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Microsoft Pulling the Plug On Windows XP In Three Years
An anonymous reader wrote in with an article from myce. Microsoft will be discontinuing all support for Windows XP in Spring 2014. Coinciding with the announcement, Microsoft released a 1,000-day countdown gadget to help XP users pass the time until their IT departments get into gear. Maybe.
It can't help XP users pass the time since it requires Vista or 7!
How many other companies are expected to maintain 10+ year old software, even after TWO new releases (Vista, Win7) are available?
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
Old news is stale :(
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/04/21/1450231/Microsoft-Counts-Down-To-XP-Death
I'm still on (and perfectly content with) XP, but even I'll admit that by that point, it'll be the equivalent of Terry Schiavo.
when the have to keep maintaining a product across the course of two new releases so customers can survive long enough for a release that's worth ponying up for.
Tho I suppose 7 wasn't too bad. Vista, however...
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
We are migrating to 64 bit Windows 7 this month, and if you have to stay with MS, now is the time to do it. 32 bit XP support in some apps and games is starting to slip to "also will run". SP1 is out, Vista has been passed over, and 7 is much easier to maintain and runs on what is now the cheapest hardware, AND will run some Win32 apps better than Vista, from my experience. Might as well start now, since they still are not going to add any new features or compatibilities to XP (and haven't in a while), only providing some security fixes that tend to make the systems run even slower.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Does this Mean XP 64Bit Edition.
If so I am going to be pissed. There is not SP3 even yet for 64Bit XP.
Sure some of you may hate it, But I has it's uses for Certian Software.
Ubuntu does not maintains Long Term releases that long.
Nor does Canonical charge for operating system upgrades. Nor does Canonical drop all support for older yet paid for and still working PC hardware as quickly; Ubuntu 11.04 needs less than half the RAM of Windows 7.
You can buy a used desktop that will run Win7 no problems for $100. I've seen NEW computers as low as $200. No excuses.
You can buy a used desktop that will run Win7 no problems for $100.
But then you have to pay another $100 for Windows 7.
You can buy a used desktop that will run Win7 no problems for $100.
Can one buy such used desktop PCs in quantity, or are you talking about watching Craigslist for a couple weeks waiting for a deal?
I've seen NEW computers as low as $200.
Link please. Windows 7 costs $200 by itself.
Microsoft announced back in 2007 or 2006 that Windows XP Pro would be supported until 2014. In 2007, they extended XP Home and Media Center support to 2014.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This gadget was released months ago. I've had it on my Windows 7 desktop at work since May at least.
And before all the whargarbl about MS dropping support... Windows XP was released in 2001. No consumer OS has been supported that long, and few enterprise OSs are. Since Windows 7 was released (that was 2 years ago) netbooks and low end systems have shipped with Windows 7 Starter. XP has not been sold on systems for years, and a four years of security support is not bad at all.
Earlier the same year XP was released, Red Hat 7.1 came out. That's the first version of Red Hat to use the 2.4 kernel (7 had the 2.2 kernel). Later in 2001 they released 7.2, which as a new feature offered support for the ext3 file system. One of the major selling points of XP, you may remember, was the fact that it offered full native USB support. It's time to move on, people.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
... with the clock starting the day the last "consumer" or "OEM-to-consumer" license was sold to a consumer.
On the other hand, I do applaud Microsoft for extending security bug fixes for XP Home well beyond the release of Vista, even though they originally were going to cut off support for "home" versions of XP in 2009 or earlier.
*Those buying through "Certified" corporate accounts on special programs, developer programs, and the like should be able to buy or get-as-part-of-the-package licenses to products in the last 5 years or even discontinued products.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You just about cost me a new keyboard today, thanks for that! How's that new diet working out? High in fibers, I'd imagine. :-D
I put on my Pedant Hat...
I think the word you want is irony. Choice Blackadder quote:
Blackadder: Baldrick, do you know what irony is?
Baldrick: Yeah, it's like goldy or bronzey, only it's made of iron.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
How many other companies are expected to maintain 10+ year old software, even after TWO new releases (Vista, Win7) are available?
Off the top of my head:
Just to name a few. There is software out there which demands support periods measured in decades. LOTS of companies are expected to maintain support for old software.
Only three years until XP is finally stable? That certainly is good news!
Actually, April 19, so almost 3 months ago. Now it's a 916 day countdown clock. Wonder how many days until the next dup...
I wouldn't buy a new computer that didn't run XP. Good thing there's plenty on eBay.
And if so, how? If you can't activate the software is worthless. I know lots of people running Win9X still (old games mostly, but some old software too).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I haven't even seen netbooks for that price, let alone a desktop with 4 gigs of RAM...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Cheers, I haven't had a TV in so long that I've missed out on a lot of Simpsons / Futurama / etc. Mark one under "Missed References"... :)
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I haven't needed Microsoft's support for my copy of XP for the last 10 years... why should I in the next 3?
Um... except for that time it "forgot" its activation, and I ended up having to call some guy in India. Thanks, Microsoft.
I was at my bank (a big Canadian one) and the manager told me that they finally upgraded to XP. I was to stunned to ask what they upgraded from.
When I got my current PC (Athlon 64 X2) in 2007, I tried running it with W2k first. Never got it to run stable, while my older Pentium4 worked fine on W2k until it went EOL.
In hindsight, I suspect the drivers. The NVidia graphics driver in particular was no longer maintained for W2k at the time, and I had to choose between an older driver for W2k and a newer one that was only offered for XP. I tried both, and either way, the system crashed from time to time.
After a switch to XP, the same (Athlon) box is running flawlessly. For W2k, that leaves either the OS or the drivers as the culprit. W2k being bad seems unlikely, as it always worked fine with the P4.
C - the footgun of programming languages
The system requirements state Vista or Windows 7 - You can't even install the countdown gadget if you've got XP - you've got to upgrade to trace the slow (but highly CPU, RAM and Disc space efficient) countdown of your peers!
...is old. This came out about if not more than 100 days ago. Unless now it's officially known as a 1,000-day countdown widget instead of a 1,000+ one...
The more you know, the more you have to say and the more you should listen.
Probably not from Microsoft. But maybe from some third party. Currently, there is the WSUS Offline Update (http://download.wsusoffline.net/) for instance. WSUS Offline Update is a small Open Source application that will download the more important patches for you (see http://forums.wsusoffline.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=172).
So get a tool like this, let it run shortly before the cutoff date, and it will make a "collected updates" DVD for you.
C - the footgun of programming languages
For embedded systems.
So it'll be 15 years for XP embedded compared to 18 years for 3.x embedded.
I wonder what will become of the activation process? If someone should want to reload the o/s will Microsoft still activate XP and allow it's use or will there be a published unlock?
Then please allow me to rephrase: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS needs less than half the RAM of Windows 7.
My father went to the hospital last month to our local medical center. I was rather suprized at something:
:) )
It's a rather high tech hospital, computers with large screens plastered everywhere. From the 6 large screen systems in the emergency room with patient data, to the Thinkpads hospital personnel roll around for patient intake, to the front desk and the nurses station computers and thin clients..
Every one of them was running Windows XP Pro. In all those computers, I did not see a single Vista or windows 7 system anywhere.
Does that tell you something?
(BTW my father is ok
just enough time for ReactOS to deliver a 100% binary compatible replacement. Why upgrade to windows 8 if reactos becomes mature enough to reuse all your discontinued hardware with xp binary drivers?
How many other companies have an installed base similar to that of Windows Xp?
- BTW, if I where to run Windows, I'd definitively prefer Windows Xp and Office 2003, things have only gone down hill from there... ugly eye "candy", ribbons, poor performance and "security" features, what's good for...
(I'm not sure if I'm joking, Windows Xp SP1 really was and still is the best competitor to Ubuntu).
So story is-- we will keep filling the world with obsolete PC's just sitting there or here capable of working but growing little annoyances. I have found through all my years that old operating systems fail at something at just the right time-- usually something small like not doing wireless as is the case with XP on both my clunkers. Somewhere along the line of service packs the wireless networking functionality on XP became corrupted on many older machines ( Ok on wired connections though). So being that they are unsupported the problem remains. A small annoyance to home users but enough to want an upgrade of course naturally
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's not 10 years old if it was sold last year.
Yeah. XP has been shipping on new machines until very recently due to the fiasco that was Vista.
Your "age calculation" should start at when the product stopped shipping with new machines, not when it was first introduced.
I just put in some new Dell's with XP pro two months ago. There's still a lot of stuff that doesn't play well with Vista and 7 in the business world. I have a lot of machines doing "industrial" stuff... parking lot databases, flight information displays, common use airline terminals, access control stuff, etc. It all runs on either Windows 2000 Pro or XP pro. All of it. I'm pricing some new common use terminal equipment for my airport... stuff to be purchased about 3 months from now. It all runs on XP on brand new equipment. Like I said, the new OS model just doesn't play nice with a lot of stuff. One of our suppliers asked if we had any burning desire to upgrade our new parking lot servers to 7, We told them no, and they said "Good, because we're having a lot of problems trying to port our stuff to it".
I've been thinking that this might be an outstanding opportunity for the big industrial computing companies... SITA, Johnson Controls, Honeywell, etc, to start moving to a 'nix based OS.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
In what wretched shithole do you work so the rest of us can avoid it?
Yes, really.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Same here, currently there is exactly one game out that I want to play that requires DX11, and many many favourites that require endless hacks to get working on seven. Not only that but in three years the XP market share will be so low that no one will bother writing malware or viruses for it anymore and regular security updates will no longer be necessary. It's not like I run to ms support whenever anything goes wrong anyway. Microsoft doesn't support linux or mac os and they seem to be doing fine :-p
I'll guess that MS will be pushing the various ATM and auto checkout POS vendors into ditching XP as well. Good luck with that.
Luke, help me take this mask off
My day job has me writing custom C++ code for Windows. We only just recently were able to drop support for Win2K. As in, within the past year. I'm immensely looking forward to XP going the way of the dodo; our software is ready for Vista and Win7 already, but there are kernel features we can't touch as long as we need to be able to run on WinXP. Things like functioning reader/writer locks which integrate well with the rest of system APIs--we had to roll our own, and they won't integrate with the rest of the system*. In other news, correctly implementing such things is non-trivial.
* No way in hell Microsoft will let third-party code run inside the critical sections for managing resources in things like WaitForSingleObject--and I wouldn't want them to.
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I will upgrade when my games require me to. In three years I will probably need a new rig anyway.
That is exactly what you should do. In fact, it is exactly what the majority of people do. This explains why there are so many XP users: computers from that era still fast enough to run standard office apps so they do not need to be updated. Even games have stagnated a bit as developers do not push the bounds of computers anymore because they want to ensure they work on the rather long-in-the-tooth next gen consoles too.
Since I had ubuntu installed on my system (which had Vista and Reinstall Win 7) and I tried the upgrade option which pretty much just hosed my Ubuntu install. (Oddly enough of those 3 the one that has given me the least amount of trouble is Vista. I think I'm on my 6th reinstall of Reinstall Win 7. Yes, really.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I don't care that the OS isn't supported. The only support I've ever asked Microsoft for was the activation of a MSDN key that I bought directly from Microsoft, a full retail MSDN subscription, that would not activate because someone had guessed the key and registered it before it was even assigned. Mind you, I never did get any support, and I had to literally threaten to sue (Microsoft!) to even get a replacement MSDN license.
Anyway, I don't care at all that XP isn't "supported." The problem is, will it be impossible to *activate* ? Will they go as far as to *deactivate* it? Will they release an activation crack before they end-of-life it?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
in the pc world it can, y2k issues plague a lot of wares from 1980s and early 90s, some unique to older BIOS. Old wares were often tied to specific devices and specific disk layouts. A couple years ago for my employer I had to scavenge a 80486 with huge card cage together to run apps, proprietary POTS cards and a dongle under OS/2, hit all those issues and more, what fun and what a rush when it was finally running just like it was 1990.
I know our IT won't bother until they are forced to.