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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.'"
Cheap PCs run XP.
MS isn't giving away free upgrades and I'm not interested in paying for a really expensive copy or Windows just to play games.
When the security patches cease, I'll just uninstall XP and replace it with whatever the best version of Linux is at that point.
If it ain't broke, why fix it? It's not like I'm running a nuclear reactor at home on my XP box.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I use OSX, Linux and OpenBSD on a daily basis. My XP use is limited to VMs running some Windows-only utilities on the first two.
There's no compelling reason to change as yet.
Trolling is a art,
Don't fix it. XP is a perfectly reliable platform. I can understand Microsoft wanting to shift more units, but no need for change-for-the-sake-of-it really. Or maybe I'm just an old codger :)
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
I just don't care. XP works as a platform for the programs I actually use, and between the lack of anything to be excited about, and lack of a clear upgrade path, I will probably use XP until I lose my key.
Most consumer Hardware and software is compatible with it
It was being shipped with netbooks till sometime in 2010 IIRC
For something like an OS, the bigger question is "Why change"
The generic consumer doesnt care about security updates
'The longer they let them run XP, the more enterprises will slow down their migration.'"
'The longer they let them run XP, the more enterprises will eat into our profit margin and not let us impliment our more restrictive and convoluted licensing...'", a Microsoft spokesperson said. "Businesses are sick of products that meet their needs and are amply tested and well-understood," he continued. "They want a product that has a restrictive licensing agreement, is much more resource-intensive, and offers little or no benefit to the business segment beyond being pretty." He went on to add, "Plus, Apple is kicking the crap out of us in the consumer market and we need extra cash to burn, and let's face it... the only successful big products we've launched are Windows and Office. We have to force business users to adopt it, or our shareholders will tar and feather us before setting our homes on fire for not creating a single smash hit in the consumer market since Halo.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The world will end in less than a year so why bother upgrading?
I can't stand the damn thing. I have a nice 6040f printer that I paid about 11k for- and under windows 7 I can't use the booklet functions via the stupid universal print driver
I make my booklets on pc #1 (windows 7, 64 bit screamer workstation) and then shuffle them to my old xp PC so I can still use the discrete driver.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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.
Paying $100+ for Windows seems like even more of a ripoff when I've got to buy it again every 2 years.
I bought this software, its mine, and I'll use it, thank you very much.
If only more of the software industry would target linux and mac, we could get away from having to pay an arm and a leg to Redmond every few years.
Dunno about you guys, but I don't exactly have a ton of free cash to spend.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
My XP partition finally had to be nuked to clear out an infection after 8 years of stable service, so I shifted to Ubuntu 10.04.1 (can't use a newer version due to hardware incompatabilities.)
I had been planning to upgrade to Win7, but when I realized I could get a whole laptop with Win7 Pro and more memory and CPU horsepower than my old box for under $600, I scrapped the idea of an upgrade. Why pay close to $200 for a copy of Win7 when $400 more will get me a whole machine?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I'm sure there will be plenty of posts here about how XP still works, how it fits the needs of some people, etc.
Even if you had a working Ford Model T, you couldn't safely use it on today's highways. Running Windows XP on today's Internet is far more dangerous, both for the operator and for everyone else, than running a more recent operating system. It will become far more hazardous after the patches stop flowing. There is a shrinking window for people to make the transition before the patches stop, and everyone still using XP would do well to take advantage of that window before it disappears.
It may have escaped PC World's notice (not like THAT ever happened before) but there are some applications and drivers that will not install on any of MS's newer OS's and that so-called XP Compatibility mode isn't. And if those applications need to be supported then XP is what you use. Maybe you hide it in a VM that is running on a newer version of Windows but chances are that you'll do like me and keep that XP machine running and wish you never got sucked into the Microsoft maelstrom.
The IT department claims that it costs too much to roll out a new OS and rebuild all the remote management tools, train the Neytwork staff in the new OS (but not any end users), and pay for upgrades for 2000+ PCs...
1) All my games work (for the most part) and I don't have to beg for a port to Linux of said game or driver.
2) I don't necessarily want to pay the Apple premium for their rendition of problems.
3) I don't necessarily want to pay Microsoft more money for their rendition of Upgrade problems.
4) I'm familar with XP and all of it's quirks. Yeah I gotta reinstall every 6 months to keep it sane again, but imaging takes care of the worst of it.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Microsoft Visual Studio 6 (C++), which doesn't run on Vista and Win7. We also still have quite a bit VB6 code, God have mercy on our souls.
They are only willing to support their product for 13 years! How dare they demand that users move to new technology once a decade to maintain support!
Please, come off it. MS has a plenty lengthy support cycle. They support all their OSes for 10 years from release minimum. XP has been extended 3 years past that. That is quite reasonable.
At least with focus-follows-mouse, there's a X-mouse workaround involving a couple of registry edits, but I'm dreading Win8.
Every time Windows "evolves", I'm forced to add another 10-15 minutes to undo the latest round of dumbing-down.
To be honest, the only reason I eventually chopped in 2K for XP was that MS started shipping tools and SDKs that (arbitrarily) refused to install on 2K.
Windows is a operating system for hosting applications, generally ones written by someone else. Everything else that it insists on doing is completely extraneous to my requirements - that it just shuts up and gets into the background. MS has failed to make a compelling argument in favour of 7. I don't find "or else" particularly persuasive.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Two things for me on my last XP machines.
1) The laptops I acquired that run XP can't run Vista or Windows 7. They are at their last Windows OS even per Microsoft specs.
2) You would have to be insane to try to upgrade an old XP box to 7 in place. I've seen enough toasted and flaky OS installations in my time that I've switched entirely to "lift and shift".
License cost? Meh - I haven't paid for Windows 7 yet or any of the other Server OS's around my house. Somehow Microsoft thinks I need lot of free samples (development editions, Windows 7 party packs, etc.) and who am I to dissuade them?
December average of 46.5 percent, a new low for the aged OS
Um, every day since XP peaked in 2006 has been "a new low". Why would market share of XP do anything but decrease? And if you want to get pedantic, there would have been a time period immediately after XP hit the market that it would have been under 46.5 percent until it reached dominance. Sorry, that statement just struck me as silly.
Better known as 318230.
Interesting... I bought a cheap $8.53 USB audio adapter from Amazon and it works great in Linux...
http://www.amazon.com/Syba-SD-CM-UAUD-Adapter-C-Media-Chipset/dp/B001MSS6CS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325624971&sr=8-1
The C-Media chipset works well.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
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.
Ok, here's the rundown as I have managed to wring out of friends and family that cling to XP.
1) it came on the computer they currently have, and works fine on that hardware.
2) they are familiar with it, and it does what they expect it to.
3) they don't want to buy new hardware when the hardware they have suits their needs already, (when running xp)
4) microsoft has switched around how the user interface works, so that now it treats you like you don't own the box. This causes issues for users who just want to make the printer they got for christmas work. Clicking OK on 3 or more scary "let this program make administrative changes?" Dialogs and other "scary" popups are not enjoyable to users, who really don't understand the significance of what the windows really mean, and who don't have an alternative to the "untrusted" 3rd party driver CD that came with the printer anyway. Windows 7 does this "less" than windows vista, which complained when you wanted to run solitare, but this is simply users chosing the lesser of two evils. They prefer the simplicity and nonverbose output of xp.
5) fewer and fewer people buy computers to play video games these days, given the rise of modern console games with online multiplayer, and the reduced hassles of competing against people with better rigs. There is much less incentive to continue driving the forced upgrade cycle, so users try to get more equity out of already owned assets, like older hardware. Let's face it, unless you turn on 3d return of clippy or some other horseshit, you don't need an i7 to print resumes or make greeting cards. You don't need gobs of resources to play mp3s while you clean your house, facebook and farmville don't need epic leetness, etc. An old windows xp era rig can do all those things just fine, and users know this. Thus, windows xp satisfies most of their needs for a general purpose computing environment.
The few issues that crop up appear to be (and are) totally contrived to continue monetizing the computing market. Driver support for devices, for instance. Unless it is some radical new slot architecture or something, there is little to make xp insufficient for a driver, especially when you are pushing a crapware consumer peripheral device like a printer or scanner, which usually use unidrv.dll for 99% of the functionality anyway. Other than drivers, you have security fixes, updates, and browsers. Browser makers don't like to support "legacy" OSes because they usually represent the dreaded "low end hardware", which forces them to make efficient code instead of quickly produced code; the impetus of which is purely due to makerting forces in the vast majority of cases. Feature creep causes a software product to require more and more resources to satisfy more and more edge case uses, which would be better satisfied with optional plugins run in sandboxed processes. Remember: "newer isn't always better." when users feel financially pinched, they stop chasing the shiny.
Many business I know of are still using XP on their desktops. I guess often due to specially written apps, or just that the mandate to change has not yet come from upon high.
Heck..on on project I know personally about...federal one....everyone is on XP. Until they upgrade the workstations/laptops, no one on that team is going to be moving from XP to Win7....I'm not 100% sure that the move has been sanction for the whole system in this rather large Federal department.
And you don't go updating these computers yourself....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
I work for a state government and our vendors are just now releasing versions which support Windows 7. We now to need to schedule the upgrade, that will take 6-9 monthes assuming they can start the process right away. Then we're typically one of their largest customers, so I'm sure they'll say the migration worked fine and we'll find problems which last time took about 9 monthes to resolve and only when they released a newer version just for us.
Bingo. I'm running XP in a VM as well. Why?
1: No fussing with activation. I can radically change the hardware in a VM without having to deal with the "genuine-ness" of my OS each time.
2: XP has a small disk/RAM/CPU footprint.
3: I have some old 16 bit stuff I like running once in a while, and XP can run that.
4: I have a few special purpose applications that only run under XP. Especially some "antique" MP3 players such as the Nomad Jukebox. 32 bit Windows 7 might be able to run them, but likely not most due to the different driver model.
For a main OS, Windows 7 is light years ahead. However, for a VM guest, XP is still a good candidate because it still runs virtually everything.
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)
It may be old PCs not cheap PCs. Old PCs run perfectly well when they are running old software, the software whose suggested hardware requirements match the hardware. Of course software that connects to the internet complicates this due to security concerns and the necessity of patches.
I work for a relatively small business. We have industrial processes (computer controlled valves, conveyors, etc) which are run by third party software. This third party software runs on XP and will not be changing any time soon.
Nobody in our business gives a flying f*ck about anything other than the ability to make sure that the product mix is correct, and barely ten percent of the company uses a computer at all. Our accounting program is dos-based from around 1993 IIRC. None of the company owners or managers can even use email.
We have recently had to switch computer providers to an even sketchier company because the guy we used to use gave up on us.
I wonder how many of these companies are out there..
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.
Win2k was the best desktop OS MS ever developed. All just fluff after that.
So you're offering to pay for the upgrade for all the Win7 licenses? Sweet!
There are ONLY _three_ reasons to ever upgrade an OS:
- Security / Bug-fixes
- Drivers
- Features
WinXP is "good enough" for the average Joe. Things "just work" -- with Win7 there is no guarantee that everything will _still_ work and won't find something broken.
If Microsoft didn't charge and arm and a leg, and another leg, say $20 for Win7, they would encourage people to upgrade. For $100 (minimum OEM Win7) there is just not enough incentive to upgrade.
If MS was smart they would sell the dam XP cd-key for $20, but gouging customers for essentially what amounts to bug-fixes is there any wonder the majority of business (and home users) go Fuck You MS ?!?!
The applications I want to use work fine in XP.
There are no features in Windows 7 that are compelling to me.
Still getting security updates for now
What's that, there are unpatched security flaws in XP with exploits in the wild? Eh, my network is reasonably secure, I have some decent anti-malware running on my computer, and I honestly don't use my XP computer to browse the web all that often.
The only reason I ever upgraded from win2k to XP was because some software I wanted to run wasn't win2k compatible. That's probably the point at which I'll upgrade away from XP as well.
... and the development team I work in hasn't been asked to test any of the software we support on windows 7.
This attitude is what's keeping people on XP. $DIETY forbid that you test your application on an slightly recent OS; that would be work, after all.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Because it just works, and that's all people need ? When will software industry wake up to the fact that users have gotten over 'upgrade cycles' and are now aware that they are just means for software companies to continually sell products to customers and make revenue ?
And no - dont blabber about 'the many great features' that are in win7 or something - get the message : people dont need them. you may think they do, but they disagree - thats another fixation in software industry; 'these features are great ! you have to have it !' -> no they dont. they just need to have what they need, and that's all there is to it.
hence the reason for a whopping 46% share of xp, even in its fallen down state.
Read radical news here
It is a pretty valid question. I know one person who has a good scanner that does not offer drivers that work with post-XP Windows, so she keeps it. Also, I know many people who have low end laptops (and of course netbooks) that don't have the disk space, graphics, memory that would make a newer OS work adequately. And then, I am seriously struggling to watch my HD-DVDs (yes, I got a few dozen in clearance - they are great!) on Windows 7, so I am considering putting the hd-dvd/BD drive on an XP box at the next sign of playback trouble.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Whats keeping people on XP is that it's good enough for what they need an OS to do (both from a user and a developer point of view), nothing in the more recent OS's is a compelling reason to upgrade.
If it weren't for the looming end of life I don't think a lot of people would upgrade at all.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
Well, Microsoft doesn't even allow you to do an upgrade install from XP to 7. You can only do that from Vista to 7. The "upgrade" procedure consists of it doing a full, clean install of 7 into a new folder on the drive while placing all the XP stuff into a WINDOWS.OLD folder. You have to manually move your documents and data over to the appropriate places after it's done, and reinstall all the apps from scratch.
I've done this MANY times for people already, and it works just fine but it's time consuming.
If it weren't for the looming end of life I don't think a lot of people would upgrade at all.
Microsoft could probably make more money selling yearly extended support contracts for XP than it could selling Win7 upgrades.
Upgrading an OS costs a company much more than just the license fees the OS vendor would get.
For every $1 MS would ask as one-time upgrade fee, they could charge $2 for a single year of XP support per license.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Actually..not really a troll.
Many business I know of are still using XP on their desktops. I guess often due to specially written apps, or just that the mandate to change has not yet come from upon high
We're one, dental office, 9 employees and struggling not to lay anyone off, if we upgrade to new computers, (we are due, 3 Mobo's had capacitor catastrophe this last year) with Win7, we would have to go with Win2008 and an extra 5 or 10 CALs, then upgrade the database on the server. I'm not sure if the client for the upgraded DB that will run on Vista or win7, will run on XP; so that'll probably be an all or nothing upgrade on the client computers. We're in a can't afford to upgrade and can't afford not to situation.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
But Microsoft doesn't want to deal with this. With the release of Windows 8, they will have four (semi-)separate code bases (XP, Vista, 7, 8) to keep secure. That's a coding nightmare that nobody wants. If Microsoft can get everyone on the same OS, then their costs of producing patches drops to a quarter of what it once was.
.Net 3.5 is installed by default on Windows 7. If you somehow needed to install it, you fucked it up real good.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
I still run Win2K at home. Lightweight, simple, without the clutter of XP. I can probably get XP to work that way, but it'd be more effort than I want to put into a fairly-customized home machine used for surfing the internet.
For security, it's hidden behind a NAT, and there's Tiny Personal Firewall 2 installed on it that's set to pop up on every unrecognized connection type by a new program. At this point in time, I don't even get the pop-ups anymore unless I install something and it phones home (at which time I just accept or deny it depending on what it is).
I haven't done any reinstallation in years, mostly because I keep it lean by installing only the bare essentials (with the occasional update).
The machine is work is dictated by company policy, and will get upgraded with the company policy. But I see no reason to upgrade to XP at home, much less to Windows 7.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
What's really amazing is that the morons who designed these software applications and systems apparently never thought ahead and realized that at some point all the computers running this software would need to be upgraded to a newer OS, and that they should have taken this into account from the onset. No, you can't totally future-proof everything, but with this stuff it looks like they didn't even try.
Sounds like it'd be cheaper and easier to just replace your capacitors and keep using those older computers. Capacitor failure is a common thing in electronics these days, and usually it's easily fixed by simply replacing the capacitors. I recently revived a c.2005 Xerox copier/printer I got cheap at an auction by replacing the electrolytics in the low-voltage power supply. Total cost less than $10. It's good practice to use the same capacitance rating as the bad (or possibly bad--it's best to just replace them all at once) cap, but increase the voltage rating if you can while still fitting the new cap in the same space. A lot of times mfgrs cheap out on caps by using the lowest possible voltage rating they can get away with, but it results in a reduced lifespan, with the unit failing shortly after the warranty period is over.
Easy. Cost of upgrading to Windows 7 vs benefit it brings. XP does everything I need it to do at home (Netflix, Gmail, Slashdot); and at work (Office, LiveMeeting, Telnet, Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc). Why would I bother upgrading if there is no real driver to do so? What, the viruses? That's what antivirus, firewalls, NoScript and common sense are for. So I got hit by one 0-day worm in last 10 years, really does not justify the thousand bucks to upgrade each system for either me or my company, especially since it's not like there isn't going to be any more 0-days on Windows 7. In fact, you are more likely to see a 0-day on a newer OS...
Bow before me, for I am root.
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