Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
'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?
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.
.. but no need for change-for-the-sake-of-it really ..
My impression was that change-for-the-sake-of-it was Microsoft's primary business model.
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.
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.
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?
(good) 64 bit support
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
... the only successful big products we've launched are Windows and Office. We have to force business users to adopt it ...
They support all their OSes for 10 years from release minimum. XP has been extended 3 years past that. That is quite reasonable
Actually, you are both right. Support for XP has been more than generous and acceptable. However, MS is indeed in the business of developing a new OS and wanting to get everyone on their previous versions onto it. Now, given the utter debarcle that was Vista, I think they have at least learned that it must be an acceptable standard and will continue to try to get it decent. Having said that, their business model will always remain on getting customers who continue to buy new OS, rather than making an OS and making enough profit from the sales without needing to get extra sales.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I still use WinXP and I expect to continue using it for quite some time to come. It's the operating system that the TabletPC slate I use for drawing runs on, and it does everything I need it to do: load my graphics application, provide storage and TCP/IP services to that app, and support drivers for the stylus and other input devices on it. I could upgrade it to Windows 7... but would gain absolutely nothing from doing so. The OS serves quite nicely as an operating system for the device, and that's all I ask of it. By the time the security updates from Redmond stop, WXP should be such a niche OS that the minimal exposure that this device has, should be a tiny risk.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
I have a form of OCD that requires me to scan every /. thread until I find a post that uses a stupid car analogy to make its point. Thank you for releasing me from this boring thread.
You do realize that MS was selling new licenses for most of that time, right? Additionally, MS doesn't give support for free, most of the time you have to either go through the OEM or pay MS to provide it. The cost of them providing patches to all the XP users isn't significantly higher than providing them only to people that have bought in the last X months. Developing the patches is the cost there.
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.
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.
No thanks. It still works. Linux has been the same for that long. Something about a continuous upgrade cycle... rather than only releasing an upgrade every, uhh... ten years. And there's any number of products that are still supported decades after their release because they still work. See also: Most mainframes.
So no, time since release is not a determinant.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
That very much depends upon how you define "safe enough". There are known, unpatched vulnerabilities in Windows XP. See Secunia's advisory database for examples. Furthermore, XP's defensive capabilities are outdated. I'm certainly not arguing that newer platforms are invulnerable, but they benefit from technologies and practices that have been created or honed over the last decade. At an even lower level than DEP, ASLR and the like, Windows 7 does a far better job of handling privilege separation, which goes a long way in mitigating risk from vulnerabilities. I personally prefer Linux, but I know better than to advocate switching to everyone. Windows Vista and Windows 7 still represent marked improvements over Windows XP, even now while the patches for XP are still coming.
He/She isn't blaming MS, I don't think. Merely pointing out that a significant feature set is not present on Win7, so upgrading completely isn't an option.
btw, I agree. The HP thing is a total scam. They've stopped supporting printers that are even just several years old. I've vowed never to buy another HP product again because of this (we got caught pretty badly in this as a small business).
-
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)
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.
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 ?!?!
... 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."
Well, the driver support is pretty terrible for 64-bit XP.
Aside from that, 64-bit Vista/7 support the Kernel Mode Code Signing Policy. This means that it is practically impossible to get a rootkit, because kernel-mode binaries must have strong signatures embedded directly inside them to prevent tampering.
You should see the hoops that malware authors must jump through in order to circumvent KMCSP. It's insane, there's only two rootkits that I know of which get around it, neither of which directly attack KMCSP but instead try to work around it by e.g. infecting the MBR with malware that hooks the boot process and loads the infected driver before KMCSP is in effect.
Even if you don't need >4GB memory...even if you don't need 64-bit application support...the KMCSP is a Good Thing that makes infecting your system much more difficult.
:(){
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.
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.
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.
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.
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