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Time To Dump XP?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the wasn't-that-ship-date dept.

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?"

20 of 1,213 comments (clear)

  1. XP is the 90's? by jamesborr · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  2. Not only... by Pojut · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...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
    1. Re:Not only... by Steauengeglase · · Score: 5, Funny

      I had the same problem. It was "open source crap". So I did the natural thing. I installed it on the prettiest employee's desktop and within a week of her lauding this "Audacity thing" there were official requests to install it on any desktop that had to manipulate audio. We would be on Asterisk by now if she hadn't left.

  3. Gartner is shilling by DesScorp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Gartner is shilling by hey! · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I've been in this software business for twenty seven years, and one thing I've learned is timing is everything. You gets tons of people trying to make money doing something, then the person who gets a good enough product out at the right time -- not too early, not too late -- wins the prize.

      The same goes for upgrading. Vendors want to you to upgrade ASAP, especially if there's revenue involved. If you listened to them, you'd upgrade too early. But you can also upgrade too late. Here's how you know you've got the timing right: nothing much happens. What? I go through all that pain in the ass for nothing much to happen?

      Yes. Exactly so.

      The vendors do not have a solution to all your problems. They're peddling software updates. So you're a fool upgrading early to achieve IT Nirvana. But you're equally a fool to wait until your hand is forced, and you have to meet heaven and Earth to do multiple years of updating in a single quarter, disrupting the operation of your employers and leaving users in a world of unfamiliar user interfaces.

      Lack of drama is the hallmark of competency. Each quarter looks more or less like the last one, with no notable emergencies or sudden "improvements" that leave people with allegedly powerful but unfamiliar tools. You can't do that if you wait until your hand is forced.

      We're coming up on the one year anniversary of Windows 7. For Windows XP shops, this is a good time to start planning a transition that will be done before this time next year.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  4. Dont know by Anon-Admin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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)

  5. Time to change your OS to OSX or BSD by thomasdz · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
    1. Re:Time to change your OS to OSX or BSD by Trev311 · · Score: 5, Funny

      You are an insightful and informative flamebait who skewed off of the topic!

  6. Migrate this! by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  7. Staying with XP by NetDanzr · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Same at my company. Given that we use largely Web-based applications, there is no cost for porting apps to Win7 (if necessary at all); the only external cost would be to retire a few older printer that we tested as not working with Win7. However, with the few Win7 machines we have, we experienced two problems:
    • Retraining for Win7 is prohibitive, from a production perspective. We can't afford people to be idle for a day or two. (This also assumes converting from Office 2003 to Office 2007, which eats up most of the retraining costs
    • Anti-piracy controls on Win7 are far from perfect. We have only three machines with Win7, and yet we experienced a total of four times so far a black background and a screen that our product key was invalid. A call to Microsoft has always solved the issue, but it's still a hassle.
  8. Any concept of what's involved in migration? by kenh · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  9. Re:Pfff... by rkfig · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  10. Re:We are staying on XP by Corporate+Troll · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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....

  11. Re:Pfff... by arb+phd+slp · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  12. Re:Pfff... by timeOday · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If someone needs to be trained to use Windows 7 then there is something wrong with them.

    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.

  13. Oh brother by jav1231 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  14. Re:Training?????? by dn15 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  15. Re:Pfff... by VGPowerlord · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How did you get through ~8 years of college level education on computers and still have a user interface confuse you??

    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
  16. Re:Getting back to the topic... by Scoth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  17. Re:Pfff... by ultranova · · Score: 5, Informative

    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"?

    --

    Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.