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Windows Vista Enters Extended Support
yuhong writes "On April 10, the second Tuesday of April, Windows Vista will exit Mainstream Support and enter Extended Support. This means that no-charge (free) support will end, no further service packs will be created, nor will future IE versions (such as IE10) be available for Vista. Also, no new non-security hotfixes will be created or be available without an Extended Hotfix Support Agreement (EHSA). This will last for 5 years before support for Vista completely ends in 2017."
I'm apparently way behind the times -- being perfectly happy with Windows XP!!!!
No patches == more zombies?
Will be interesting (and possibly annoying) to see if this end of patches is accompanied with a surge in botnet based spam and such.
I don't know why the above is rated -1. It's certainly more interesting than TFA.
in two years and your company will either be running botnets or migrating to a newer version.
all xp updates end april 8th, 2014
When are they going to put a mercy bullet in XP
You're implying that you're doing it a favour killing it? There's a reason it's still widely used. It works. I have yet to find something I can't do on the system. Every application runs on it save for the few that Microsoft's marketing department have deemed unsuitable like DirectX 11.
You shoot the race horse AFTER it breaks a leg and becomes useless, not while it's still in good racing condition.
The words you're looking for are "good enough", because that's what XP is and Microsofts main problem with it.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
XP will end support in exactly two years (April 2014).
I thought at first this was some kind of weird troll, but I checked your posting history and apparently I was wrong.
This is assuming you are in the racing business, and not in the business of selling equestrians.
I am John Hurt.
This means that no-charge (free) support will end,
Windows support is only ever free if your time has no value.
I am writing this on a laptop (TabletPC) running Windows XP. It's a 5-year-old machine, but aside from the battery life getting low (a $40 fix I'm considering, for convenience) it does everything I need a laptop to do. It runs *office. It runs Chrome. It runs Manga Studio (my main drawing program) with full support for the built-in stylus/digitizer. I have no reason whatsoever to replace it. I'm familiar with Windows 7; I work with it at the office. If I had a desktop PC instead of an iMac, I'd probably use W7 on that. But I cannot think of a single feature of W7 that I would benefit from on this computer, and I can think of several factors (speed, mostly) that argue against upgrading. Windows is just an OS: software that acts as an intermediary between my applications and the hardware. WXP does that job quite adequately. To "put a mercy bullet in WXP" is nothing more than deliberate, willful, unnecessary obsolescence.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
and apparently you
Looks like he only cared about commenting.
You can of course switch to the free Llamas, but they're so unfamiliar.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I have an old Win98 box with some historical files in poorly-supported legacy file formats (WordPerfect/Paradox/Quattro) that I fire up from time to time. A mere half-gigahertz processor, quarter-gigabyte of RAM, and it's still so responsive it feels like it's anticipating my commands.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I've been dreading the day I'd have to leave Vista behind!
The two of them?
I know you're joking but there is a boatload of people out there running Vista... just about everyone I know who bought a laptop before W7 was released (excluding the people who are adept enough to install Linux, XP or W7 themselves) are running Vista. These people don't even know they're running Vista; to them it's just a computer and as long as they can write their emails, look up stuff on the internet, play FreeCell and occasionally write a document they are happy and oblivious to the fact that they're using Vista.
The longevity of XP was an accident. It was a good time to live in, but they won't make that mistake ever again. Don't expect support to last as long as the XP support for 7 either.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
This shows how microsofts model of making people pay to beta test backfires, because no one wants to spend money on anything not 10 years old. No one in the linux scene is bitching because they stopped maintaining kernel 2.4 (came out around the same time as XP).
I have yet to find something I can't do on the system.
Drop admin privileges without breaking every program in existence?
Run a version of IE that isnt dog slow?
Also, not enough shiney [not sure if joking]
There's no valid excuse for not upgrading Vista to Win7. The upgrade is fast and easy, and you get more than enough improvements to justify the minor cost.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
I believe slashdot.org was around back when this was pretty much a bunch of nerds in their basement. I.E before the corporate acquisition :)
And to be slightly on topic, I still have a windows 2k disk set, I have both pro and advanced server, windows 98, and windows 95 (including 95b) as well as XP and a Vista beta disk. I don't know why I still keep them (nostalgia??) and I have them installed in VM's, which I've not turned on for years, but I guess it is good to keep them there just in case I need them in future.
Lots of things don't work on Windows XP. Just off the top of my head I can think of:
* Windows 2008 R2 RSAT Tools -- you can RDP to a server instead, but that's not always possible or recommended.
* PowerShell Active Directory module -- very handy, but doesn't work on XP at all.
* You mentioned DX11
* Internet Explorer 9 or later
* Location APIs for HTML5 apps
* Proper IPv6 support (XP has some experimental support, but in practice it's not very usable)
* Any 64-bit only software like the SharePoint 2010 design tools -- I know there's a 64-bit XP edition, I used to use it myself, but few others did, and support for it by hardware vendors was never good and even less these days.
Sure, these are all small things, but they add up. To get an XP machine to "work" you need about a bazillion hotfixes, add-ons, extras, drivers, and even some scripts. On top of that, these days it's getting hard to buy a machine with "only" 4GB of memory, but that's the most XP supports, unless you're a masochist and want to run an unsupported decade-old 64-bit OS instead of just going straight to Windows 7 64-bit like a normal person.
Sure, its leg might not be broken, but it's limping pretty badly.
One of them is my mother.
She only uses the web browser (Firefox and Yahoo for email) and occasional type up a list for one of her clubs.
She always is "losing the Internet" usually by minimizing Firefox.
Next week I'll be visiting her to upgrade to Ubuntu. I think the Unity interface is perfect for her. She only needs one or two buttons.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Nonsense. If Fortune 500 companies had huge numbers of old Linux workstations, they would be waving cash at RedHat to buy "extended support". Linux gets away with relative short lifecycles only because it's primarily used in a server role with hands-on administration.
(These companies have a 'software subscription' with Microsoft & are buying Windows 7 and downgrading it to XP. The issue is logistics of upgrading, not license cost.)
And end support for Windows Vista altogether. Let's face it, even "upgrading" from Windows XP to Vista is basically the same thing as "downgrading" to Windows 3.11 For Workgroups. Except Windows 3.11 had far fewer issues that the user had to contend with.
Minor cost? I guess you will pay for the half dozen XP machines I support for family and friends, because non-nerds see no point in paying for something that works in their eyes. Heck, I have one remaining XP machine and see no reason tho shell out good money that I can use for more useful things. You talk about 100$ as if it were chump change. It also assumes your old peripherals will work, where printers and scanners are the worst players. At work we have an expensive multifunction printer whose Vista/7 drivers suck compared to the very reliable XP drivers. At least there were drivers available. Replacing peripherals that stop working because of an OS upgrade cist money too. Sure this problem probably is moot when talking about a Vista to 7 upgrade.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I'm sure there are a lot of Fortune 500 companies still running XP. The biggest reason to upgrade by far, as has always been true for Windows, is for newer hardware support, or when security patches stop. Actually, I'm sure almost no one actually upgraded even to Windows 7, they just bought a new computer with it.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Her name is Vista not Laura. You got that wrong.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I'm a developer at an ISV. Personally, I am waiting for XP to go. Microsoft has some great technology (WWSAPI, SQL Server 2012 LocalDB) that looks like it will solve some of the problems we need to solve with our application, but it's not available on XP. (Technically WWSAPI is, if you're willing to pay for the support contract.)
As it stands, while XP is still supported (mainstream, extended or otherwise) and we have customers on it we are unable to use these new technologies.
In the context of my job I don't think Vista is any different from 7 in terms of the technology available and the support effort.
At home I find 7 to be superior to XP and Vista. I don't think Vista fills any niche, XP has the 5-year-old-low-powered-device market, but anywhere else really should be using 7.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Well, that was one thing MS got right... about 10 years too late... but right nonetheless.
Of course, Vista shipped with such moronic security features such having to ask permission multiple times to rename an icon on the desktop, but they managed to get it right with Windows 7.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
...and yet it's still perfectly fine for 95% of users.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Minor cost? An upgrade to Win 7 would be half of the original cost of my netbook. And for what? A new browser that I don't use. Or maybe the a nice UI which is irrelevent when the only icons I use are the ones for Chrome and occasionally Word. I'd have a much better experience if I spent that money on more RAM or an external monitor.
Believe it or not people are sick of the upgrade treadmill. The consumer operating system of the future is one that boots straight into a web browser from which all applications will be accessed. And people certainly won't expect to pay good money for it.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
Well, every web developer on Earth woud love it if Microsoft kicked every version of Windows that won't receive IE10 off the web. Yes, that's unreasonable but with Microsoft not believing in backports we get to support IE8 until XP has negligible marketshare, which will probably still be another decade. Having to code against that POS (and the only marginally better IE9, which will live for another decade after IE8) means a lot of redundant work and expenses.
It's been "spend half your time coding against the spec and the other half ironing out bizarre IE bugs" for far too long now. By now we shouldn't have to worry about whether an element "has layout" or how to set static dimensions on dynamic content so that IE won't do weird things when we want a float to overflow its parent.
Of course the best option would be to give up on Internet Explorer altogether and spare us all the horror that is Trident. Not like that would happen, either. I have little doubt that Microsoft will keep supplying us with half-baked IE versions with quirks that we need to support for decades because the users can't update IE without buying a new copy of Windows.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
disk and installed in on a spare latop not too long ago. Shit that thing flies even compared to lxde distros.
There are a couple of anti-virus vendors that support Win2K with current versions, but no browsers that I know of (again, with current versions). Otherwise, I'd be perfectly happy using Win2K on some boxes.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The two of them?
There are more Vista desktops than Linux desktops out there.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
If you are a developer of applications (including web developers that have to test how their application looks in IE7), you'll see better where I'm coming from. Also, it isn't very secure. Its not very convenient for users either, because if they have upgraded from XP they are likely still on Office 2003 or something.
I guess it means that Windows 7 really is Vista SP3. I'm also noticing how each version of Windows has less service packs (it peaked with NT 4.0). NT 3.1 = 3 SPs, NT 3.5 = 3 SPs, NT 3.51 = 5 SPs (first widely deployed release), NT 4.0 = 6 SPs (this is when NT went mainstream on servers), 2000 = 4 SPs, XP = 3 SPs, Server 2003 = 2 SPs, Vista/Server 2008 = 2 SPs, and finally 7/2008 R2 = 1 SP (so far).
now u know what it's like to use linux on almost any machine.
If you're willing to sign the checks and pay for all the upgrades (not just the OS, but legacy software which may not run on the newer OS), I'll be more than happy to upgrade. But looking at my own budget, then the answer is no. Everything currently in use still works fine for what it does, and it's kind of stupid to spend money I don't have in order get newer software to do what I'm doing already.
Not to mention hardware issues. Who's going to update all the drivers and such for printers and similar equipment connected to the network? How good is the legacy support on that end? It's a step backwards to break things that work now.
As for security? Most security issues tend to be PEBKAC, provided stuff connected to the internet is locked down fairly well. Maybe hard to deal with on a large scale, but on stand alone machines or small networks it's fairly quick to figure out who's causing the problem.
I think others making business decisions would answer the same way.
On the other hand, MS Services for Unix is free on XP.... so I guess it depends on what you need to do.
In my case, I have no need for RSAT tools, the PowerShell Active Directory module, DX11, IE, HTML5 apps, IPv6, or 64-bit applications (though it would be nice sometimes to have 64-bit MATLAB). But I do use MS Services for Unix. I'm sure I'll figure something out whenever I get a new PC with Windows 7 on it, but there's certainly nothing compelling me to actually upgrade.
The biggest thing going for Windows 7 (versus Vista) is that there's no compelling reason to DOWNGRADE :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Services for Unix is prepackaged in Win 7, but under a different name. I can't remember what it is...but i know it's there (check the Win 7 equivalent of add / remove windows components)
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
>old software and old OSes.
This is why you run a virtual machine and load up whatever software and OS you want from the old days.
It can be tricky, though. Because some of the really old stuff doesn't even expect a hard disk. I unpacked a .zip install of PFS Pro Write on to the "c:" drive in a DOS VM and it /demanded/ that I install to a drive location other than the install drive. Because the developers assumed the destination was a floppy, even with a c: drive letter.
Old software, all the games you missed playing over the years, etc. Load up a VM in a current computer. Install the legacy OS, boot it when you get all nostalgic or need to read really old files, and put it away when you're done. No need for separate hardware. DOS, Windows of all flavors, Linux, BSD, Solaris, OSX if you have an Intel processor, etc., can all be loaded in virtual machines. No need for a separate computer.
And when you're done, just close the VM and go on with your other business.
My favorite Windows for virtual machines is Windows FLP. It's like a pre-stripped XP. I tried 2k, but I wound up ripping DLLs from XP to put into 2k anyway. The same with NT4, which I needed to get DLLs from 2k and XP to just install Opera.
DRDOS 7.03 is out there for free download too. Unfortunately Windows 3.11 says that FreeDOS is "incompatible" and will refuse to run (wrong version). Hrmph. It also helps to have a serial mouse and serial port available for things like DesqView/X which demands an actual serial mouse.
My virtual machine software of choice is VirtualBox. There are others out there, like Xen, KVM, VMWare, Parallels (macintosh). Try them.
As for Win98, giving it any more RAM will be futile anyway. It maxes out at 512MB of addressable RAM. Windows 95 maxes out at 64.
A snapshot I took once to demonstrate the power of virtual machines: http://ompldr.org/vYXgzcA
--
BMO
I've been planning on upgrading my main computer with new software and hardware but I'm waiting for Intel to let loose those new 22nm wonders. I've been pretty happy with Vista and a 32nm quad core so I'm not going to upgrade until I get some serious reward for my coin.
I say what I'm about to say after using Windows 7 x64 for a while, and liking it.
But...
I got a used Core2 Duo laptop off ebay that came with XP. Went to upgrade it to something that would take advantage of the 64bit cores, but I realized I was out of MSDN licenses for Windows 7 x64. But I had all my Vista x64 license keys remaining for some reason. ;) Dreaded the thought, but went ahead and put Vista 64 on it, and put on all the services packs, etc.
I am very surprised at myself saying this, but I am actually liking the UI on Vista better than Windows 7. Heresy, I know. But with SP2 on it, it's (finally!) solid and it's doing everything I need it to do. (C#/Visual Studio/MVC 3/Entity Framework development...)
I really think the sidebar (introduced in Vista, ripped back out in Win7) should have been longer lived. I did not like it at all when I first encountered it, but now I am just loving it for some reason. (Maybe I just hate change??)
Of course, two weeks after I do this, they end of life it. Dammit...
What are these? Other than Tinker, a couple card games, and DreamScene? Are there others that were promised? Cause I was able to get the previously mentioned ones from Windows Update.
It's now Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications and it appears to be deprecated as of Windows 8.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
That'll be interesting to whatch. What comes first? Massive migration from XP or April 2014?
Will the currently old computers that run XP be replaced by them?
Rethinking email
I wouldn't put it on a new machine, but if you have XP-generation hardware there's no need to upgrade. If it was a free upgrade I'd probably suggest everyone go Win7 but I wouldn't spend money on it. And for a lot of people what it does and the hardware they have is enough.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Why not wine, or a VM?
Slashdot was founded in 1997 and only in 1999 got sold to Andover.net. Geeknet, Inc. is the reincarnation of the merger of Andover.net and VA Linux.
just about everyone I know who bought a laptop before W7 was released (excluding the people who are adept enough to install Linux, XP or W7 themselves) are running Vista
I dont want to sound repetitive, but: the two of them?
it is now called Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications
For those of us in a domain, win7/vista allows SMB2
I've run SMB2 on MS-DOS 6.22. Heck, I've run SMB2 on a Nintendo for cricket's sake.
According to statcounter XP in the United States is dying very fast if you include Aprils numbers. Home use on the weekends is only around 18%.
It is not good enough for most users anymore. Its old and will have a place in conservatives hearts like Windows 98, 95, and W2k did. Meanwhile its time to move on.
http://saveie6.com/
For practical purposes, SFU/SUA has been replaced with MSYS.
Wonder how many enterprises will end up buying the expensive Custom Support Agreements.
Well, every web developer on Earth woud love it if Microsoft kicked every version of Windows that won't receive IE10 off the web.
What version of Windows still in mainstream or extended support won't receive Google Chrome Frame, a browser helper object for IE pre-10 that uses WebKit from Chrome to render HTML pages using modern standards?
It also assumes your old peripherals will work, where printers and scanners are the worst players.
Printers and scanners that work with Windows XP but don't work with Windows Vista or Windows 7 are likely to work with CUPS and SANE. Set up a Xubuntu box for excrements and giggles and see if they work.
Also I would like to mention support for
* greater than 4 gigs of ram
* SSD and trim command support
* better SMP support
* Supperior security for all browsers due to better DEP and other security enchancements
* Touchscreen
* multi que async with Sata and PATA drives
* Much better security
XP is running on bandaids with newer hardware. For shit and kicks I installed XP on my Phenom II 2.6 ghz 6 core, 8 gigs of ram system with a Sata drive last summer. It was sllooow. Boot time doubled, the kernel would freeze up when reading from the disk in random sets (not BSOD but just become unresponsive), not to mention I am used to using the keyboard to type which programs to start like W-O-R ...> Word 2010 ... click.
It was a blast from the past and it felt anitquated. It was a great operating system 10 years ago. Sadly, todays obsession of minimizing costs and having financial gurus become CEOs have hugly devalued technology. You do not see people running Windows 3.11/DOS in 2006 anymore did you?
There comes a point where any upgrade offers more benefits than just costing money. Old hardware wont be around forever and there is productivity enchancements and a security risk has a much bigger cost than the CPAs realize.
http://saveie6.com/
...On XPSP3. We'll skip Vista and will probably wind up running Win7 or something like it, virtualized. Around 2015 or so.
The consumer operating system of the future is one that boots straight into a web browser from which all applications will be accessed.
You're right that the practicality of something like Chrome OS is in the future, not the present. Between now and then, either A. programmers will have to learn how to make web applications use CACHE MANIFEST and localStorage, B. cellular ISPs will have to substantially lower their monthly rates, or preferably C. both.
I bet most of those people don't know any better. Once you get used to Windows 7 and are shown by someone knowledgeable about how it can do things better, you realize how old-tech XP really is. I have yet to meet anyone in the flesh (i.e. anyone apart from Linux nerds) who actually prefers XP over 7. Just my experience.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
XP is dying. I agree with MS on this as if they supported more people would still use it. IE 9 requires ASLR, refined DEP, new exception handling security fixes, and something else I do not remember, and of course DRM for their h.264 license which is part of aero.
In essence they would have to turn the kernel into vista lite and would more than quadrouple the development cost for a dying OS that is being discontinued. Even Chrome and Firefox run in crippled mode in XP without these security enchancements.
IE has changed and will have an annual release. IE 10 will be out soon and next year IE 11 will be out etc. Windows Update automatically updates to the latest browser now starting this year and IE 8 usage was only 13% this weekend according to g.statcounter.com! Corporations will have to update their browsers far more often compared to the past. It wont be like IE 6 since it was such a different beast from any browser or even version of itself.
IE is not perfect but MS is at least making steps and it should be simple to upgrade old intranet code if its made for IE 8 or later or it might just work with any future IE release. Metro forced MS to embrace HTML 5 and AJAX.
http://saveie6.com/
Dear Bob,
Will you never get over that weekend in Vegas? Please. I've moved on. You need to also.
p.s. your omelets aren't any good.
All the best, Laura
I have an Me installation, because of some old games that won't play with DOSBox or similar. "Why sucky Me instead of glorious 98SE?", I hear from the peanut gallery. Because its networking stack works a lot better against Linux dhcp servers and Samba.
Another spike in the coffin for 98/Me is that next month, the last usable AV software to work under DOS based Windows (Eset Nod32 v 2.7) will cease getting updates. Of course, behind a NAT in a VM, it's not so critical, but it would still be nice to have the option, at a price. /. from 98/Me.
For web browsing, Opera 10.83 works, so you can browse
Oh, if only there were a third choice. Torn between torment and damnation we might glance about for some saving grace, some true escape from our peril but it is not to be. The choice is either run botnets, or migrate to a newer version of Windows. There is no third course. Alas, we are lost!
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This has little to no meaning for most home users, many of whom are probably still running XP, or may have upgraded to WIndows 7. However, it may have a big impact on corporations and governments though, in particular ones who standardized their SOE with Vista for workstations.
Many have governance which requires their organization to run OSes which are within the (mainstream) support lifecycle - meaning that Microsoft moving Vista to extended support means many corporates and/or government bodies might get pushed to Windows 7 or Windows 8 for their SOE in the very near future. Not a bad earner for MS assuming their don't push organisations to another platform...
Here's some advice:
By writing "M$" you are letting Microsoft win. It makes you sound like your only reason for hating Microsoft is because they sell goods and services. Instead of writing "M$," try explaining specifically what you find objectionable about Microsoft and their products. By providing specific reasons and justification, you may be able to foment change in the individuals and organizations who currently consume Microsoft products toward the products and ideologies you prefer.
I offer you this advice because, as an old man, you should spend your remaining days more wisely than as a fat freetard faggot.
My ex and her 2 kids for one.
All 3 of the machines have Vista on them. There maybe a few fortune 500 companies who upgraded as well and of course school districts. Vista is as popular as MacOSX according to g.statcounter.com. My guess is computers bought from 2007 - 2009. These machines still work and it does not make sense to plunge $120 for a machine worth less and lose all your important data in the process. It just works. ... slowly :-)
http://saveie6.com/
Look at Windows 7 right now. Now look at Windows 8. Are you trying to suggest that Windows 7 won't have longevity?
That was 4 years ago. That is a whole PC life cycle. You do not expect Windows 95 updates in 2000 or NT 4 updates in 2002 do you?
Go upgrade or keep your security fixes.
In the good old days MS only supported OSes for 2 years. MS is frankly being nice and I think people are frankly spoiled
http://saveie6.com/
There needs to be a new Godwin's law for when people use the term "sheeple", like when a person uses the term "sheeple" it automatically ends the argument because that person is too stupid to acknowledge they themselves are sheeple in some respect.
I mean in all honesty who thinks they can hold down a full-time job that requires a college degree and write an entire OS then support that OS for almost every instance that requires it and push those updates as fast as you can. Microsoft is in business because their specific OS is widely adopted and hasn't been supplanted because they have commercial partners and they are more than just hobbyists. Open source is /.'s mantra and all but really, open source can't solve everything and brings its own set of problems to the table (i.e. security...etc). I know you're an AC trying to get a rise but what is deemed "support" here is literally updates sent to the OS through the update tool besides the over-the-phone support as the article seems to imply. The fact it is going into the shut-down cycle this soon proves how successful Win 7 was well as how big a failure Vista ended up being.
Oh, I suspect 7 will be around for a long time. Big companies are likely to switch from XP to 7 one of these years, and then they'll begin fossilizing on that OS just as they did with XP. Unless the next Windows version offers some feature that actually saves companies money that they can't save in any other way, they're going to stay put.
Switching OS versions can cost a company millions of dollars by the time everything is done. Most of the time there is no upside, other that avoiding even larger costs if you don't switch. Well, companies are going to wait until those costs actually start to show up before switching. What costs so much? Well, for starters you have all the obvious logistics. Then you have application testing. Then you have all the disruptions because of all the apps you didn't test (nobody knows all the software at a big company). Then you have all the disruptions that you'd have even if everything went "perfectly" as people re-acclimate/etc, or find that some file wasn't stored on the network and somebody has to restore a backup, and so on.
I have a car. I know it is going to die one of these days. And yet, I don't replace it, because I don't need to. It is just as useful when it is 10 years old as it was when it was new, and a new car doesn't really give me much utility over the old one. I keep the old one, until it becomes cheaper to get a new one (which can include a lot of factors beyond just repairs).
100+ bucks is a fucking good reason
Virtual Machines are still not an answer, not yet anyway. Until there's a Voodoo 2 gpu emulator in the virtual machine that handles directx 1-7, opengl 1.2 and Glide. Old applications simply will not all run. Win9x doesn't work properly in virtual machines even now 15 years on. You still can't play Warhammer Dark Omen with all it's options just like a bare metal Pentium 2 running windows 98 with a Voodoo card can. This is a hurdle that honestly should have been fixed years ago. Wine has the same problem. There are many old applications it doesn't support because they never finished Directx 1-7 support. http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectX-ToDo. Until they get graphics cards properly working in virtual machines it's not ready to be used. Gallium3D is going to make linux able to run Directx 10/11 applications work in virtual machines by directly forwarding commands from the virtual machine to the graphics card, but there are at this stage AFAIK no plans to support older titles. The closest thing I've seen around is Dosbox has some voodoo 2 patches but they're very unsupported, you can't just apt-get install dosbox-voodoo and get a working install at this stage. Also running windows 9x while patchable, is unsupported by Dosbox at this stage. It would be nice if virtualbox would pick up some of this work to fix gpu support. But I suspect noone is interested in making old software work :(
Corporate IT runs XP because it runs a set of time-tested apps, that are either custom or extremely vertical. Updating to Windows 7 would mean:
1 - Upgrading licenses for the OS and probably office suites
2 - Possibly upgrading hardware
3 - Upgrading licenses for all your third party software
4 - Upgrading licenses for your web-based software to run in a newer browser (this is why so many companies still use IE6)
5 - Possibly upgrading server licenses to work with Windows 7
6 - Validating and testing to make sure all the new software works together (no small feat for large companies - think VPN clients competing with new active directory configurations, new authentication mechanisms, new IE mechanisms talking to new web app stacks that are probably custom, etc...)
7 - Re-train your support staff so they know the new software inside and out
8 - Finally you can re-train your users to use the new stuff
All that, for what? You're replacing a system that's known to work with an unknown quantity. The new functionality you get had better be WELL worth it, 'cause it's going to cost you.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I believe this is because Windows 3.11 relies on the implementation details of Microsoft's own DOS (certain things will always be in this exact memory location) and FreeDOS' implementation is not identical down to that level.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
I would bet you lunch it's because 99% of those old XP machines have been replaced, not upgraded.
Of course XP is dying very fast. You haven't been able to buy a new XP machine in about 4 years, except for netbooks, and that's been over 2 years. XP is only disappearing because you can't get it any more. I would bet very few machines have been upgraded from XP.
I would also bet that 95% of users would still be perfectly served by XP. I think Windows 7 is fine, but there's definitely nothing significant about it I prefer to XP.
If you don't use IE, like any sane person, and you don't care about DirectX 11, which counts everyone who doesn't play leading-edge games, the only advantages of Windows 7, for home users at least, are the latest security fixes and support for newer hardware. Microsoft's biggest problem was that XP was really quite good, and they've simply got nothing else to offer. The best we can ever hope for is incremental improvements, mostly driven by advances in the hardware technology.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
but I am a blac belt in all five major martial arts so I can protect you from him and from all the rightwing racist vijilantes that creep all over the horrible racist capitalistic hellhole that is the U.S.A.
Can your blac[k] belt stop a 9mm?
While you are correct with regards to supporting OSes in perpetuity, Microsoft has actually created an atmosphere of "perpetuity" to their OSes since cutting the cord with the command line all those many years ago. They wanted in the embedded device market... so they made XP work on o-scopes, etc. Well, those OSes need to last much longer than your grandma's computer OS, and Microsoft is increasingly aware that if they're not going to support their OS, someone will have an OS ready that will... and large, monolithic customers (the DoD for one) do not simply update their OS when Microsoft tells them to.
(Open Source has created much more secure and wonderful OSes than Microsoft could dream of creating, but that's for another post... and many folks did it while holding down a full time job.) They did it without forcing or requiring things to exist so they could invent a market, and in spite of Windows' sales numbers, there are many more Linux OSes run by the masses than ever before.... it's not your father's geek OS... :) Windows could cement their dominance by not dropping their OSes off the radar so quickly, but their hubris with regards to "the desktop" has shown many imperfections in the last few years... imperfections that are filled by other companies and their products.
Microsoft's OSes are manufactured to be compatible with each other. Windows 7 is just a better handled bug-fixed Windows Vista. For the most part, like Apple, Microsoft "obsoletes" their OSes artificially. The move to the NT-based kernel has solidified Microsoft's position with a real OS (anything before NT was a toy OS...), however with that comes the inevitable support dilemma that either helps Microsoft sell more OSes and keeps the package "fresh" so everyone will want the new OS with feature X, or it helps Microsoft maintain its existing base by supporting the OS so it won't be ditched in favor of the more plausible alternatives (more plausible and useable alternatives than we've seen in the history of computing I might add.)
While I agree that manpower is something Microsoft must contend with in their OS roadmap, I do not believe they are "hurting" by supporting two or three versions of their OS for at least bug fixes and the odd security patch. I'd be more inclined to believe that it is a substantial burden if Windows were a substantial rewrite each release... with the XP to Vista transition, far less of the OS was rewritten after many features promised were pulled (and still haven't seen the light of day... like WinFS, etc.)... but that is indeed a bigger difference than Vista to 7. But if they support Vista, they won't make any money peddling 7 (and soon to be 8...) That's not to say XP and Vista are twins... that's just to say that the underlying codebase (stuff that would benefit from bugfixes and security patches) is not as different as the boys at Redmond would have us believe.
My personal feeling is security and bugfixes shouldn't be something that gets dropped because of manpower shortages... after all bugfixes and security patches are repairs to something you already sold an unsuspecting public. Saying "well, buy 7 and that'll be fixed" is purely marketing... there is no technical reason to abandon an OS after a short time... Apple's just as guilty... requiring Lion for features that would work find for Snow Leopard. Apple's got the same problem Microsoft had with XP... it's good enough for most people. There's a realistic limit to support for an OS version, as we even see that in Linux, but Microsoft and Apple seem to be falling into the revenue grab trap... and the "sheeple" are not happy about it as they once were... even with smaller investments (with the OS costing more than most PCs that run it), people aren't keen on shelling out yet another $200 for an OS upgrade that just changes the second digit when you do "Ver" at the command line.
I don't believe the failure of Vista has caused Microsoft to "speed up" their shutdown cycle... I believe their increasing irrelevance in a changing market is pushing them to devote more and more resources to things they traditionally would've had "sewn up" in the bad old days of pre-convicted Microsoft.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Seems like Vista just came out!
You are right. If Windows 8 won't get a major overhaul it's a dead horse except for pure tablet computers. I'll wait for Windows 9 because I want to use the mouse and multitouch, whatever is more hany fr the given task. And the actual chimera Windows 8 is, it won't fly for Desktop purposes, so NO reasonable IT Deportment will use it. We always use the actual MS-Software after the first SP, because these incrimental upgrades are less rough than waiting for the very last second.
But I bet my butt our IT Department will give Windows 8 the finger if it's not changed big times.
At my workplace, our systems still predominantly run XP Professional, with maybe 3 or 4 running Windows 7 Pro.
Due to a budget crunch in 2009 through last year, we couldn't afford the planned upgrades, so we decided to make do with what we had. (EG. If a power supply died, we spent the $35 for another one and got the PC going again, vs. using it as a reason to upgrade to a whole new PC with a new OS on it.)
Now, we're slowly rolling out some upgraded hardware and software (just finished upgrading all of our Microsoft Office 2003 installations to Office 2010 -- which we were basically forced against a wall to do, so we could retire our old Exchange Server 2003 and utilize a cloud hosted Exchange Server 2010). But Windows 7 deployment has, quite frankly, created more negatives for us than the positives it brings.
Lack of driver support is a big issue. For example, the classic Adaptec 2940 series SCSI controller cards are no longer supported at all in 64-bit Windows 7. That's a problem for us, since we use a document management system with a group of dedicated "scan stations" people go to to scan in their documents each day. The scanners are old Ricoh SCSI based models that cost us many thousands of dollars each when we first bought them. They're still good workhorse scanners for our purposes and I can't really cost justify replacing them, at least until they fail on us. The only way I've found to make these work in Win 7 is to install the whole XP mode thing and run them in a virtualized XP session. That's ridiculous if you can just keep XP Pro on the computer instead!
Our old HP plotters aren't supported in Windows 7 either, but again -- why replace an "ancient" but still good, working plotter with a new one that costs $14,000 or more, just because you'd like to have the latest $200 or so operating system on the PC it's attached to?
From the systems administration side of things? Windows 7 annoys me because I can no longer browse the network and see the comments entered for each workstation. Under XP, I can double click the "Network Neighborhood" and look at all the PCs in the domain, and if they had description fields entered such as the name of the employee using the PC, they'd show up in the list. With 7, they decided that info was irrelevant, apparently, and no longer display it?!
"Old software, all the games you missed playing over the years, etc. Load up a VM in a current computer. Install the legacy OS, boot it when you get all nostalgic or need to read really old files, and put it away when you're done. No need for separate hardware. DOS, Windows of all flavors, Linux, BSD, Solaris, OSX if you have an Intel processor, etc., can all be loaded in virtual machines. No need for a separate computer."
Doesn't work for all the old games, especially older Win32 games because most VM software won't provide the necessary tools for older OSes like 9x/ME for things like Video Acceleration. (ST: Armada is one of them). What those companies sould do is release source code so the engine could be updated to run on modern OSes instead.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
I'm pretty sure you can run clamscan on anything that's mountable, so if you are really hurting, boot up the VM in a liveCD or something and give the filesystem a scan that way.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Your list is correct, but I know from our own experiences, it's not a very significant list of items for what we do. Obviously, results vary -- but for example? I'd say "So what?" about no IE 9 compatibility. I'd rather see people using Firefox or Chrome, both of which DO work just fine under XP Pro.
Proper IPv6 support is totally irrelevant for us right now too. If we did eventually reach a point where our ISP told us we were being issued an IPv6 address and needed to support it - that would probably be handled at the router level, and everything behind the firewall / router would still use legacy IP addressing anyway.
Direct X11? Totally a non-issue for the business applications we run. Nobody's doing 3D gaming in our workplace, and even though we do some CAD work, all of it is 2-dimensional (such as architectural drawings).
Quite possibly, the biggest reason to upgrade from XP is that 4GB RAM barrier ... but even there, 4GB seems to be enough for what we're doing right now. I've found that about half of our users are just fine with 2GB on XP Pro really, and 4GB gives everyone else enough extra headroom to load and edit larger images or drawings they might be working with. I know this is always a moving target, and in 2 more years, bigger upgrades of some of our apps may require more (ACCPAC accounting package -- I'm looking at you!). But 2 more years of life out of existing software/hardware is 2 more years of life out of it!
"and a SSD drive you will have issues and probably a dead drive within a month or two."
I'll call BS on it. I've ran XP for about a year on my Agility2 and it's still humming at near-new performance. Once I wiped the drive it regained full performance on a newer Win7 machine.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Indeed. I have several games here that require Voodoo graphics support (glide or minigl). Good luck getting that in a VM.
There are also copy protections that require the floppy.
What would be useful is if Microsoft and other vendors did a "final release patch set", and offered it to the public for all foreseeable future. So even if you can't get support anymore, you can at least install the latest official patches, no matter how old those patches are.
As it is, you can't - Windows update won't work, and the patch download pages either have been removed, or made inaccessible. If you have to reinstall, your only options are to either go unpatched or to pirate the patches.
I don't expect Microsoft to support OSes forever. But I do expect them to not remove patches that have already been released. The hosting costs are negligible - an entire Win98 patch set probably takes less space than a single typical Tuesday patch, and will be downloaded by far fewer people, so the bandwidth costs are pretty low too. And, face it, it's not like customers are going to run Windows 98 instead of Windows 7/8 either, so there won't be any lost sales. Just some goodwill, which they are short on.
Hey, son, stop giving advice to older dudes, because it looks bad for both of us... also, if filthy words worked, this world would work perfectly, wouldn't it?
Look, kid. Nobody knows how old you are, and nobody cares. The software and stack people use DOESN'T MATTER. The only thing that matters is whether you use your skills for the betterment of mankind. Sometimes that means writing Linux kernel patches, sometimes that means selling Windows software.
The fact that you don't get this means you are immature, uneducated, unwise and unworldly. A fucking child.
You have to be a man before you can be an old one. Grow the fuck up.
clamscan is reactive, not preventative. Nod32 can intercept an exploit against the network stack or browser and stop the malware as it is downloaded or attempted written to disk. With clamscan, you have to be infected first; then you can scan.
Oh, if only there were a third choice. Torn between torment and damnation we might glance about for some saving grace, some true escape from our peril but it is not to be. The choice is either run botnets, or migrate to a newer version of Windows. There is no third course. Alas, we are lost!
In practice, no, there is no third option. Attempting to migrate to Linux or MacOS would not only require extensive retraining of every employee in the company (including the IT staff!), but also rewriting every piece of custom software that relies on Windows (including stuff like Excel spreadsheet macros and VBScripts, many of which are probably undocumented). This would be far, far more expensive than just upgrading to Windows 7, even if that requires new PCs. A migration to another OS is almost impossible to justify by a simple cost-benefit analysis in any large company.
Lots of things don't work on Windows XP. Just off the top of my head I can think of:
* Windows 2008 R2 RSAT Tools -- you can RDP to a server instead, but that's not always possible or recommended.
* PowerShell Active Directory module -- very handy, but doesn't work on XP at all.
* You mentioned DX11
* Internet Explorer 9 or later
* Location APIs for HTML5 apps
* Proper IPv6 support (XP has some experimental support, but in practice it's not very usable)
* Any 64-bit only software like the SharePoint 2010 design tools -- I know there's a 64-bit XP edition, I used to use it myself, but few others did, and support for it by hardware vendors was never good and even less these days.
Sure, these are all small things, but they add up. To get an XP machine to "work" you need about a bazillion hotfixes, add-ons, extras, drivers, and even some scripts. On top of that, these days it's getting hard to buy a machine with "only" 4GB of memory, but that's the most XP supports, unless you're a masochist and want to run an unsupported decade-old 64-bit OS instead of just going straight to Windows 7 64-bit like a normal person.
Every time people make a list of features, they say "they are not important but it adds up." This "adds up" doesn't really happen with Win 7. In our research organization, not a single person needs Win 7. We will be upgraded, we know that, but are trying to keep a number of desktops on Win XP, because of some MEMS design apps. Being a research organization, it is full of content-creating people (we make extensive use of MS Office and OpenOffice packages, graphing tools, Autocad and other vector design packages, MEMS layout editors, physics simulators of all kinds, even bitmap editing apps). And yet, not a single one of us 200 needed Win 7. From this perspective, I'd say that list doesn't amount to a hill of beans. I mean, who the fuck needs IE 9 ? Just run Chrome or Firefox like everybody else, FFS. No need to be all special and different by using an exotic browser :D
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
* Windows 2008 R2 RSAT Tools -- you can RDP to a server instead, but that's not always possible or recommended.
* PowerShell Active Directory module -- very handy, but doesn't work on XP at all.
* You mentioned DX11
* Internet Explorer 9 or later
* Location APIs for HTML5 apps
* Proper IPv6 support (XP has some experimental support, but in practice it's not very usable)
The only reason why your list of things don't work is because Microsoft will not allow these updates/applications to be available on Windows XP because it is in "extended support". Windows XP is perfectly capable of running the software you listed with minor tweaks, but Microsoft doesn't want to support it.
There's a huge difference between planned obsolescence and a broken OS.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
What host OS is that? It looks like Motif or something.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Dropping admin privileges is required from a security standpoint. It's not something that needs to be done to get a 100% fully functional system, and it's also not something that is much of a problem for a competent computer user.
Run a version of IE that isnt dog slow?
You're messing with me aren't you? You suggest dropping admin privileges to eliminate security flaws and then suggest actually letting someone loose on the internet with IE? Thanks but pass.
or switch to the expensive Almacas...
Answer: the world will end before April 2014, and mass migration from XP is a harbinger for the end of the world, so it's all irrelevant.
I vote based on politicians' actions, unless contrary to my preconceptions. Often wrong, never uncertain. #iamthe99%
It's Ubuntu with FVWM as the window manager.
Yeah, it's ugly. There is no way to make FVWM pretty, except for FVWM-Crystal, but that particular fvwmrc has its own issues.
--
BMO
XP is dying. I agree with MS on this as if they supported more people would still use it. IE 9 requires ASLR, refined DEP, new exception handling security fixes, and something else I do not remember, and of course DRM for their h.264 license which is part of aero.
The H.264 license does not require the use of any DRM. Where do people get this nonsense and why do they keep spreading this misinformation? DRM is only required to play back Blu-rays and other "protected" content – not freely available video from the Web.
The longevity of XP was an accident. It was a good time to live in, but they won't make that mistake ever again. Don't expect support to last as long as the XP support for 7 either.
Windows 7 has mainstream support until Jan. 12, 2015 (when new feature development stops) and extended support until Jan. 14, 2020. So you can keep using it for nearly another eight years if you are satisfied with just security patches and no new OS features. Windows 8 is shaping up to be a real dog on the desktop, so I expect the boundaries of support to be used to their fullest. 2020 is plenty of time for Ballmer to be canned and for Windows 9 to get back to fulfilling core business needs and forget about this silly Apple tablet envy.
Yep. Expect to see XP on the corporate desktop until 2014, and then Windows 7 until early 2020.
Actually, 3.1 and 3.11 ran on PCDOS, DRDOS, and OS/2 and DesqView/X. Possibly Phar Lap, but I never got a chance to use that.
I think it's just Microsoft being dicks back then.
--
BMO
My next operating system choice will not be Microsoft.
I purchased Vista in 2008. This is way too early for extended support.
If MS wants to cut support for Vista - fine, just give vista customers a free bounce to 7 and support is fixed.
7 is what Vista should have been anyway and 7 should have been a free upgrade for Vista users.
I fully agree w/ this. Given how broken Vista was, SP2 or SP3 should have been a free upgrade to 7.
Incidentally, does Vista run well given excess hardware, like say, 8GB of RAM?
You see, that is the root of the problem. They ("M$") work so that won't happen. We saw recently news about Chrome overtaking IE on Sundays. Can you guess why?
Because Chrome doesn't support Active Directory administration, and in any business organization of any size which is based around Windows, this is an essential feature. It's the #1 reason why alternative browsers haven't gotten a foothold on the corporate desktop.
They have 2 years to figure out what they want to switch to (when XP runs out of support). Best get crackin.
Those icons resided in the %allusersprofile%\desktop folder, which is (rightfully) only writeable by admin. By attempting to rename those icons, you were attempting to write to a system protected location. Darn tootin it asks for credentials, and Ill note that even on XP a non-admin would not have been able to rename them.
And for the record Win7 would give you the same issue.
IE9 vs Firefox vs Chrome seems such a wash security wise at this point that the wisecracks are a bit worn. Chrome's auto-update and sandboxing may make it more secure, but gone (IMO) are the days where you can really be on solid ground mocking someone for using IE-- IE9 is a decent (though limited) browser, with a number of performance and security features that I do not believe firefox matches.
Are you kidding me ?? Extended support for a dump of an OS ?? Just stop Windows Vista already .. 7 is way cool. I don't know why they are going for 8 so early, let windows 7 go for some 4-5 years more.
just about everyone I know who bought a laptop before W7 was released (excluding the people who are adept enough to install Linux, XP or W7 themselves) are running Vista
I dont want to sound repetitive, but: the two of them?
Yes, you're right. I concede defeat.
Mod up for truthiness!
VM installs are terrific. Easy to restore from Snapshots, very quick to load additional machines for testing apps etc, and dandy for data rescue too.
For example, I needed to make a .pst from a .ost for a friend. Instead of tying up a PC, I loaded Office and the .ost recovery app I needed on an XP VM, did the deed, then reverted to a previous clean Snapshot. I also exported to Thunderbird Portable so he can use that too.
Didn't have to leave my recliner to do it, praise be to VirtualBox.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Same here. I have an old PC with Radeon 9200, and there are no Win7 compatible drivers for that. Works fine with XP, though.
Until IE5.5 crashes trying to render www.slashdot.org, that is.
You can run the latest versions of Firefox or Opera at least on Win2k. I'm doing it now. There is very little software for XP or Vista that won't run on Win2k.
... Because Microsoft haven't written a plugin/support so other browsers can support active directory.
Let's not forget here that Microsoft will extend something outside of the standards. If they wanted to support active directory in chrome, firefox, etc, then there is a plugin system to let them do *exactly* that. Funnily enough, they don't seem to have written any plugins to support their proprietary stuff for 3rd party browsers.
i have an old mac with clarisworks
Mendacem Memorem Esse Oportet
Except people keep saying that and I see precious little difference between Vista and 7 (when running on hardware that can cope; one of Microsoft's biggest and most reprehensible mistakes when launching Vista was the "Vista-Ready" fiasco which put it on millions of computers that simply couldn't cope. Paired with the problem with drivers, which itself wasn't strictly Microsoft's fault and which I remember happening to the same degree with XP when they changed the driver model and manufacturers didn't prepare, it left a very bad taste in a lot of people's mouths). Other than the taskbar - and I'm not a fan of 7's taskbar, actually, and prefer Vista's - and the way Microsoft tweaked User Access Control to make it somewhat less secure but at the same time rather less aggravating, they seem very much the same to me. Maybe I'm missing something, though; my home machine runs Vista and I've not spent that long on 7.
If you're running W2k you need antivirus.
Of course, these two statements are not mutually exclusive.
Ah yes, that old canard, "linux is fine for hobbyists and geeks, but serious grown-ups use Windows." Serious grown-ups look at the bottom line and metrics like productivity and decide accordingly. I run my company exclusively on FLOSS and I guarantee you we are serious grown-ups and have greater productivity because we aren't spending large chunks of every day keeping our systems patched or losing half our cycles to anti-virus software or spyware/adware etc.
I had thought linux had long ago buried that FUD among serious grown-ups, but I guess some memes never die.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
There are a couple of anti-virus vendors that support Win2K with current versions, but no browsers that I know of
I have current releases of both Opera and Firefox running without any problem in Win2k.
Support is for people who want their computer to show the correct time when their government changes the daylight savings times rules yet again.
I have 3D acceleration in WinFLP, but I don't have any applications that use it.
3D acceleration does not work in seamless mode with VirtualBox on Linux. Fullscreen only. Obviously stuff that relies on DX11 is right out if you're using Linux as a host OS. And besides, there is no DX11 for WinFLP anyway.
I don't know what happens if you use Windows as the host.
The Xen kernels do not have 3D acceleration at all and there is no support from ATI, Nvidia, or Intel for it even as proprietary drivers. No 3D in the Xen host and none in the client OS.
--
BMO
open source can't solve everything and brings its own set of problems to the table (i.e. security...etc).
sorry? can you substantiate this somehow?
security is actually one of the strongest points of open source, because it's open to public review and scrutiny as oposed to the questionable security by obscurity in closed software.
The fact it is going into the shut-down cycle this soon proves how successful Win 7 was well as how big a failure Vista ended up being.
this is quite comprensible but security updates should be definitely mantained free. limiting them now to paid subscriptions is a blatant rip-off customers shouldn't tolerate, and a risk the whole network shouldn't have to take. MS should either continue with free security patches for vista or else offer a free upgrade to w7 to all vista (l)users.
We actually had to downgrade a laptop to vista the other day. You can install clean windows 7 on it, but one of the built-in drivers causes it to straight up blue screen after a couple of minutes, but without telling us which driver in the stack trace, just a generic error. We *think* it's the hard-drive controller after various eliminations, but various versions of the intel drivers don't help. We spent days on it trying to debug the damn thing.
Stick vista on it (which it came with). Works fine out of the box, no bluescreens, just keeps working. Just needs drivers for the touchpad and optional better intel GPU ones.
So screw it, vista it is.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
SUBST usually gets around limitations like this in older programs.
recently set up a new win7 system with xpmode for a bunch of old programs, some needed to be installed from subst'd drives, while a couple needed to be installed TO subst'd drives (and shortcuts modified to create the subst before running the exe). took awhile to work out what needed what, but everything is still working a year later.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa374177(v=vs.85).aspx
Group Policies is what sets IE apart from other browsers in the enterprise. But the Group Policy API is open and available to anyone.
You are not suggesting that Microsoft should write GPO plugins for *other* browsers, are you?
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
ooh, neat, thanks.
I've forgotten so much about DOS.
--
BMO
Minor nitpick, but I thought Mac Office 2011 brought back support for Visual Basic scripting?
I think it's just Microsoft being dicks back then.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
What makes you so sure Windows 9 is not going to have a tablet focused UI as well? A businessman is at the Microsoft helm now. Not a geek like Gates. So it can be expected to make decisions based purely for monetary reasons. Not for tech reasons. If a techie had been in charge of decisions by now we might have been blessed with a small, efficient MinWin kernel that operates under a user selectable choice of GUI to better compete with Linux. Instead we have moronic decisions leading to primary support for tablets first and then desktops and even laptops as an afterthought as well as one of the most bloated OSes ever created by man. Certainly nothing to be proud of from a tech perspective.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
greater than 4 gigs of ram
Windows 7 32 bit does not support more than 4 gigs and Windows XP x64 supports as much RAM as you've got. OS X and Linux also support more than 4 gigs and both are far superior to Windows 7.
SSD and trim command support
Fair enough, but you are also going to have significantly less room on that SSD of yours due to Windows 7 bloat. I believe OS X also has trim support now and it is a far superior OS even if you hate the dock as I do.
better SMP support
Noticeably better? I run a dual core CPU on XP x64 and both cores seem to operate just fine.
Supperior security for all browsers due to better DEP and other security enchancements
Again how much better is the DEP support in Windows 7? XP SP2+ also has DEP support.
Touchscreen
Riight. Now that's an important feature. Who the fuck even uses a touchscreen for a desktop OS?
multi que async with Sata and PATA drives
Whatever that is I don't think I need it. XP has full command queuing support for SATA drives.
Much better security
Fair enough. There are some real security improvements in Windows 7. Along with the trim command security is the main reason to upgrade to Win 7.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
No, 64 bit xp doesn't count and has never counted. Try to find drivers for it.
All of my devices have XP x64 drivers, including some older, somewhat obscure RAID cards. I find the driver support to actually be pretty good. OTOH, one of my devices does not have driver support for Windows 7. In fact that is the main reason that I don't multiboot with Windows 7. Lack of driver support.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
IE has changed and will have an annual release. IE 10 will be out soon and next year IE 11 will be out etc. Windows Update automatically updates to the latest browser now starting this year and IE 8 usage was only 13% this weekend according to g.statcounter.com! Corporations will have to update their browsers far more often compared to the past. It wont be like IE 6 since it was such a different beast from any browser or even version of itself.
If IE8 has a 13 % market share that means that my customers would lose approximately 13 % of their visitors by not having it supported. That's a hard sell. I can get away with it once IE8's market share drops below 5 %, although less would be better.
(Another problem is that I might need to support IE8's Trident until IE9 has died out due to hacks like CPP3PIE apparently only working in IE9 if IE8 compatibility mode is active. And no, "just don't use gradients" is not an option.)
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
The marketing department wasn`t responsible for the complete rewrite of the graphics driver model as well as the subsequent re architecture of DirectX.
What makes you so sure? Do you work there or something? Microsoft is most definitely a marketing driven company.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
BTW, NT 6.0 is supported till 09-JUL-2013 and EOL is 10-JUL-2018 (http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search/default.aspx?sort=PN&qid=null&alpha=Windows+Server+2008&Filter=FilterNO)
Since "the website requires certain users to install third-party software" is unacceptable
Then how did so many web sites get away with requiring Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Reader for so long?
I don't expect Microsoft to support OSes forever. But I do expect them to not remove patches that have already been released. The hosting costs are negligible.
The problem is not with the hosting costs. The problem is that if Microsoft did that, people would have no incentive to switch to the new operating systems and office products. It would carve a gargantuan hole in Microsoft's profits.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Pretty much. They were doing a check to see if you were running their version of DOS and if not put up what were essentially fake error messages. It was one of the bits of evidence in the anti-trust trial years ago.
Maybe. Ok so lets mock IE for other reasons. How about the ability to start up IE without it questioning me about accelerators and other ways to enhance my search experience or that automatic downloads are displayed in the most unobvious way with a little bar on the edge of the screen which is easy to miss and often leaves you wondering if a webpage / download is working at all. How about we pick Chrome due to it's ultrafast javascript performance, excellent WebGL support, or support for more than one high def video codec?
And while Microsoft is busy shouting from the rooftops that IE9 supports the canvas tag and scores 100 on Acid3, it fairs quite dismally at http://beta.html5test.com/ supporting less than half the number of points on HTML5 support than your nearest competitor safari and close to 1/4 of the points of the current leader.
Also what's with not showing an SSL page as secure by colour code if you have self signed certificate which is otherwise trusted by the system? Makes me do a double take every time to see if I am actually visiting an encrypted page or not.
There's many reasons other than security for not using IE.
I wasn't aware that any Linux distribution developed its own HTML rendering engine. The ones I use only package ready-made stuff like WebKit or complete browsers. Now, admittedly, after a while the upgrade channels are no longer supported but you can generally expect that as long as a release is supported it can expect software upgrades. Microsoft tends to have Windows versions on "extended support" where they no longer receive things like new IE versions but are still "supported" and thus acceptable for companies to use.
Plus, other operating systems aren't nearly as badly affected as they don't ship browsers that use Trident as their rendering engine. Old versions of other engines lack support for certain things but mostly adhere to the specs. Old versions of Trident tend to deviate from the specs in weird ways or force web developers to deal with bizarre stuff like hasLayout.
The problem is not that old Windows versions have old components, it's that one of those old components (Trident) negatively affects the web by forcing web developers to implement arcane hacks for as long at it sticks around. Each version of IE after IE6 has gotten a little better but these things have a long half-life and they keep costing us time and money until they're obscure enough to be ignored.
You know, if Microsoft did put Google Chrome Frame into Windows Update as a heavily recommended update for obsolete Windows versions (XP and Vista) that would make life a lot easier. Win8 ships with IE10 and the others can semi-safely be assumed to run WebKit if asked, which should reduce the number of hacks needed for IE compatibility.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Nonsense. Windows 98 maxes out at 1 GB of RAM, though there are workarounds and even patches to make it address more. Windows 95 can have at least up to 256 MB of RAM. It probably has the same limit as Windows 98, but that's untested as far as I know.
Windows 7 is just a better handled bug-fixed Windows Vista.
Credibility destroyed.
Couldn't that be accomplished with a network time server and (maybe) software updates, transparently to the user? Anyone who can't get those could just change the time manually like they do any other device that doesn't get network updates. I don't think it requires a phone call, much less thousands of them.
What makes you so sure Windows 9 is not going to have a tablet focused UI as well?
I am shure they will integrate multitouch and mouse/keyboard better. I don't expect it to give up multitouch.
A businessman is at the Microsoft helm now. Not a geek like Gates.
To give him credit, Windows 7 was a good OS. And Office 2010 was the first Office since 10 years which was actually better than an open source derivat. One reason being it doesn't implode just because you use too many screenshots in a word document...
The 16-bit-crap they sold the masses for decades while NT was available at astronomic rates was not. XP was a big (!) security mess until SP 2, so I REALLY think the claim that Bill decided for better / geekier products from a thechnologic point of view shoulkd be doubted. For the time between Windows 3.11 and XP SP2 M$ as a company needs to burn in some special nerd hell.
So I pirated NT and 2000 as a matter of self defense because I paid for Windows 95 and Windows 98, which were unusable crap. How often have you played top notch games back then and the system hung altogether? A nearly non-issue under NT.
On the other hand, what we've seen from Windows 8 makes it unusable for Desktop Users, because it is a step back. And the new Home Server 2011 is pure crap. Boy, did they mess WHS 2011 up. And I don't mean the missing drive extender.
So what I am suggesting here is that under the evil Ballmer Microsoft made some really good products while Bill is responsible for the really bad ones, just saying.
Instead we have moronic decisions leading to primary support for tablets first and then desktops and even laptops as an afterthought as well as one of the most bloated OSes ever created by man. Certainly nothing to be proud of from a tech perspective.
I personally have no problem at all with the OS being bigger every time. The hardware is following moores law for decades, so there is no limiting factor here. But you are wrong, Windows 8 is actually not using that much more ressources than windows 7. What I have a problem with ist stability, usability and security. And the usability is a step back if it stays that way. And this will need to go away in Windows 9. For Windows 9 I want an inputdevice on my PC (beside the PC and the monitor, which I doon't want to be multitouch) like a multitouch tablet and a mouse and a keyboard. With all three combined the user interface adapts to your specific tasks. And who knows: If M$ kann make multitouch OSes, maybe in a few years time the more open Windows environment is superior to the walled gardan Apple has to offer. Maybe. I bought the iPad 3 despite the limmitations though because the other tablets optically are not worthy to be used as a bookreplacement. And a kindle is ONLY a book.
I don't give up my hopes yet: Windows 8 could MS make understand multitouch. And Windows 9 could combine the best of two worlds. We'll see.
Have you ever used Vista recently? They've patched it up to the point where it's more or less Windows 7 but missing a few interface tweaks. The main difference is the PR game, where everyone thinks that Vista is bad and 7 is good, even though the differences aren't huge.
My impression of Windows 95 and 98 is that they don't really know what to do with more than about 256MB of ram. The OSes can use it, but they don't utilize it effectively.
The so-called 64MB "limit" for Windows 95 may come from most of the original Pentium chipsets back in the day where the L2 cache would only cache the first 64MB of ram. Since Windows 95 tended to allocate memory at the end first, you could take.a pretty big performance hit by putting more than 64MB into those systems unless you actually had need for large amounts of ram (in which case why are you using Windows 95?).
The particular bit that you're talking about (that was evidence in the trial), was in the beta version of 3.1, not in final release, so it can't be what GP is running into.
Technically, the PC came with a Windows 7 license (check the sticker on the case) and was downgraded to XP. I'm sure this will continue to go on for a long, long time.
The longevity of XP was an accident. It was a good time to live in, but they won't make that mistake ever again. Don't expect support to last as long as the XP support for 7 either.
Windows 7 has mainstream support until Jan. 12, 2015 (when new feature development stops) and extended support until Jan. 14, 2020. So you can keep using it for nearly another eight years if you are satisfied with just security patches and no new OS features. Windows 8 is shaping up to be a real dog on the desktop, so I expect the boundaries of support to be used to their fullest.
I second that.
2020 is plenty of time for Ballmer to be canned and for Windows 9 to get back to fulfilling core business needs and forget about this silly Apple tablet envy.
I disagree. First because MS fucked up big time before Ballmer: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2773391&cid=39620577
People tend to forget what a mess XP was securitywise until SP 2. Or what crap they sold to the mass market between Win 3.11 and XP (first usable OS if you were not so keen on spending hundreds of dollars for one decent OS).
And I see multitouch as an important addendum to the already available inputdevices. There are things far more easily done with multitouch, while others are faster done with a mouse and others with the keyboard. The essential thing is a good integration. I assume that it will be done fine in Windows 9. Win 8 will make themlearn (like Vista on 3D) and Win 9 will be the the windows7 for multitouch and Desktopintegration. We will see.
As a UNIX guy myself who actually liked(and used) Windows NT features, NTFS permissions/registry/auditing/group policy/etc., and not a Windows hater by any means. I actually thought Microsoft Services for Unix would bridge the gap nicely... but I found SFU is terrible (for my use). The NFS implimentation is terrible. The terminal is terrible. There is no X server. There is no native ssh included. No community support. No vi. It (was) all crap and there was no way I wanted to port and recompile every mundane script/program. When I started installing cygwin binaries to make my SFU experience more complete, I eventualluy ditched SFU all together. SFU was just a steaming pile of sog dhit waiting for you to add the flies.
120 characters ought to be enough for anyone
I am a big fan of people testing and migrating to IPv6 yesterday. But how do they do that if their ISP is not ready, and hasn't issued them any IPv6 addresses? Even if they were to obtain IPv6 links from somewhere, their ISP would still have to be capable of handling it - if they can't, having those IPv6 resources is worthless.
MS doesn't need to do any Windows 9. All they need to do is to in the Control Panel, have something called 'Concepts' or 'Themes' and offer users a choice of UIs - Metro, 7, XP, 2000/98/95. If they wish, by all means make Metro the default interface, but provide the choices right out of the box. Do that, and they won't even need to migrate to Windows 7 - they can go directly to Windows 8. Oh, and one more thing MS can do - make Windows 8 a 64-bit OS only, and refer 32-bit users to Windows 7.
Delaying what ought to be a simple common sense decision for something that might come 5 years later is just inane. Offer the right thing now, and everybody will happily migrate from XP, Vista, 7, 2000, NT4, NT3.5, NT3.1, Windows 98 and Windows 95 to Windows 8 (aside from resource constraints).
CentOS offers support? I thought they just compile RHEL and give it to you, sans any support.
Support doesn't just mean phone calls. Software updates are a very big part of the support package, and it is the one most people use most of the time. Coming out of support means there won't be any software updates for new DST rules.
A network time server isn't going to work. It gives the time in GMT or UTC, and the local computer uses the timezone information to work out what time it should be where it is. Windows stores local time and timezone offset, most other systems store GMT or UTC and timezone offset. So while you could get the local time stored on the computer to be correct, the timezone offset will be wrong, and that will affect things like timestamps on emails; and calendar appointments either side of the old/new DST changeover dates.
Good catch. I was not aware that it didn't make it into the final release.
They did...several years ago. Whoever is on Vista deserves it now.
Can I substantiate why Open Source can involve security risks? As old holes close new holes open. You don't explain how a lock works to a thief. This is once again /.'s mantra to solve everything.