Slashdot Mirror
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!!!!
I don't know why the above is rated -1. It's certainly more interesting than TFA.
No non-security hotfixes is not the same as no patches. They'll patch security flaws, but not add any features.
Not a sentence!
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.
This is assuming you are in the racing business, and not in the business of selling equestrians.
I am John Hurt.
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've been dreading the day I'd have to leave Vista behind!
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)
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.
>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
sorry, that feature was removed before vista
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.
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?!
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.