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Microsoft Urges Businesses To Get Off XP
An anonymous reader writes "It's approximately 11 years since Windows XP was unveiled, and this week Microsoft was still at it trying to convince users that it's time to upgrade. A post on the Windows For Your Business Blog calls on businesses to start XP migrations now. Microsoft cites the main reason as being that support for XP ends in April 2014, and 'most new hardware options will likely not support the Windows XP operating system.' If you run Windows Vista, Microsoft argues that it's time to 'start planning' the move to Windows 8. As this article points out, it's not uncommon to hear about people still running XP at work."
We have a few expensive microscopes with WinXP on the corresponding machine, an expired service contract and in reality cannot upgrade without buying a new microscope (an newer drivers), so what do you do, other than put it behind a firewall and hope for the best.
When the equipment is providing frequent readings or results, it becomes a really expensive boat anchor if it's disconnected and those readings can't get to the people who need them.
Few businesses today want to pay someone to use sneakernet every 15 minutes to transfer new results to the network.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Let's also celebrate slashdot accounts that have only one post, praising MS, put up the instant the story is posted. Because that's some effective trolling, for what that's worth. Been going on for a while and people are still taking it seriously.
I'm testing Windows 8 on a 2008 core2duo and it runs fine, it normally runs 7. I do have it on a more modern hard drive. The problem for Microsoft is computers got 'fast enough' for average users at lest 4 years back if not longer. If 2008 hardware is acting touch and go on XP it's either bad hardware or a beyond average use case. Even XP itself got fat over the years. After the service packs and browser updates, XP wanted a whole lot more RAM to get the job done. As for Win8, I hate it's interface, but the resource requirements seem the same as 7.
It is the same deal with any OS. Ubutnu supports a LTS release for 5 years from the date it comes out, not the date you install it, not the date you get a system with it.
MS makes no secret of their support cycle. They promise 10 years of support from the date of release. Sometimes they extend it, as they did with XP, and they then make the new date known. So when you bought a system in 2010 with XP, you bought it knowing that there was only 3 years left on support for that OS.
Support lifecycles really aren't a hard concept, and MS is actually really good with them. Whining about it is rather silly.
My father managed a moderate sized law office. Part of the issue in upgrading was support from 3rd party software which was integral to their business. The main issue was soft costs. As an example, they upgraded from Office 2003 to 2007, the cost of the software was ~$10,000. Not a big deal at all. However, each employee had to be trained on the new software, new procedures drawn up & training for those, then the productivity loss was huge. Overtime costs went up, additional staff needed to be brought on to keep things up to speed during the adjustment period. 3 months in the actual cost of the upgrade was over $100,000 and they were still not back to the level of productivity they were at before. End result: they downgraded back to 2003 and repeated the process once 2010 came around. 2010 stuck but $100,000+ down the drain is not an easy cost to absorb - even if it did work out.
In the end it's probably cheaper to keep XP, toss on Deep Freeze and just keep a document server up to date until you have no choice but to upgrade.
You might not be aware of this, but Microsoft provides a compatibility pack for Office 2003 that allows reading and writing .docx and other 2007+ formats. With the pack, we can all keep the last good MS Office interface for as long as we like. Death to the ribbon!