefox doesn't support kernels that old). Your OpenSSL libraries would have started at version 0.9.6b, and been patched roughly twice a year since release.
The odd thing is, were this Linux you would be flamed for trying to get modern things running with such old versions. But as this is Windows, you feel entitled to complain about having to re-learn something new and brag about the "effort" you save.
As somebody who programs for both Linux and Windows for a living - your "saved effort" comes at a significant cost to me. It is increasingly hard to write Windows software that works on both XP and Win7; every new feature has to be written twice, once using the right Vista+ API and once to degrade gracefully on XP. Linux is marginally better - there's a new trendy library-of-choice every few years, but at least old ones disappear before too long. Hardware tends to be less than 5 years old, Linux installs tend to be less than 5 years old; yet tech-savvy XP users somehow feel entitled to stay with a 9-year-old OS. Most people don't keep cars that long; why expect an operating system to last?
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
I'm not sure if you've ever had experience supporting people, either over the phone or in person, but a surprisingly large number of people immediately lock up and scream for help if anything the least bit out-of-place happens. Maybe a Word toolbar gets rearranged somehow, or they accidentally move an icon somewhere, or their Big Project drops off the Recently Used list... stuff like that utterly stops workflow. The concept of fumbling around, trying stuff out, or otherwise figuring it out is a foreign concept since they're still in the camp of fearing they're going to break it or get a "virus" somehow.
You can argue they're unemployable, but I'd hazard to say even a majority of the average non-technical office workers are like this. Now throw in Windows 7 and IE8, and suddenly there's a lot of little differences they'll have to learn and/or get used to. Maybe throw Office 2007/2010 with the ribbon in if perhaps they were still using an old version of Office as well. I do tend to think the fear and cost is overstated, but you can't discount it entirely either.
Actually there is a huge difference. For me, a primary motivation for updating linux is getting driver support for new devices. On windows, the stable driver abi and supply of 3rd party drivers means XP supports everything on my laptop, even though it came out years after XP was released.
As for python and Mozilla, you don't need the latest kernel to run those. (That's right, I don't update my linux kernel unless I have a specific need, either. Call me crazy).
Really? OK, I posted earlier about all the reasons that moving to *nix from Windows is hard, but, well, these are none of them. Every problem you list has at least one often more solutions in the Unix world:
File sharing: Several options. Assuming all Unix machines, NFS is by far the easiest. As long as all users are authenticating off the same directory their UIDs will match between systems. This is the "go to" Unix file sharing system, but there's other options. You can use Samba of course, and there's a few nifty distributed file systems out there that are starting to get mature. The first two options will work on any Unix system including Macs. The distributed solutions are spottier in what they support, being often new.
Centralized Login: Two major solutions. LDAP and NIS+. LDAP is by far the more modern and and scalable, though it can be slightly tricky to set up. Very slightly, nothing any half competent admin can't figure out. Original NIS is also an option, but is getting long in the tooth and has some security problems. Macs are perfectly capable of using LDAP, and I assume NIS as well, though I've never tried
Policy management: This is a little less defined in the Unix world than it is in Windows, but still manageable. Most of these policies are managed by various text files in Unix, so what I typically do is run a script when I first install them to set everything the way I want it. In the unlikely event I need to make a change I just change one system and propagate it to all the others. I have a script that copies a file where ever it needs to go on every machine in the network. You can also automate this through rsync though I've never personally bothered to set this up. I've never run a network complicated enough to really need it. The hard part here is if you have a heterogeneous Unix environment, since nearly all Unix's insist on using different files and different syntax to manage this stuff. I'll admit this is a slightly weak area, but definitely manageable.
Update Management: It's trivial to setup a local repository for any *nix repository system I am aware of. Setup you client to update to the local repository and test updates before you put them on the repo server.
Mostly this stuff is trivial in Unix/Mac environments. When I manage heterogeneous networks my problem is usually getting the Windows boxes to play nice with everyone else. Unix and Mac machines will all happily share files and directory data with each other, even across different OS's and hardware platforms, while the Windows boxes insist on playing their own little game. Samba helps with file sharing, but getting everyone to log in against the same network shared directory is an undertaking and a half.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
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.
Good. That's where it belongs. Or possibly to a whole new department - "User Interface Science"?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.