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."

Comments

Crap!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm apparently way behind the times -- being perfectly happy with Windows XP!!!!

Re:My message to you, Laura:

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why the above is rated -1. It's certainly more interesting than TFA.

Re:Does this mean even more pown'd windows boxes?

[DMUTPeregrine]

No non-security hotfixes is not the same as no patches. They'll patch security flaws, but not add any features.

Re:Euthanize XP

[jawtheshark]

True, but in this case everyone except MicroEquus, is in the business of using horses. Some of them are employed as brewery horses, others are employed as race horses, but as long as they work fine, there is no need from horses from MicroEquus.

You can of course switch to the free Llamas, but they're so unfamiliar.

You're not the only one still on XP ....

[King_TJ]

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?!