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10 Years of Windows XP
Julie188 writes "Windows XP – the XP stood for 'Experience' — was released October 25, 2001. With Windows XP, Microsoft hoped to have one codebase that would span everything from consumers to corporate desktops. Microsoft was fairly ambitious with XP. There was an embedded version that went everywhere, from phones to information kiosks. Banks in particular embraced it as a way to migrate off IBM's dead-end-but-once-great OS/2. Consumers have been quicker to ditch XP for Windows 7 while businesses hem and haw and slowly test a decade's-worth of custom apps on Windows 7. Some estimates show that XP still has a hold on 48% of the Windows market."
XP was for eXperimental Prototype as in test aircraft. The kind that crashed a lot.
No, I'm pretty certain that they only crashed once...
(I am a Linux user... I do not share your pain)
My blog
I thought XP stood for Chi Rho (the greek letters it looks like), a pun on the project name "Cairo".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
but that was all they had at the store; I was perfectly happy with XP; my hardware died and I didn't see anything I like with XP on it, so got one with windows 7 IMO, and in the opinion of everyone here at my office, XP was MS's best OS; most of us like it a lot more then windows 7 ymmv
And yet, those recycling kiosks at the grocery store are still running Windows 98.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Or much of anything?
Compared to previous versions of Windows (especially those that ran on 9x codebase), XP was much better. Compared to Windows 2000, it ran games better.
Vista compared to XP is worse, or at least it was worse just after the release. Windows 7 is about the same as XP, just a new UI, but it is not that much better for people to buy it (and probably upgrade their PCs), because XP is stable and does everything they want. The computer is fast enough for hat they use it for, so no need for an upgrade until it breaks down.
They added the X in the title, because everyone knows, if you have an X in the title, you get better ratings.
Fight Spammers!
Of our four most used machines at home, the media center is running Windows 7 because I was told Media Center works better than in "Windows XP Media Center Edition". (Only partially true -- the surround doesn't work right.) My machine is running Windows 7 because I thought I needed more than 4 GB of ram. And then I found that the machine wouldn't boot with more than 4 GB of ram, so that was kinda a bust. (Maybe with a different motherboard?) The others are still running XP and the programs wife and child use still load up and work fine.
That's the point people seem to forget. The OS isn't important. (Well, maybe for Windows 2000 and up -- nobody in their right mind, except for the people who designed those can and bottle recycling kiosks, still runs Windows 98.) What's important are the applications the OS runs. Sometimes these applications need resources unavailable to that particular OS (sometimes for marketing reasons) and then an upgrade may be unavoidable. But until then, why bother? The OS is not the application.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
...it's just about ready for release now.
I was an OSX user, but with the current snit between Apple and Adobe, I switched to Windows 7. I'm a heavy Adobe user, and it used to be that Mac was the platform of choice for that.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I still miss Windows 3.11 (for workgroups) on the desktop, and Windows NT 3.51 on the server. Sigh.
I once got fired by a client because I didn't downgrade a windows 7 laptop to xp. No, they didn't have any custom _anything_. They just had a policy.
Stupid is as stupid does.
Anyone who has used XP can tell you that the abbreviation is also an emoticon.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The story content was "XP wont die in the Enterprise", no it wont, and is you are in the Enterprise, you or your vendor can do a spin for your hardware ... no fuss.
I stayed with Windows 2000 for the longest because XP's UI was beyond ugly. Not until you could get the Media Center themes that it became a good looking UI and I finally settled on XP.
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I thought it was a pun on Cairo, the vaporware, or head-fake, or whatever it was that Microsoft claimed would be so great but never released... and that the claim that it was a reference to user "x-perience" was a later concoction.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
XP itself never crashed(BSOD'd) unless you had serious hardware (or later, malware when it became sufficiently virulent) problems. It also otherwise Just Worked(TM).
Compare that to the stinking unworkable piles of shit that were the average Linux distros at the time, hell, I remember Gnome back when XP was released and it looked like some horrible blocky IRIX knockoff. That was back when ISP's gave you shell accounts and the only sane uses of Linux were running servers and taking IRC channels. As far as the speed, stability, and usability of Linux distros go; they are still playing catch-up to Windows XP, especially with respect to the dominant third-party applications.
And I'm a hardcore Linux/UNIX fan.
The last windows I actively used was XP, and I kind of liked it. But when I jumped the Linux bandwagon, the productivity of multiple desktop got me crying every time I had to use windows thereafter. Ten bloody years have passed, and only now is windows getting something that resembles multiple desktops. It can't possibly be that hard.
I have two laptops and three desktops in my household that are probably going to be running XP for at least another year. I don't want to upgrade one of them to window 7 until I'm ready to upgrade most/all of them to 7.
Kind of the same reason I still use DVDs instead of Blurays, I guess.
I want the editor's note on why the BillGatusOfBorg icon has been changed! Rob Malda leaves and the humor with him!?
I remember when XP came out everyone was complaining about its online activation requirement. They said they would stay with Windows 2000, which didn't have that requirement. Nowadays, barring Windows 7, it's everyone's favorite OS. Funny how things change.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Discovered two boxes running Warp on my network today, still being used in a mission-critical capacity.
So yeah, good luck getting rid of XP!
(I am a Linux, Windows *and* OSX user - I share all the pains)
Software development used to be easier when I started this life...
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Light, gets work done, all games run on it, this that.
The gaming underground loves it even more. Xp Sp2 is the preferred version for seeking max fps on 3d games it seems. There are 'stripped/edited' slipstream versions of xp sp2 being traded in underground, which apparenly consumes only 84 mb of system memory or something.
it seems its here to stay for a loong loong time with its huge software base.
Read radical news here
Well at any rate, it stood for a much better pair than Windows ME. (Might Explode)
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
What happened to the bill gates borg icon?
It was assimilated.
Software development used to be easier when I started this life...
I don't know when you started yours, but I got going in the 80s 8-bit home computer era. Everything of consequence was assembly language, and every platform was completely incompatible. Even on the mainframes, you still had a variety of HLLs and completely different OSes & architectures.
Everything nowadays is x86/x64, everything runs C++ and hence most interpreted languages, and most everything runs Java. Graphics are fast, storage is gigantic, libraries are mature, and connectivity is pretty much a given. Software development is MUCH easier nowadays.
Windows 7 is the new XP windows 8 is the new vista.
windows 8 will bomb big time.
Even prior to SP1, XP never threw a BSOD (and rebooted) unless it was something hardware or device driver related. Even Anti-Virus programs which needed to install a driver could trip a BSOD. Which was hardly surprising because it's based off the NT lineage and not MSDOS. In fact, it's quite miracle that random bits of hardware and peripherals could be slapped together with near infinite permutations and still had XP provide all the extended functionality for that specific device with as little problems as it has. Microsoft shouldn't have caught hell for this, but rather praised.
Life is not for the lazy.
It was replaced with Flying Chair Ballmer.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If you're a heavy Adobe user, you don't need anyone else's pain. You have plenty of your own.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I give it credit ... 10 years ago.
Time to move on seriously. What if the world hung on to Windows 3.0 and Mosiac when XP came out? Thats what was hot 1991 and the net would not have Yahoo, ... maybe a simple Google, nor Amazon in 2001 when XP came out if corps and people acted that way back then.
Old standards are holding technology back. XP is keeping flash alive and HTML 5 out. Even Windows 7's IE 8 is 2.5 years old? That is old now since even IE is on an anual update schedule as much as the PHBs want to cry and whine.
XP was a fine but insecure OS when it came out. But it is time to move on as we are entering a different age in computing.
http://saveie6.com/
Windows 8 will bomb, but not for king of technical reasons that ME and Vista had. Win8 will bomb because MS decided to change shit around so much, that people still stuck XP may say something along the lines of... "I was going to replace my XP computer with Win7, but now that Win8 out, fuck it. I'm going Mac. I'm tired of MS moving the bar". I really think MS is slitting their own throat here with such an early release of -yet- another OS overhaul.
Life is not for the lazy.
Funny this story came out today. I just put a new hard drive in my desktop today and installed Windows 7 on it. I have
been using XP since beta. Now its going to be a bit of a pain to migrate my data over. There's no 1-step upgrade path
from XP to 7. Yes, I know about Windows Easy Transfer and will use it to copy the profiles over.
The primary, and just about sole reason for the new OS?
Battlefield 3.
No XP / directx 9 support. It also supports Vista, but I tried it in the past and hated the performance.
I have a feeling there are going to be many more "no DX9" games soon, including M$'s own "Flight".
Indeed, some of our lab's test equipment (specifically the Agilent oscilloscopes and network analyzers) use Windows XP embedded. When I saw what they were running it was a bit of a shock as I was conditioned to believe Linux was king on embedded systems and Windows didn't have anything to compete, but I guess that's what you get for reading Slashdot/Linux sites too much. Still, seems to work reasonably well.
Although I admit it's funny to turn on a AUD$50,000 network analyzer and see a system tray balloon complaining that automatic updates is not enabled. :)
To all newcomers - people here are very close-minded and can't handle complaints about Linux. Keep this in mind.
Repeat after me: "It's just an OS. The purpose of an OS is to load programs and manage resources. The OS is not the application."
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
of about 15-20 Euro for an XP Professional license, its an excellent price/performane ration when it comes to selecting something for your VM to browse occasionally under IE. Most Software still supperts XP and the Hardware requirements are modest, so that its not a pain in the ass to run it just for printing, scanning, browsing incompatible websites, updating my phone, programming FPGAs or microcontrollers where the SW primarily supports windows.
It was a great operating system. I used to dual-boot between Win98SE and the original XP (in the pre-service pack days) on a 200mhz machine with 64MB of ram. 98 had the performance at the time, but XP had this rock-solid feel to it. I used it for development to avoid crashes, and played all my games and stuff over in 98.
But times change. It's not safe to run as administrator anymore, and XP handed that out by default. Doesn't matter how safe you think you are about running potentially bad stuff or opening attachments like in the old days. The vector for attack is the web, and any vulnerabilities your software will offer are going to get taken advantage of sooner or later. Didn't matter if you had IE or Firefox, they were both riddled with holes over the years. Even Opera, the security pro it was, had its share of problems too.
Vista introduced new technology to help with that, but was obviously a P.R. flub, allowing Windows 7 to come in and save the day. 7 is their greatest operating system to date. Granted, I disabled their OSX-wanna-be style of launcher and reverted it to the XP style quick launch icons. But the fact that they left me do that speaks to the configurability Microsoft still offers to people. You won't see Apple letting their users do anything to change the overall appearance like that. Hell, aside from adding a dock, even Apple themselves haven't really changed their appearance from the earliest Macs. Talk about being scared to try anything new.
Anyway, as someone who deals with Linux on a daily basis, and has every personal machine multi-boot to a Linux distro, Win7 is still my primary OS. But XP still set the bar for what I look for in a stable desktop operating system. My main PC can even still boot to XP, because on occasion I need hardware access I can't get in 7 as easily, for interfacing with custom electronics with Windows-based software. I have a feeling many other people will still find it useful for years to come, too.
Wow, remember when, if you were a Photoshop user, you were automatically a Mac user? I'm trying to remember what the killer app is for Macintosh now. (Hint: It's not "lion".)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What happened to the bill gates borg icon?
Bill mostly runs his charity now, and has very little to do with MS day-to-day. Plus the joke was old 10 years ago.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That's not exactly true. Or rather, it's spun in this sentence in such a way that suggests consumers are choosing 7 over XP -- they are not. They buy a new computer, it comes with whatever it comes with. There's no informed, nor conscious, choice for the most part. Most consumers don't have the skills to find an old copy of XP, wipe off 7 and re-install XP.
Businesses are making a conscious, informed decision. For the most part, there is no compelling business reason to upgrade to Windows 7. It adds very little utility, it's mostly an eye-candy shell for XP.
The "borg" Bill Gates was much better than just the Microsoft name.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to yoooou
Happy birthday dear XP
Happy birPAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
Windows 7 is the new XP windows 8 is the new vista.
windows 8 will bomb big time.
It will if Microsoft tries to cram that new Metro UI down user's throats. Methinks that sooner or later, they'll see the light, and Metro will be optional rather than the first thing you see.
MS has made some really good things, but this reminds me of their past efforts to start trends that just didn't ring with the public (remember Win 98 first edition's "Active Desktop Channels"?).
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The Chi Rho was the symbol that Constantine the Great had painted on the shields of his legions before the battle of Milvian Bridge; this act signalled his and the Roman Empire's conversion to Christianity. Who knew thaty 1600 years later it would hail the dominance of the most mediocre operating system the world has ever seen as well.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
What do you mean might explode? :P
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
paging dan brown, paging dan brown
there's a bad book plot here somewhere
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There are two types of operating systems.
Ones that age ,and ones that mature.
MS operating systems age.
It's pretty sad the 10 years is a long time for an operating system.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Software development is MUCH easier nowadays.
Sure, but the problems were so much easier back then.
TCAP-Abort
It gave me many hours/years of joyful biased windows/microsoft bashing. :) Not as good as when Windows 95/98 were still mainstream, but it was all I had. :{
James
Really? So if an app doesn't work well with an OS, he shouldn't switch to a different OS, one that works better with that app, when he's identified that the App is the key part of his daily grind?
I have my share of complaints with Windows, but let's be honest here. They dominate the desktop market for a reason. Whether it be hardware or software compatibility, they are the frontrunners in the desktop market. Windows has created an image of itself that is based on simplicity and ease of use. I have a life to live. I could care less if my desktop is locked down or proprietary. Don't believe me? Look at the success of iOS and Macs. Linux is great for desktop use, yet unreliable and unfriendly for the *general* population. I've had problems with *nix based software as well as Linux distributions in general. That's why I tend to use Windows 7 more so than I do any of my Linux operating systems installed on my machines. Although this may not be the case for other users, I speak from experience when I say I've had a better experience with 7 than I've had with any other operating system I've used so far.
I still get BSODs from Microsoft's ATAPI driver. They're rather ingenuous in their claims when they blame 3rd party drivers.
Your BSOD screen tells you what caused a crash, if you disable automatic reboots and read it.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Windows "Yuppie Flu" as it got called around these parts, "Yuppie Flu" being piss-take phrase for CFS whic at the time was more commonly/popularly referred to as ME (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_fatigue_syndrome)
Very true. Linux is much better now than just a few years ago but Windows 7 is probably the best OS ever made. I'm thoroughly enjoying dual-booting both (Xubuntu 11.10 - I can't stand Unity).
And speaking of Unity... it appears Canonical and Microsoft BOTH are about to shoot themselves in the foot with UIs that most make most people cringe (Unity and the proposed Metro in Windows 8). Thank God that with Ubuntu, we can still choose xfce or KDE. With Windows, you're stuck with whatever MS gives you.
Absolutely! Just about everyone remotely computer savvy had either heard from a friend that uses an Apple product, or knows of all the reviews through the media. "It just works" is more than a catch phrase. It's backed up with user experience. Imagine for a moment. You're next computer is going to force you to relearn a whole bunch of stuff. Knowing your past computing experience and knowing how easy it's been for new Apple users, would you not be the least bit interested in demoing a new Apple iMac? Think of how well it plays together with iPhone, Apple TV, MacBook, and all the other stuff. Most people surf the web anyways, and MS Office 2011 is available for those that need it.
I live in breath in the MS Windows world because it's my profession as an MSP (Manged Service Provider). I roll out Microsoft SBS boxes only because Apple has shunned this market. Their own server and corporate offering are anemic at best. But Apple is hoovering up the home user / consumer base. It's these people that are infiltrating the corporate world with Apple iDevices. But it will reach a tipping point in where Apple (in a very short period) will capture the SMB market in one fell swoop. As an MSP, I too will take the Apple plunge if only to better serve my clients and their needs.
And this is coming from someone who has been working in the MS World for over 15 years as a professional! I have no reason to poo-poo Apple products.
Life is not for the lazy.
Not only was XP always meant to convey "Experience", "Cairo" was not even XP's codename/project name, that was Win2k's. XP was Whistler fyi.
Nah, have to change too much and reload stuff.
Easier to just give the old machine away and buy an octo-core replacement instead for $600.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I thought while I was doing some upgrades on my computer I might want to go ahead and take the plunge from XP to Windows 7. Sure, it would be a huge hassle, and a learning curve, but the time had come. Then I saw the price tag. Sorry, but for what they are offering, I realized I really wouldn't pay more than 50$ for.
Mine BSOD occasionally. W2k didn't have that problem and SP 2 finally fixed that so it was not a driver issue but a bug in XP. XP did have its issues for the first 4 years.
http://saveie6.com/
I can't comment on that specific ATAPI issue. However it's been my experience that it's something else stepping in the same memory address of another driver. Yet, it's the driver that's the victim that gets reported. For that, I blame the OS kernel for false reporting. Or, at least not making it very clear. Sometimes you have to debug the dump files manually to find all offending drivers involved and isolate the common denominator. Thankfully, there are programs such as BlueScreenView that provide a GUI for easy readout. Highlighted line items and all.
Life is not for the lazy.
Win 2K was "Cairo" in the same sense that Vista was "Longhorn" and Mac OS 8 was "Copeland". In other words, no, not really.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
It's just an emoticon. "You're using Windows XP"
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
It meant that in some cases, it didn't. I ran ME for about 3 years on a home PC, and it was actually far more stable then 98SE I switched from.
I have no idea why to this very day, I've had huge amount of problems getting rid of ME "exploding" on family/friends' computers I was maintaining. But my home PC with ME was rock stable (at least by standards of that age).
I dunno; I like KDE over w7... These days, I can't live without 3-6 bash tabs open in addition to my 40 FF tabs.
I actually like XP x64 over 7, mainly due to W7's "audiodg.exe" problem. Oh, and still having to reinstall drivers to fix issues - I never realized how little I miss that little thing until I have to use windows and run into it. /no/ issues with audio. Linux has minor ones, and wU has glitches where audiodg.exe can suck up the entire CPU for 30s for no reason. Horrible when trying to game.
XP X64, for me, was quite stable, worked excellently, and had
Microsoft had a nice coffin and a burial site carefully planned for XP. When sub 100$ notebooks with Linux appeared in the market and it was clear the designated successor Vista would not run on such puny machine, they hastily cut the noose and brought it down from the gallows and gave it another lease on life. Wonder what would have happened if that 100$ notebook had come after XP death process had moved too far to be rescued.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Everything nowadays is x86/x64
I've got bad news for you...
iTunes, duh.
TinyXP is even better than XP, stripped of bloat and uses only around 90mb of RAM
>>the dominance of the most mediocre operating system the world has ever seen as well.
Oh, there's been waaay more mediocre OSes than XP.
CP/M? Vista?
I thought the bible predicted 1000 years of Windows XP.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
XP itself never crashed(BSOD'd) unless you had serious hardware (or later, malware when it became sufficiently virulent) problems.
I distinctly remember an occasion about 5 years ago when I logged in to my office PC (running XP) from home, I believe using Citrix. That was in the morning, to get something done early. I did my stuff, then closed the Citrix session and headed in to the office -- but that didn't terminate the session, it just paused it. At my desk, for some reason I opened that Citrix session again, this time from my desktop PC itself. For about a second I saw a "two mirrors facing each other" type of thing, as it tried to show my desktop in a window on my desktop, and another one inside of that one, etc. Then XP blue-screened. It didn't seem like a hardware thing, and that's about the only blue-screen I can remember.
Still running XP at work, but now it's the 64-bit edition...
I know my techie comrades like to bash XP for its inadequacies, but regaurdless, I personally feel that it was still a great OS. Ahh, the memories! Alas,
Damn straight. I got a Gateway Solo 5350 PIII Notebook with 256MB of RAM and Windows ME on it - anybody want to buy it?
Actually, at the time, I bought it on purpose to get a non-XP machine due to FUD regarding whether or not XP would serve me as well as '95 and friends had for the previous 5 years. Apparently, XP had about twice the run, and '95 had about twice the effective run of 3.1, and before Windows 3.1, I seem to remember a raft of 99% backward compatible DOS versions, more than one a year back in '91-'92.
Is this a Moore's Law inversion? Each successive generation of an OS will last twice as long as its' predecessor.
(I am a FreeBSD user... I do not share your pain)
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
(Posting anonymously to avoid the wrath of IT director)
Our IT department is taking brand new laptops with Windows 7 and installing Windows XP. This is 100% legitimate under our enterprise license and 100% why XP will take so long to die.
Microsoft could help themselves immensely by talking to the enterprise blockheads and showing them that Windows XP is not teh shizz they think it is. But as long as they still have a supported allowable license downgrade to XP it ain't going to happen.
I've never used WinME, actually, but from what I heard, the true problem was the device drivers: it could use the old "VxD" drivers, as well as the newer "WDM" drivers. Stick to WDM and you have a very stable system, but throw a bunch of VxD in the mix and the whole thing goes to hell.
Circumcision is child abuse.
My ME machine was fine, as soon as I disabled all the automatic trying to be helpful stuff like disk defrag starting itself, etc. Same thing they got wrong with Vista.
eXtinction of Profits for MSFT
Heh, you wish... it's still selling at 50 million licenses per quarter. Computing the profits is left as an exercise to the reader.
(And yes, a lot of those are preinstalled OEM versions, but they're still paid for.)
Standards are to be praised for that, not Microsoft, you moron.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Software development is MUCH easier nowadays.
Depends on what you are trying to do. If you want a BASIC (or BASIC like) program that inputs three numbers as text and then prints the product of those three numbers to the screen - I think that's actually harder today. Although, since Qt and Creator came out, it's starting to reach parity with the TRS-80...
Most of what's relatively easy today was simply impossible then, although, I'd like to see a serious effort put into a "modern" software development kit for the Apple II / Atari 800 / C64 generation of 8bit machines, I bet they were actually capable of a great deal more than they delivered.
One reason why XP is still so prevalent in businesses is that stack of custom apps. With everything going to webapps and the cloud now, here's hoping that this will be the last time we have to worry about app compatibility. Hopefully some of these big companies have taken the hint and realized that if they have to sink all this effort into testing app compatibility, why not just take it a step further and put the app stack in the cloud and never have to worry about it again.
I wanted to like Slackware back in about '96 - wanted to so badly that I subscribed to the CD distro... it just wasn't ready for prime time, while my Winsock was ticking over like a champ, Linux would boot once, exactly once, and have a working modem connection to the internet, then it would break itself and never connect again. Sure, it was a configuration error. Sure, with enough knowledge, (research done on the Internet from my Windows machine),, I could have learned what script was responsible and recoded it myself to work for my esoteric application, because, hell, nobody used dialup back in '96/97, did they? Yeah, DSL was at least a year out at that point.
XP made Linux look really bad when it came out. It took a long time (2004ish for me, true native 64 bit addressing in Gentoo) before Linux had anything remotely compelling to get me to switch, and even then, there were hobbyist versions of 64 bit XP floating around that were probably easier to deal with than Gentoo - but I found the free gcc compiler a compelling alternative to the licensing BS around Visual Studio...
Still going strong.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
Ugh
I just had to use it for something and I thought it would be a quick ordeal like Paint.net. It took days and was a hair pulling experience to get anything done. I have never seen such a pinicky program ... since like autocad for DOS. But even Autocad didn't do strange things if you didn't know what laywers were like Photoshop. I still prefer MS publisher for simple things as paintbrushes do not work 50% of the time for some reason and only the pencil will pick the right color from the picker? I have no clue what I am doing wrong here.
Dreamwaver is fine for a few things but difficult with other stuff. People laugh at Mac users thinking they are idiots who do not know complexity or how to use a computer. The opposite is true if they use photoshop.
http://saveie6.com/
In our case, it was Linux. We had already bought our workstations for the office (assembled from components off Newegg), and called up to get volume licensing on Win7, since we could only find volume OS upgrades on their action pack deal online. We were told we "weren't allowed" to build our own boxes; we had to buy hardware with OEM OS licenses, then upgrade from those. Standalone licenses were no longer offered, and the upgrade pack was in a similar price range that the full OS licenses were in the past.
No, Microsoft, you're not going to double-dip. We're now a Linux shop.
Had we not already purchased the hardware, Macs would have been a serious consideration. But Linux is chugging along fine with our network environment & applications. Meanwhile, the Mac Mini in the conference room being the only box that gives us grief. From my anecdotal input here & from others, a Mac is fine as long as it's a standalone or internet box. But once you start playing around with identities on LANs and get heterogeneous, you really battle the OS and have to dig into the half-BSD half-Apple nightmare under the pretty face.
The reason to pick a mac for photoshop is because the monitors and color calibration suck goatballs on a PC. Windows 7 closes the later problem with great ICC color management support. Still, even the best of PC monitors fade in light and color saturation change in angles. Only Lenovo had mac like quality screens but they are now cheap. The smaller imacs have crappy screens too so I dunno, but it was the hardware rather than the software for these users.
http://saveie6.com/
Well at any rate, it stood for a much better pair than Windows ME. (Might Explode)
I always considered it to mean "Money Extraction". And then they did it again with Vista. So, I'm thinking that the overall Win 8 deployment will be REAL hesitant. It's funny really, just about the time all the Big Boys have vetted Win 7, MS will want everybody on the "we know whats best for you, your programs, and your data" bus they are currently warming up...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
I thought it was an emoticon.
MS shill much?
Sorry, despite mostly agreeing with you, I believe the parent is a shill.
If I had mod points and if you could spell I'd mod you up.
Win 2000 was more stable, really just Windows 5 a step up from Windows NT 4.
Windows ME was an abomination, the worst of both worlds.
Windows XP was really just a step up from Windows 2000, turning off themes and a few other trivial changes brought it right back to what users were comfortable from Win2k. Better Games support as you say.
Windows 7 is by all accounts more stable but even after you make tweaks it is still another set of differences and just generally a bunch of pain in the ass minor changes for little extra gain.
Microsoft is increasingly facing diminshing returns, older versions remain a bigger challenge to them than Linux. Same as it ever was.
Mandrake was what people used to use in 2001. I may have rose-colored glasses, but I can't recall having problems with it, and I'm no bearded unix guru.
My then-girlfriend installed it because she liked ksokoban and tux racer. She's not in any kind of IT and we didn't live together back then.
Wasn't Mandrake installed in like two clicks or something?
My first Linux experience was in 1997 when I went to college, and even thought I didn't have to install it, fvwm was not terribly different from the Win95 GUI either, neither was Netscape 3.0. Shrug.
Bingo! If you had WDM ONLY all was gravy. if you had a mix of VxD and WDM (which is what the majority of OEM WinME installs were) then BAM! hell with my late sis' ME you could set your watch by it, exactly 23 minutes after startup it would crash even if you didn't do a thing to it and just left it on the desktop. IIRC there was also a timer bug that would cause WinME to crash hard if left on for a week as the clock timer would slowly but surely eat all available memory.
As for TFA while XP was and still is a great OS after SP2, and the X64 version frankly was kick ass, I'm glad I've finally got the last of my customers and family over to Windows 7. Its more stable, has a much nicer GUI thanks to breadcrumbs and jumplists along with integrated search, better drivers, all in all its just a better OS. XP was good but frankly PCs have come a hell of a long way since XP was released and the old gal just wasn't as good at managing the large resources we have now. When XP came out sub 1Ghz single cores with 256Mb of RAM or less was the order of the day and at its peak the amount of machines I saw with what I called the "standard XP setup' of 2.0-3.0Ghz P4 with 512Mb and 40Gb HDD was just nuts. But now we are dealing with as many as 8 cores on the desktop, 2Gb seems to be the minimum on RAM with 4-8gb becoming more common every day, the old gal just wasn't built for that.
Time to say thanks for the memories and then put XP out to pasture. I think we'll all agree X64 is the way to go, not only for the extra RAM but for the extra registers. XP was great for its time, and I still have an old socket 754 XP machine I use as a download box and nettop but when even my netbook comes with win 7 X64 its time to face the fact that the days of XP are coming to an end. XP X64 still makes a great file server and nettop though, its a damned shame they didn't push that OS when it first came out, it was and is pretty nice.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Sounds like a best seller to me.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
You know, I've been totally against not "owning" software most of my life, but I now think the business model for MS is wrong. They should have two versions of Windows, the normal line of Windows they have always had, and a Windows Business edition that basically gets support, security updates, and the occasional service pack, but otherwise stays the same *forever*. For the Business edition, you have to subscribe (pay) to get updates, security, new drivers, etc.
MS makes it's money from the next big version and upgrades. Imagine not having to have a new version rammed down your throat when what you had already did everything you needed it to do. It would be easier on developers (at least those targeting businesses), too.
As long as MS didn't get crazy with the fees, I think it would be a happy compromise from the forced upgrade path.
In fact, I think this would be a good business model for Mozilla as well. I would pay money just to get a stable version that works...and just *stays* the freaking same.
It's not that I hate change. It's that I think they are forcing new features that don't need to be there just to stoke their egos. Businesses don't need that. They just need something that works and stays the same.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
everyone knows "XP" stands for "Xtra Problems"
Blah blah blah. I'm writing this post on a Gateway desktop running XP. I've had it for 7 years and it's never bluescreened once. I switch it on and it just works. I've upgraded the RAM and that's it.
My biggest issue with Linux in 2002 (I was running Red Hat 7.x and then 8) was lack of office software. After I ended up with a copy of Star Office that ended that complaint. Only thing I couldn't do in Linux at the time was gaming (I lie, most games worked in Wine just fine) which I would normally boot into Windows 98 to do (Thief, StarCraft, SimCity (and its addons), Diablo II, etc. Wasn't on the high end of gaming at the time).
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
We're rolling out Windows 7 on new machines, but we're not doing in-place upgrades on older boxes. We've finally got a good ghosting program to allow us to clone images, and as long as we order the same model for a batch of replacements and just change the Win7 and Office licenses and machine names it's working out pretty well. (Last batch was eight new machines for an OB/GYN office, all cloned and rolled out in a day.) Since the half life of most machines is about 5 years (fifty percent of machines will die within that 5 year span if they aren't properly cared for), it'll be a while before XP is gone for good.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Or, maybe it's a realization that an os can be "good enough", and doesn't really matter in the big picture, as long as it doesn't get in the way....and this is how it should be. It should "just work" and let you run or do whatever it is you're trying to!
-Captain Obvious
Software development is MUCH easier nowadays.
Depends on what you are trying to do. If you want a BASIC (or BASIC like) program that inputs three numbers as text and then prints the product of those three numbers to the screen - I think that's actually harder today. Although, since Qt and Creator came out, it's starting to reach parity with the TRS-80...
Most of what's relatively easy today was simply impossible then, although, I'd like to see a serious effort put into a "modern" software development kit for the Apple II / Atari 800 / C64 generation of 8bit machines, I bet they were actually capable of a great deal more than they delivered.
I've found AutoIT to be good enough for my limited interest in programming. Simple enough to get it to accept input and display output via msgbox's, or you could dump output to console. Additionally you can make it "do useful stuff" by simply having it drive the GUI in other programs:
http://www.autoitscript.com/site/
Uhhh...You CAN buy nicer screens for windows too you know billy, they just ain't cheap, kinda like how they ain't cheap when it comes to Apple either. Hell you can use an Apple cinema display if that is what melts your butter.
I don't know, maybe its just me, but frankly i don't see anything wrong with the new screens as long as you calibrate them. as you pointed out Win 7 has great ICC support and while I'm not a photoshop guy I do have a customer that does lots of graphics work (signs, logos, painting ex wives out of photos LOL!) and he is quite happy with the picture on windows 7 and a new 24 inch Dell monitor. in the end what he sees on the screen is what comes out the printer and isn't that what matters?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
XP is keeping flash alive and HTML 5 out.
1) how? I am quite sure that there is no anti-html5 service running on XP and if Firefox, Opera or Chrome supports it and runs on XP then it can be used.
2) even if it does (though see #1 above), why is that so bad? Flash works. HTML5 will probably works as well (or use a few times more resources because it is more modern and it's not cool when a newer technology runs on older hardware, so you need to add more layers of abstraction and delay loops).
Time to move on seriously.
Why? What does 7 do that XP don't? Is the difference worth the price of 7? OK, I'll simplify that -let's say that I pirate Win7, is the difference worth me reinstalling Windows and having the computer not work correctly (because I forgot to install some app that I rarely use but now need to use) for a week? And no, additional ~700MB of RAM isn't worth it, since the 7 will most likely use them up anyway.
Amen. Finding the solutions, for me, could get frustrating. The only other real problems I had were lock-ups caused by me and my messing about whilst "tweaking" the experience. System once locked up, or so I thought, so I left and went to the bar; four hours later, not ten minutes after I'd returned home, XP chugged through whatever the holdups were and presented the original window I'd asked for. Beer goggles and all, but I thought it was amazing.
I recall the excitement, even wonder, when upgrading from 98SE on a Dell Optiplex (GX-100 ?)- Celeron A and 128MB RAM that I got via MSU salvage. Wow, night and day, _and_ compatibility modes. With a larger HDD and going to 384MB memory, XP worked fine. Due my own efforts, I'd reinstall/repair every few months for the first couple of years. Finding congenial, efficient, and effective AV and firewall, etc., getting the apps I wanted, was an interesting exercise.
Over the years, several times XP woke up in brand-new homes (other used but more capable machines). After multiple reboots discovering new hardware, etc., and sometimes tracking down proper drivers, it kept chugging along; Microsoft was always gracious in re-activating.
Ran 64-bit in '06-'07 while in school. Used Virtual PC and VMWare stuff. Later dual-booted for most of two years with Vista 64-bit.
I switched to Linux full time early this year but XP lives on in VirtualBox.
Thanks, XP.
They dominate the desktop market for a reason.
Yes, and that reason has nothing to do with its quality or ease-of-use, technical merit or anything other than a) it was installed by default on every no-name brand PC at the lowest price points and b) it was pirated widely.
Look at the success of iOS and Macs. [] I've had problems with *nix based software as well as Linux distributions in general.
Mac OS X is *nix. It's something that's easy to forget because, unlike others, it never exposes its *nix underpinnings unless you go looking.
I run a fully updated XP Pro on an 8 year old IBM T41 & it's stable as a rock. I have my cellphone connected via bluetooth & a bluetooth earpiece on another bluetooth connection for Skype or music. VPN tunnelling through a USB dongle internet connection. It just works.
I once 'fixed' an XP Pro machine (an old Dell) by pulling one of the two 64MB RAM cards which was bad. XP Pro booted into 64MB of RAM with no difficulty, though it did thrash pagefile.sys. It ran Word and connected to the internet no problems.
Like to see Windows 7 do that.
Nico M, London, GB.
Question: Have you tried any of the Corel offerings like Painter or Pain Shop pro? While i too find PS to be a royal PITA for most jobs i've found painter and PSP to be quite easy and actually pleasant to use. They both also work really well even with the low end tablet inputs which at least for me is a hell of a lot nicer way to work than trying to deal with a mouse. you can pick up a tablet input at Monoprice for as low as $23 and get the big ten incher for $48 so it isn't like they are expensive. I gave one of the 10 inchers along with a copy of Painter for my youngest boy's BDay and he loves it. in windows 7 it all just works as smooth as butter and it allows him to really get fine detail in his drawing.
So you really ought to look at getting a pad input and Corel Painter or PSP. Even if you don't deal with photos that often it makes it a hell of a lot nicer experience and Adobe has always been a steeper learning curve, at least for me.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Actually you are partially incorrect. while its true that Metro is a serious clusterfuck of a UI (I've shown the screencaps to over 120 customers so far and NOT A SINGLE ONE liked the look or thought they would want to try it. The closest I got to an endorsement was this exchange "That is a nice looking cell phone screen, what kind of cell phone is it? Is it Android? i've heard those are quite nice....what do you mean Windows? Windows what? why that's just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone for my desktop?") there is also a "classic mode" which you can see in some of the developer's presentation which is just the Windows 7 GUI with a square start button instead of round and from what I've heard a simple registry change makes it default.
So actually in this case with BOTH Windows and ubuntu you don't have to take the clusterfuck UI, although I hear its more of a PITA to strip out unity and get something decent running than it is to just run Xubuntu or Kubuntu in the first place. Personally if it were me I'd be looking at Vector Linux which not only has 6 versions tailored for what kind of machine you want to run it on, from ultra light live to workstation, but they also have a "KDE Classic' version that has a fully updated KDE 3 as the default DE. I've been playing with it and its pretty nice, especially the light live for older laptops.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
CP/M was a loader and a file system. It was like a home computer BASIC environment without the BASIC. Vista would have to be a lot better to be mediocre.
404: sig not found.
There are at least 30 things that Windows 7 is ahead compared to XP. I do not even know where to begin. It is like saying what is so different from my 1938 to a car from today.
For #1 people who still use XP never upgrade and therefore use IE. That is how I got to that conclusion if you follow statistics. Html 5 on Windows 7 is hardware accelerated and can do visuals that only tablets and smartphones can do with smooth fast scrolling and hardware accelerated font redering. DirectX11 provides much of these features not to mention HTML 5 has other things besides just video. Drag and drop, progress bars, worker threads for multi core systems, and even offline data storage for when you have no wifi to do your work in intranet apps. The ones today really suck because they are designed for IE 6 and in 5 or 6 years you will see them look more like iPhone apps and know what I am talking about.
XP is holding it back.
XP is suspectible to bit rot, it is insecure, has no GPU accelerated graphics, and was designed when internet meant WWW with dialup for simple websites that resembled minspring and craigslist. I do not have the space to go into details but even with up to date Windows Updates it still has design flaws that make it insecure even if you use another browser. If you are refering to ram, keep in mind you are not seeing the whole the picture as Windows 7 will cache it. At $15 per gig that is not a big deal anymore. I have a 3.5 year old laptop with just 2 gigs of ram and I can multitask and run photoshop on it fine with Windows 7. Its age does show but that is due to the slow cpu and graphics. It is certainly usable.
http://saveie6.com/
Exactly!
It's been a consistent problem ever since I first installed the first release of XP, on a variety of hardware and no end of drivers, so I'm pretty confident it's the ATAPI.sys driver itself.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I've paid a lot of money to Microsoft for the initial releases of Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, and Windows XP. How many times am I supposed to pay for bug fixes that don't happen?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You must be kidding. You really think this?
At that time, our users were normally another programmer or, at least, someone literate enough on technology, We didn't had to spend 85% of our planning effort on thinking in ways of doing things to people that does not want to learn anything, to keep the stupid ones from hurting themselves - and still delivering a useful program at the end of pipe.
Are you sure you work in Software?
Did you ever tried to make a multi-platform application (Android, iOS, Symbian and Bada)? Or perhaps porting an Palm/OS program to something newer?
The MS-DOS' ancestor was programmed by ONE guy. The Windows 7 needs more than a thousand just for the core functionalities.
It was EASIER that days. The programs weren't so powerful, feature plenty or idiot proof as the modern ones. But was a lot easier to program them at that times.
I suggest you to learn 6502 and Z80 Assembly languages before making such statements. Teenagers managed to make good money using them as the main programming language.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Sadly, true.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I once booted DOS 5.0 on 640K of RAM, ran full-screen games on it, loaded WordPerfect no problem, connected to the local BBS, no problem. Didn't even need a pagefile.sys for any of that..
Like to see Windows XP do that.
What's your point.. an old OS runs on old hardware.
On April 8, 2014, security patches and hotfixes for all versions of Windows XP will no longer be available. That basically means if you run it past that date, any exploit released out into the wild will not be patched, ever.
Furthermore, hardware vendors haven't consistently supported XP in years. Windows drivers are only forward-compatible, and Vista has been out since January 30, 2007, which is nearly 5 years. If you upgrade or purchase new hardware in any way, good luck with getting that to work in XP without installing old network and sound cards for starters. Even then, the performance is also going to be terrible on an OS tuned for 10-12 year old hardware and considers SATA to be exotic.
Don't expect software vendors to thoroughly support XP in the next 2 years or so, either, when XP usage will likely plummet to single digits like IE6 has in the past 2 years. The fact that a simple program like Paint.NET 4, due at the end of the year, won't support XP is a harbinger of this. At 10 years old, XP is like a Linux system stuck on Kernel 2.2, KDE 2.2, Xfree86 4.1, and GTK 1.2. The fact that such an old configuration is still supported to any extent and remains thoroughly tested by software developers is nuts. Like with web devs and IE6, most probably can't wait to drop it.
Mind you, I'm not fond of Windows, but what are ya gonna do? At some point it's necessary to get work done. I'm participating in a thread at the Adobe forum to convince them to port Photoshop et al to Android, and it finally looks like we're getting some traction. But the hardware would still need to catch up.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
For #1 people who still use XP never upgrade and therefore use IE.
Interesting. Though I told everybody (who I know) to not use IE for anything other than websites that require it. Some people are using IE as their primary browser but that is not the fault of the OS, as Microsoft even offers a choice window to choose another browser. Now, if the other browsers did not work on XP then it would be different.
OK, 7 supports GPU accelerated graphics (2D, that is, other than games). Other features of HTML5 look like they can be implemented on XP (maybe Firefox already supports them).
even with up to date Windows Updates it still has design flaws that make it insecure even if you use another browser.
Isn't 7 also vulnerable to zero-day exploits? I mean if only the hacker knows about the bug then he can exploit it. And 7 has bugs, otherwise it would not get new updates (since everything is fixed).
If you are refering to ram, keep in mind you are not seeing the whole the picture as Windows 7 will cache it.
Caching is good, but I have a win7 VM and it uses more RAM than XP, even if I consider cache as "empty". Also, on the same VM server, XP with 512MB RAM runs faster than 7 with 1GB.
7 uses ~400MB straight after boot (Total memory: 1024, available: 617, free 417), while XP uses only 123MB and that is with AV running.
At $15 per gig that is not a big deal anymore.
As my main PC uses registered ECC DDR1, the memory costs more. The point is that now with XP, 3.25GB is enough for me. The remaining ~700MB are not wort the very painful reinstalling, even if I installed 2003 (32/64bit) or XP 64 bit, not to mention 7 with its different UI (making the reinstall more painful, and for now the ClassicShell does not bring the Win2k UI completely back).
> Uhhh...You CAN buy nicer screens for windows too you know billy, they just ain't cheap,
You certainly can, and they're not any more expensive than a Thunderbolt of similar size. What it comes down to is that a professional buys hardware appropriate for the job, and the OS is only there to load the applications and manage resources, not be cute or colorful. If Apple wants to screw around, they can do it in someone else's sandbox. I used to think I needed them. Apple managed to beat that out of me.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Are you implying that that icon was... funny? And not, say, the oldest, least funny, joke ever made?
Comment of the year
I think the best 3 reasons to upgrade to win7 64 bit from xp 64 bit are that it is a lot easier to run as non-admin all the time, Sandboxie runs on it, and TRIM support for SSDs. Those security advantages are significant and TRIM is nearly a necessity for SSDs.
It actually is possible to run XP as non-admin with the help of SuRun and other apps, but it can be a PITA since a significant percentage of apps need full admin rights to even run.
Compatibility issues are a mixed bag. My sound card won't run on Win 7 x64 due to a lack of driver support, but Adobe Premiere won't run on XP x64. So either way I can't run my favorite video editing software until/unless I buy new sound hardware which otherwise I just don't need and can't justify spending money on.
I triple boot XP x64, Win7 x64 Embedded and TinyCore-64 Linux. Once you tweak the win7 UI so that it is not as much of an OSX clone with that dock-like ribbon at the bottom and use a decent third party search tool and turn on the 'classic' theme, it's really not so bad, but I still find it takes me longer to do most things than in XP. Except for a faster boot time with win7 I haven't noticed a speed difference either way. At least not with the embedded version. 90% of the time I just boot to XP x64.
Although Win7 does have some security enhancements from WinXP, it is important to remember that both OSes are still from Microsoft and the security is abysmal. For online banking or any credit card purchases or email log-ins you should be using either Linux or OSX. Period.
If you use Windows for financial stuff you will get screwed eventually. It's just inevitable. It happened to me and I am uber-paranoid about security and use many of the best third party security apps. Now I only use Linux for anything financial. If I had a Mac or Hackentosh box I wouldn't be afraid to use that either.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
" a) it was installed by default on every no-name brand PC at the lowest price points and b) it was pirated widely." Is that your best explanation on why it's dominating the desktop market? Because it was pirated? Based on your logic, Linux should have long killed Microsoft as it was being offered at no charge. What about corporations? What are their reasons for using Windows? Like I said before, Windows, as "dummbed down" it may seem, just works. It shields everyday users from the complexities of working with terminal or editing configuration files (which you still have to do, even in Ubuntu). It's also the platform of choice for mainstream applications and games. Generally speaking, I've had a smoother and more enjoyable experience using Windows than I did with Linux. With the way things are going with Gnome 3, KDE, and Unity, I doubt Linux distros would ever be comparable to Windows 7.
A small office chair rotated clockwise about 120 degrees and back about 30.
404: sig not found.
Well done for picking on one of my arguments while totally ignoring the other.
Ohh... Thief....
-- no sig today
It runs nicely in a VM. Windows 7 as a guest OS is horrible. I'd imagine Microsoft will tackle this problem soon enough, though.
Why? What does 7 do that XP don't?
I'm still using Windows 2000, but only now I'm finding that programs don't work. I was going to upgrade to XP, but I heard people talk about Windows 7 etc.
Here is the website:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/compare?T1=tab20
Here are some "features":
* Touch and tap instead of point and click. (I don't want this)
* Stream music, photos, and videos around your house. (I'd rather use existing programs.)
* Open programs and files you use most in a click or two.
I think I'll still try and find a copy of XP. I love the speed of Windows 2000. Everything's instant on a modern system. I'm not wasting any cycles on fades, alpha blends and graphical task bars. I'm not wasting time indexing when I only search a few folders anyway. As long as I can run Firefox 4, then I'm okay - I imagine at least for another 5 years.
Come on, I'm no shill. And Windows feels a lot better than Linux. It's the Mac Fanbois you need to worry about.
> Wasn't Mandrake installed in like two clicks or something?
Mandrake is what "converted" me to Linux. Loved that OS. It took more than "two clicks" to install, but in fact, it blew me away because it was easier to install than Windows. The only catch that I recall was that frightening "move your mouse wheel!!!" dialog that would pop up during the installation. (Remember THAT thing?) :)
But since we're talking about XP here, I have to say, it has been a good 'un. Windows 7 seems to be pretty solid as well.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
What it comes down to is that a professional buys hardware appropriate for the job, and the OS is only there to load the applications and manage resources, not be cute or colorful.
Workflow my good man, workflow. For some people the Mac OS X user interface simply fits better with their workflow than the Windows UI. Heck, I know that personally I'd take a poorly configured FVWM2 install over any version of Windows (yet I'm stuck running Windows at work, oh well).
It doesn't even have to be the fastest-to-use UI, it can be a lot more subjective than that, depending on your workflow a particular operating system/GUI may just feel more "fluid" because none of your regular interactions with it feel overly slow (a classic example of something which drives me nuts every time I encounter it is the dialog for opening or saving files in Windows Vista/7, it feels so clunky that I just want to find the person who designed it and punch him/her as hard as I can, I'm sure MS figured out it was faster and easier for a certain percentage of regular users but for me it's clunky).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Over the years, several times XP woke up in brand-new homes (other used but more capable machines). After multiple reboots discovering new hardware, etc., and sometimes tracking down proper drivers, it kept chugging along; Microsoft was always gracious in re-activating.
Windows has always been horrible when it comes to moving a disk to a new machine. I still remember the horror of migrating the system disk for an NT4 server to a new machine, took the whole day to slowly and methodically install drivers, reboot, repeat.
I suppose that by comparison to that XP was a dream but I'm comparing it to Linux and *BSD where I've frequently moved system disks to completely different machines without any changes beyond "oh, the network devices have new names, better change /etc/ipf.rules". Windows OTOH will throw a multi-hour fit if you move your disk to a seemingly identical machine...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Not sure what you mean. My workflow is defined by the application, where I spend all my time. What do I care if icons jump to get my attention?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
...and Mac OS 8 was "Copeland". In other words, no, not really.
Did that come before or after Butthead Astronomer?
This space unintentionally left blank.
Some people actually use more than one application in their workflow.
Not to mention things like my example, the save/open file dialog which you have to deal with. And that's not even mentioning a host of other little UI quirks that exist. As I stated, it's all about your workflow, for some people there is no difference between one platform and another, for others there are clear differences that make the prone to stick to the platform they are more comfortable with.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Win7 consumes too much resources for her laptop to cope, but XP is just dandy.
Consumers have been quicker to ditch XP for Windows 7 while businesses hem and haw and slowly test a decade's-worth of custom apps on Windows 7.
Consumer's haven't been given a choice..Businesses do have a choice.
Just because 90% of laptops are grey doesn't mean that 90% of people would buy a grey laptop if they had a choice.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
I will grant that I probably shouldnt have been given the distro I was (which WAS given by a bearded unix guru), and that there may have been good alternatives, but I would be very impressed if they had anything close to a 3 click LDAP / AD joining process, or anything remotely like GPOs. Windows XP managed to cover the range of use cases from home user / media playing to corporate managed drone box very nicely, and I think calling it mediocre is a bit of a stretch. Only MS OS that I am more nostalgic for is Win 2000, and thats mainly because my recollection of it is on 2005-era hardware, where it was blazing fast. None of the crap, just a solid NT-based OS-- yes plz.
Windows 7 has a built-in RAM diagnostic...
No sig today...
The last time I saw an ATAPI error under Windows was in the (relative) infancy of CD burners, when folklore and back-end customization waged war against the much-vaunted coaster.
But the war is over, and it simply turns out that it wasn't so complicated after all: The software and hardware sucked, and the hacks to mitigate that sucked harder. After a time, software simply improved, and the old hardware was replaced. (The hacks disappeared naturally.)
Are you doing anything consistently peculiar with your system?
Kid-proof tablet..
You, sir, have never run an incarnation of Slackware from the NT4 era. You'd build your own kernel and modules, and you wanted things to be as lean as possible to save on RAM (which was precious in ways which seem unfathomable today), reduce complexity, and keep the lengthy compile times to a minimum.
So, generally, you only included the system devices that you needed. Blindly move a disk to a completely different system? Get ready for an extended round of booting from floppy, fighting with LILO, and learning how to build a new kernel on a box that only half-way works (what network device? what CD-ROM?) so that it can be brought up fully.
It might be preferable to NT4's own hairy mess, but not by much.
It was painful enough that I learned how to pre-configure the existing installation to suit the new box, which was at least half-way sane but still involved hoops of flaming sodium if I'd made an improper assumption. And it didn't work at all in the event that I was changing the disk over to a new machine due to some other fatal hardware problem.
Perhaps more to the point, all of that pain has taught me that when I migrate to a new machine I should just do a clean install on the new box. Once I get the hardware running properly, I install the requisite services and user programs. And then I move any user and configuration data over, test it, change the hostname and IP address, and call it done. Almost no downtime required, and all accomplished with a great amount of leisure since the old system is still running during all of this. (It works under Windows, too, though the details can be very different indeed.)
(The *BSDs, in stock form, did seem to behave much better with random hardware changes at that time, but they were also far more mature than the typical Linux distribution...)
Kid-proof tablet..
Only MS OS that I am more nostalgic for is Win 2000, and thats mainly because my recollection of it is on 2005-era hardware, where it was blazing fast. None of the crap, just a solid NT-based OS-- yes plz.
Totally agree. XP was just a garbagefied version of 2000.
Win2k was probably Microsoft's best piece of engineering... too bad it's almost impossible to run it on modern hardware.
As for Linux 3 click LDAP/AD join : All RedHat-deratives have had that for a long time if you were OK with plain LDAP. The system-config-autentication package sorted you out for LDAP and NIS. Both in the GUI or in a curses interface.
As a vi user I always thought it meant "delete" "replace".
That's what I thought about it until about SP2 when it finally edged ahead of Win2k.
It appears you didn't ever use it before SP2.
Also by the way, I'm using an Enlightenment desktop theme that I've been using since 1998, some time before XP - and in a few ways it actually resembles Windows 7 ( WTF is this bullshit about catchup?) Gnome and KDE were not as bad as you pretend back then either, it was after 2000 after all.
Speed? WTF? Ever wondered why numerical processing is only done on highly stripped down versions of MS Windows if it's done on that platform at all? Take a look at your task manager application some time and learn about MS Windows.
Clean install, yessir, that's the way to go. I eventually learned that. It seems like more work at the outset, but can save bags of time fiddling with stuff. I'd forgotten that I'd have to do a repair install to 'set' a new HAL or somesuch. Still, it worked. Only in the last few years have I moved any Linux installs to new homes - with the later versions of major distros and vanilla configs it tends to be a lot smoother, all right. I think it's one of the reasons I also developed a liking for virtual machines. Unless one requires direct hardware access for something it goes much more smoothly. Haven't compiled any kernels in a while; getting old and lazy.
It's 4:30 am, couldn't sleep, got my first good laugh of the day when I read "hoops of flaming sodium" - thanks.
@ mykael_j - yeah, I was fairly lucky, and I chalked the tedious bits down to learning. I don't do that anymore, just down to the homebuilt and a laptop; when I work on somebody else's machines I try to do it a bit smarter than I used to.
Actually I have, I remember all too well installing the a and n packages from floppies so I could get the system up and running just enough that I could get online...
And yes, when it came to compiling kernels people (myself included) did have a tendency to only include the bare necessities. Still, it was nothing compared to NT4. And when it came to moving somewhat stock installs from say, 1998 or later, Linux easily beat (and still beats) Windows.
My "trick" back then was to always make sure things were set up to an extremely generic configuration, these days it seems you can mostly just move the disk and then you might have to boot from a CD or USB stick to fix grub. But, Windows is still bad when it comes to this, as I said, I once made the mistake to think that moving a disk between two "identical" machines would be at least somewhat painless, still took quite some time before the seemingly endless reboot cycle was over...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Surprised this isn't in a +5 comment already: I think XP's longevity is explained by the era of "good enough" computers in the 2000s. In the 1990s, every year or so, you had to upgrade your computer to run new programs and use new hardware. This drove the treadmill with Win95, 98, 98b (what was that called? the USB support upgrade), 2000, XP. MS added new features like SMP and USB, and hardware was upgraded. Most people needed a new computer every year.
In the 2000s, computers were "good enough" that there was no reason to upgrade. No one has come up with a "killer app" for consumers who do word processing, e-mail, and web browsing that would make them upgrade their machines. Throw in three recessions (01, 05, and 08), and businesses have had little reason to upgrade, either. So XP's longevity is largely by accident.
Sure, people like me want 64-bit computers with 16GB of RAM, but for the normal user, that's ridiculous. Any old dual-core machine from the past decade with 2GB of RAM is fine for what the 99% do. The 1% of us who run Linux and develop software can build Core i7 machines.
Other than that, not much has changed. If you've noticed, progress has basically stopped. If you look at Gnome 3, FireFox, Windows 7 - all they do is rearrange things. Are there any compelling new features? If it doesn't have eye candy, add it (FireFox). If it has eye candy, remove it (Chrome). If you don't have anything new, rearrange everything randomly (Gnome 3 and Windows 7). USB devices are cheap and plentiful, and new standards like Thunderbolt are slow to take off because USB is "good enough".
Software development is MUCH easier nowadays.
Depends on what you are trying to do. If you want a BASIC (or BASIC like) program that inputs three numbers as text and then prints the product of those three numbers to the screen - I think that's actually harder today. Although, since Qt and Creator came out, it's starting to reach parity with the TRS-80...
Most of what's relatively easy today was simply impossible then, although, I'd like to see a serious effort put into a "modern" software development kit for the Apple II / Atari 800 / C64 generation of 8bit machines, I bet they were actually capable of a great deal more than they delivered.
I've found AutoIT to be good enough for my limited interest in programming. Simple enough to get it to accept input and display output via msgbox's, or you could dump output to console. Additionally you can make it "do useful stuff" by simply having it drive the GUI in other programs:
http://www.autoitscript.com/site/
I'm sure there are a lot of tools out there that are easier than TRS-80 Basic, but, back in the day, when you powered the machine on, you were booted straight to the program interpreter command line - a hell of a lot easier than tracking down and installing a good tool, it "just worked" ;-)
Which ISPs offered shell accounts in 2001 (when XP was released)?
re: bash, have you used the PowerShell ISE? It has tabs...
WindowsME was an improvement, but it was so similar to Win98 that it could have been called "Win98 Service Pack 3" :)
Everyone seemed to be 100% sure that WinME was crap, even though they had never seen a machine running it.... except mine. It ran great on my computer... so it must have been the one exception.
Perhaps you should have announced which language you used, not everyone, even on slashdot, would recognize python from such a short snippet of code. Let alone realize it's probably Python3, when it fails to work Python2 is still the default on many systems, including Fedora.
Agree for general desktop and notebook machines, but many netbooks still run better on XP than on 7. I've had users ask me to switch their netbooks to 7 (for a variety of reasons, most silly, some good), and they've always complained that XP was snappier and more responsive. Cue requests to switch back, which I'm all for as they're paying for every operation I do on the computer.
7 might be stabler, and there may be completely unauthorized "lite" pirated versions around that might in fact run decently even on low-power hardware (at the likely price of stability), but I still warn people against running it on netbooks.
Compare that to the stinking unworkable piles of shit that were the average Linux distros at the time, hell, I remember Gnome back when XP was released and it looked like some horrible blocky IRIX knockoff. That was back when ISP's gave you shell accounts and the only sane uses of Linux were running servers and taking IRC channels.
I think you're misremembering your dates there. XP came out in 2001, long past the age of ISP shell accounts, perhaps you're thinking of Win 3.1
I used gnome a bit back in 2002, on a Red Hat 6 variant. it basically looked like a GTK1 version of the Gnome 2.foo I used on Fedora 12, 13 and 14. I used single panel on bottom style, applications button on the left, notifications and clock on the right, taskbar in the middle. Very Windows-ish The KDE1 version on that old Red Hat variant was also very Windows ish by default.
The last time I saw an ATAPI error involved an HP branded SCSI CDRW drive with an Adaptec 2940UW PCI card running under Windows 2000.
Life is not for the lazy.
paging dan brown, paging dan brown
there's a bad book plot here somewhere
Sounds like a best seller to me.
You're _both_ right!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I booted NT 3.51 with 12MB of RAM. That seems unbelievable today.
Of course, it didn't work well, but it did work.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Even if there were a functional difference, not just a cosmetic one, it's still about the application. Adobe applications used to be best run on Macs. But Apple chased them out of the barn. What this means to me is a platform change, because the application is more important than the platform.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What's your point..
Our "point" is that this knee-jerk Microsoft / XP bashing is tired. XP is, by and large, a stable, reliable workhorse.
XP + nLite = what do you need more ?
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
Imagine for a moment. You're next computer is going to force you to relearn a whole bunch of stuff. Knowing your past computing experience and knowing how easy it's been for new Apple users, would you not be the least bit interested in demoing a new Apple iMac?
No. I'd go for Linux, which a lot of "computer savvy" people would have recommended me, because it's free in every sense of the word and support for older hardware and software will be there, which , if I've kept XP for over 10 years, it's something I'd be interested in.
Oblivion Awaits
WindowsME was an improvement, but it was so similar to Win98 that it could have been called "Win98 Service Pack 3" :)
Everyone seemed to be 100% sure that WinME was crap, even though they had never seen a machine running it.... except mine. It ran great on my computer... so it must have been the one exception.
I agree about ME==98-SP3...
I don't love MS and believe they deserve more bad press than they get, but in the case of ME, I think it got a disproportionate amount of bad press and somehow popular sentiment backlashed at it worse than it deserved, at least relative to their contemporary products that got less bad press and popular resentment than ME.
XP itself never crashed(BSOD'd) unless you had serious hardware (or later, malware when it became sufficiently virulent) problems.
If you tell that to users of SINE (Aventail Connect VPN client), we'll just laugh and laugh, and then cry after the flashbacks have taken their toll. When I was with IBM, that part of the standard build for our work-issued ThinkPads was the easiest way to routinely crash XP Pro, which is why SINE was phased out in favor of MTS (AT&T Net Client).
That version of Aventail Connect was crap software, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it "malware."
I'm a Mac OS X user at home and XP SP3 still does the job for me, both as a bootcamp OS, and as a VM OS under Parallels and Virtualbox.
At work, we still use XP on all of our workstations and IE8.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
You aren't foxhoundz either...
About the same for me, except it was an Advansys SCSI card and a Plextor PR-820 CD-R burner. (I forget if it was Win2k or an early XP.)
Everything has worked so well more-or-less since then, regardless of interface or software, that I haven't really thought about it much. I've got three DVD-RW drives tied to my desktop right now: One internal PATA, one PATA-over-cheapshit-Chinese-USB-dongle, and one prepackaged USB external -- all of very different brands and vintages. I abuse them all variously for all manner of CD-shaped media, sometimes all at once, and things really do just work under Windows.
Even with the weird concoction I have of software ATAPI emulators, transparent DVD decryption tools like AnyDVD, and such that are always present on my system: No problem.
My rather old daily-use Dell laptop somewhat bizarrely has a PATA burner on an internal SATA channel, and it's the same story: It just works. Always has. This laptop came with XP, I put Vista on it just to learn it, and it's now on 7. No issues, ever. (Er. Well. The first drive eventually gave up and was replaced, but that's not exactly Microsoft's fault. I blame Sony.)
*shrug*
Kid-proof tablet..
Actually the scary part? The pirate version RUNS BETTER and is MORE stable on old hardware than the full version! honestly the guys at MSFT really ought to hire the guy that makes "Tiny Windows (insert version)" because he makes a better light OS than even embedded and winFLP. we are talking about an XP that uses 56Mb of RAM on the desktop, 63Mb for Win2k3, 386Mb for Vista (even he can't work miracles) and 248Mb for Windows 7. I of course don't sell units with it and have only played with it for my own amusement but the speed this guy gets is just nuts. you can tell it isn't some Vlite job, he really tore into the guts and rebuilt like like a hot rod. Here is the only changes I would make if I was using the Tiny version. One it doesn't have UAC by default on, you have to make a second account to enable it. Two it doesn't have WMC which I like, but in both cases I can understand why, as its mainly built for gamers that want to squeeze that last drop of performance and not for HTPCs.
But I have to disagree on netbooks unless you are talking about atom which frankly is shite on a crusty roll no matter WHAT OS you are using. I have one of the new AMD Brazos netbooks and honestly even the default non tweaked Windows 7 X64 HP runs like a dream on it. Its snappy, apps loaded quick even before i stuck 8Gb of RAM in it (which yeah i know its overkill, but hell with the gift card I got 8Gb for $31. How could I turn THAT down friend?) and both HD video and games play with nary a stutter. While I'm not the type to game while i'm mobile there are even videos of guys playing L4D and other shooters on it and getting decent framerates. Just because its a netbook doesn't mean it has to suck the big wet titty. Oh and I get a full 6 hours under Windows 7 and if all I want is the web it also comes with ExpressGate which gives me 6 seconds from cold start and an extra 2 hours on the battery. Its the EEE 1215B and they have it with 2Gb for $299 at Tigerdirect if you know somebody that wants a good Windows 7 netbook. With the RAM and a carrying case i got out at less than $350 for the whole smash, you just can't beat that for a dual core with Radeon graphics.
Finally if you want to know how to get Windows 7 running decently on even a shite Atom may I suggest you check this out friend? Its a central repo of links to how tos for squeezing every last bit of performance out of Windows 7 . I've found that if one wants a that runs fast this site really gives some good performance tips and have used a few on customers whose hardware was borderline Windows 7 capable and by the time i was done they were actually enjoying 7 more than XP. It won't crank out the speed like tiny 7 does but it will make windows 7 faster, especially if you are talking about running it on shit like the Atom. although to be honest my advice to customers on Atom since the beginning has been a giant NO WAY. You can get an AMD based unit for just a tiny bit more money and the performance just stomps a mudhole in Atom's skinny ass. I've sold plenty of both the MSI Wind and the Asus EEE AMD netbooks and they are worlds better than Atom when it comes to actual feel and user experience, its like night and day. if you haven't tried one you really should, they are sweeeeet!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Well, sure. Modern Linux distros (save the tailored Gentoo install and the like) tend to autoconfig every bit of necessary hardware at every single boot, as if every boot is a new install. It happens so fast that it doesn't even matter, and RAM and disk are damn near free at this minute level on any semi-modern PC.
I blame the good folks behind Knoppix for first figuring out how to get this right (not that it is in any way a bad thing).
But in the NT4 days, I remember things generally being very different from automagic. And they were.
Meanwhile: At work, we have two identical HPaq ML330 Windows Server 2003 boxes. One is basically an offline spares kit, and the other gets used daily. Things on the working box are backed up daily in disk image format.
More than a few times, usually just after the end of the year, the in-house accountant has asked to be able to look at last year's stuff as it existed at that time, in isolation from the rest of the accountancy stuff.
Doing so is easy: Just plug the spare ML330 in, restore the entire hard disk with Acronis, and....done. It boots up and works just like it was turned off yesterday (or yesteryear). I haven't tried it, but I strongly suspect that it'd work just as well under VMWare as on actual bare metal.
So, I really don't think that things are as bad, these days, as you assert that they were well over a decade ago. Everything seems to have improved a lot in that time.
Kid-proof tablet..
Meh. Despite the timestamp above that says it's Thursday at about midnight:30, I'm up for the count even if it is fast approaching 4:30AM. I gave up on sleeping at night a year or two ago, and am better (healthier, happier) for it. YMM[probably]V. (And perhaps unusually or unexpectedly, money and family has stayed about the same for me, even with my somewhat-recently-self-imposed "strange" hours for work/sleep/play.)
As to clean installs, it even works on Android phone: Wipe everything, install the latest Cyanogenmod (or whatever), restore apps and useful data, and done.
Looking back, starting from a clean install would've easily saved me a lot of effort even when I was using OS/2. I wish I'd learned it sooner, though I don't know that I'd have ever really tried it unless I figured it out the hard way.
Kid-proof tablet..
I agree that things in the Windows world are better these days. Still, I did try moving a Windows 2003 install (admittedly not the latest version of Windows) to a machine that was supposed to be "identical" (as in, exactly the same hardware) and it still required a bunch of reboots to install drivers for various pieces of hardware (even though drivers for that hardware were already installed it refused to recognize the hardware until I had installed the drivers again). Nothing compared to the NT4 days of course, back then a move like that would take the better part of a day...
But it's good to hear you've had better luck in that department, maybe some day in the near future we'll get to the point where you can just assume that your system disk will Just Work(tm) if you stick it in another machine.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Yeah, the night owl stuff. Wouldn't be a prob if one could shoe horn in eight hours sleep somewhere, because I really dig sunlight, but in the wee hours it's _quiet_. Cheers.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.