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What's Keeping You On XP?
Hugh Pickens writes "PC World reports that Windows XP lost more than 11 percent of its share from September to December 2011, to post a December average of 46.5 percent, a new low for the aged OS as users have gotten Microsoft's message that the operating system should be retired. Figures indicate that Windows 7 will become the most widely used version in April, several months earlier than previous estimates. Two months ago, as Microsoft quietly celebrated the 10th anniversary of XP's retail launch, the company touted the motto 'Standing still is falling behind' to promote Windows 7 and demote XP. In July, Microsoft told customers it was 'time to move on' from XP, reminding everyone that the OS would exit all support in April 2014. Before that, the Internet Explorer team had dismissed XP as the 'lowest common denominator' when they explained why it wouldn't run IE9. The deadline for ditching Windows XP is in April 2014, when Microsoft stops patching the operating system. 'Enterprises don't want to run an OS when there's no security fixes,' says Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner Research rejecting the idea that Microsoft would extend the end-of-life date for Windows XP to please the 10% who have no plans to leave the OS. 'The longer they let them run XP, the more enterprises will slow down their migration.'"
Work says I need to use XP so I do. They are working on a Windows 7 upgrade plan but that isn't due for an other year or so. They need to be sure everything is tested and works.
When you have a large organization Thousand+ employees it takes time to make sure the upgrade goes smooth.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You probably don't have a good video card. Windows 7 and Even some versions of Linux run much faster when to do enable the Animations, because the OS uses this as an opportunity to go, oh you want these animations! Let me offload this to your video card. When you have them turned off, the OS thinks your card isn't fully supported so it handles the existing UI off the CPU.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
For me it isn't about money. Since I have built my own machines for the past 20 years OS updates are optional for me. I pretty much have to use Microsoft on my main machine for the occasional games and nothing in Vista or 7 have really struck me as necessary.
I suspect this will be the last time I can reuse my XP install though. It is very possible that the next video card update I do wont support XP.
grape - the GNU free, open source rape
Many corporations and government organizations have stringent security requirements. Everything must be tested and approved. Security plans must be written the spell out everything on the network. This work is very time consuming and expensive to upgrade all computers. Thus I'd expect slow adoption and inertia. One could argue that updating to the latest will result in better security, but not always and bureaucracy is rarely logical.
I don't know, but it works for me.
How cheap are we talking? I just built my parents a computer for about $160.
Works just fine running Windows 7 Ultimate. You can bump those specs generously by bringing the price up to $200, which is still pretty cheap for a brand new computer that doesn't have to run a decade old operating system.
I hated 7 too until I found http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/
Now, I'm more or less happy as a clam. There are still some annoyances that I needed to work around through heavy modifications, but at least now it looks 90%+ like XP was.
Bye!
At work...well, I can't see us getting off XP until 2013 at the earliest. Nobody, but nobody wants the hassles of upgrading ten years of software applications written for a 20,000 seat enterprise and targeted to XP. It has to happen, but we don't want it.
[FUCK BETA]
I doing work for a multinational bank and all their desktops are running windows xp. I've heard there is a project idling along to upgrade to windows 7 in my country but nothing is very vocal and the development team I work in hasn't been asked to test any of the software we support on windows 7. We only recently upgraded to IE8 - That was a year-long project that only got a full country wide implementation because someone wanted to "upgrade" the intranet to sharepoint which nolonger supports IE6 (that now takes several seconds of cpu time just to render on a 3ghz core 2)
Tell me what Win7 does for me* that XP can't, and we can have a more meaningful discussion
Windows XP does not support ASLR, which is a powerful exploit mitigation feature. That is, given a vulnerability (which are pretty abundant in the software that we use), ASLR does a good job of preventing a large class of them from being able to be leveraged to run code (like install malware, keylogger, etc.).
Windows 7 does ASLR, which makes you less likely to get exploited by vulnerabilities.
10 years for a single OS release is better than any other manufacturer except maybe IBM with a multi-million dollar support contract (and MS will do extended patches for I believe 3 years if you want to give them that kind of money). No Linux release is supported longer, SunOS/Solaris has never been supported longer, no version of HPUX is supported longer, nor AIX. If you can point me to a single IT vendor that supports an OS release for more than ten years in a normal COTS contract I'd love to know because AFAIK there are none.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
In my limited experience with these things it's not future-proofing that's the issue. It LAZY, SLOPPY PROGRAMMING that's the #1 issue. Developers who learned how to do something bad in the Win9x days, and kept doing it well into the WinXP days... and beyond.
A couple of years ago I had to deal with booking software at an agency. The entire function of this software was hooking into an SQL database. However, it REQUIRED local admin rights simply to RUN. It wouldn't run AT ALL on Vista or 7.
Why? Because it wanted to write files to a program directory. What files? I'm not really that certain. However, this was the way things were done in the Win3.1 day, devs continued lazily doing it in the Win9x days, and WinXP merely tolerated it. Vista slammed that practice to the floor. So, rather than clean up their code an adopt proper coding practices, they just said to us "You have to use it on XP on an account with local admin rights. We're not fixing that issue."
As an addendum, given local admin rights, let's just say it's hard to tell interns "Don't install things."
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
The reasons for using XP are obviously:
(1) Additional hardware requirements
(2) Software incompatibility, including, but not limited to:
(a) Existing vertical market apps glued together with Visual BASIC
(b) Inability to run already purchased copies of Office on the new OS
(c) Inability to run already purchased other programs
(d) Lack of driver support for older hardware
(i) what sane printer maker is going to port a driver for their 4 year old model with broken toner/ink DRM to a new OS?
(ii) many hardware companies are out of business yet/because the hardware they made is still working fine
(3) Buying into putting all your machines online so they can phone the mothership and download god knows what
(a) Worked like a charm for the automated checkout registers at Lucky's, didn't it? Get your new Visa/BofA ATM card yet?
(b) Once it's working, leave it the hell alone; I don't need an auto-update of IE on my server/POS/home system with firefox/Chrome on it
(c) an offline machine gathers no worms
(4) There's simply no significant value proposition, unless you consider "Ooooh! Shiiiiny!" a value proposition
Get over it: Good enough is the enemy of better, particulary if (better - good enough) == nothing useful to me.
-- Terry