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."

Comments

Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Dystopian Rebel]

XP is still common at work because

a) it is fast even on old hardware,

b) it is supported by at least one good, secure Web browser (hint: not MSIE),

c) it supports about 15 years worth of professional applications (some of which are not available anymore), and

d) upgrading == (pain + time) && (upgrading != c)

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[MonsterTrimble]

*WARNING: CAR ANALOGY*,/p>

I agree (somewhat). I use XP on a Duo Core HP at work and it is pretty responsive however I attribute that to the horsepower under the hood rather than how light the body is. You can make a '57 Cadillac run the quarter mile in 10 seconds but it doesn't mean it's the same weight as a Civic. I have used XP on older hardware (circa 2008) and it's touch and go at times. Pre-2005? Forget it.

Another point is the upgrading portion. We are in the process of migrating to a new MRP system and our old system is the one which has required us to use XP (or virtualize XP on the new Win7 machines). It eventually will happen that staying costs more than moving forward. My only thought is how long will it be until the OS doesn't matter?

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Viol8]

"No it isn't. If you upgrade XP it runs slow. Slow Hardware runs slow."

Clearly you've never "upgraded" from XP to Vista where hardware slow under XP switches to glacial mode. Also there is some older hardware that XP supports which Win7 does not.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[gfxguy]

a) it is fast even on old hardware, No it isn't. If you upgrade XP it runs slow. Slow Hardware runs slow.

It has lower requirements than 7 or 8, so leaves more CPU cycles free for the user... You know what he meant.

b) it is supported by at least one good, secure Web browser (hint: not MSIE), For business? Businesses use IE, and the smart people break the policy and install other Browsers.

I work in a programming department for a large company... when people have problems with IE, we ask them to use a different browser - we don't officially support IE in any way. Our supervisors and managers already realized how much time and money we wasted trying to.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[gnick]

Businesses use IE, and the smart people break the policy and install other Browsers.

Depends on the business. At my company we have IE, but are encouraged to use FireFox instead (no other browsers allowed). At Los Alamos National Lab both IE and FireFox are installed on the computers, but only FireFox is allowed to access anything but internal sites.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Sheik Yerbouti]

No good business reasons to upgrade except for Microsoft's bottom line. Upgrades are good for Microsoft but not necessarily Windows users. It's time to start thinking about upgrades differently the desktop computer operating system technology is pretty mature at this point. The reasons for upgrading are often not really there anymore. Lucky for Microsoft they have drones like you who will advocate people upgrade for no good reason.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[WillRobinson]

I agree, I have quite a few robotic machines running xp, have spent tons of money developing multi threaded C++ programs for them. Just changing to their new development environment, new drivers for the specialized hardware will be expensive. And it just works fine as it is. There is no advantage in speed of
the machines etc.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[serviscope_minor]

At Los Alamos National Lab both IE and FireFox are installed on the computers,

Not on the RHEL desktops. Or ubuntu laptops or macbooks. I remember there being a fair old mix of stuff...

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Lonewolf666]

I have used XP on older hardware (circa 2008) and it's touch and go at times. Pre-2005? Forget it.

That's surprising. 2002 to 2007 should have been the heyday of XP, with the best driver support from hardware vendors. Maybe some vendors slacked off on XP after the release of Vista, but the period you quote was certainly the best for running XP.

In fact, I got a new PC in 2007 and could not get it to run stable under Windows 2000. Switching to XP helped.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[PlusFiveTroll]

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.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[blind biker]

d) upgrading == (pain + time) && (upgrading != c)

Lazy ass IT.

Sometimes, the best thing IT can do is stay the fuck out of the way. Sometimes it's not laziness but on purpose, a decision to not disrupt productivity.

But what would you know about it. You felt the need to hammer a nail in each and every statement of GP. That screams shill or clueless.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Anonymous Coward]

> Lazy ass IT.

Sorry, that's a stupid ass comment. We went through the upgrade at work (major bank) from XP to W7 last year, and it was VERY VERY EXPENSIVE. Over 4000 apps had to be validated, 60K users. Whole thing took months and months, in waves, to ensure up-time and maintain support capacity.

To think that reluctance to do this more often than absolutely necessary is due to "lazy ass IT" demonstrates a butt-clenching level of naivety.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[jader3rd]

I have quite a few robotic machines running xp, have spent tons of money developing multi threaded C++ programs for them.

Given how XP was primarily developed with single core machines the XP thread scheduler isn't that great for multi threaded apps. You get a legit fair thread scheduler with Vista and up.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[stinkyj]

Celearly you don't run the budget either. We have thousands of desktops running XP. Replacements are running Win7, but old ones will probably run XP till they die. Old meaning computers bought last year still run XP. Sure 7 is nice and all but for what we're developing in, it works fine. Just because it's old doesn't mean it's broke!

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[hairyfeet]

You forgot one:

e) Windows 8 has put a lot of doubt in everyone's minds as to whether they will be able to get the Win 7 units they'll need so they are taking a "wait and see" approach.

Lucky for me I was able to get all my customers switched to Win 7 and we are all gonna stay right where we are, but I can totally understand why some would stay with XP. Money is tight, you have a bunch of units that may not run it (I kept Win 7 Upgrade Adviser on a stick along with SIW so I had a good overview of what kind of hardware I was dealing with and any issues, although most chose to buy my $500 quad specials instead of keeping the P4s) and Windows 8 is making a LOT of folks nervous, because that tweeting twitting facebook shitting cellphone OS is NOT what a business users wants nor needs in the office.

So MSFT has nobody to blame but themselves. Instead of taking the worry out for business by making it clear that Win 7 would still be available they are dumping out the beta quality mess that is Win 8 without a care in the world, businesses just don't turn on a dime MSFT, you have to do program testing and hardware testing...its a hell of a lot of work before you can finally start rolling out units. it was a hell of a headache for me and I only deal with SMBs, I can't even imagine what it must be like for an IT guy stuck with 5,000+ units to switch..ugh. Stay with XP as long as you can and if you are lucky Ballmer will get fired before you have to switch and they'll bring in someone who understand business instead of a Steve Jobs wannabe.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[davester666]

Except with Windows, it's the opposite. Newer stuff is much more hardware intensive than the older stuff.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[cluedweasel]

I agree, I have quite a few robotic machines running xp,

So do I, but that's enough about HR...

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Billly Gates]

No business reasons? How about:
1. No hardware support
2. No software support
3. IT not familiar with it anymore
4. IE not working on all websites
5. Seucirty issues
6. No patches!

Those are 6 very good business reasons if you ask me to start migrating. Sure your ancient software is supported but what about the upcoming Adobe Photoshop 7? No XP support. How about HTML 5 websites? No XP support (since corps only use IE), What if the next code red hits your enterprise? No XP patch. What if all the tablets by dell are EFI only? No XP support.

Eventually your business will get emails with docx 1.3 file formats in which OFfice 2003 can't read. Then what? Same with your marketing department. In the next 5 years all of these things will happen.

The world does not revolve around your office
I laugh out loud when I hear MS IS BEING GREEDY! Dude have you ever owned a mac? If your mac is from 2009 you out of support! XP is 11 years old and MS is being more than generous here. Fact of the matter is it costs money for everyone to backport everything. Examples of costs:
1. Webmasters researching and implementing 10 year old bug fixes and work arounds for IE 6
2. Developers using older .NET libraries because .NET 5 is not XP compatible
3. Hardware makers have to double the costs to keep writting drivers and doing extensive QA to run your ancient platform
4. Other customers, vendors, clients having to use ancient technology to make your fear based IT department happy.

There comes a point where it is not our problem for not supporting your platform but yours for not upgrading. It is 2012 and will be moving to clouds newer versions of software and HTML 5. Yes Firefox and Chrome will eventually in a year or two no longer even run ON XP! I will be sending you Photoshop CS 7 files, not coding for anything under IE 9, and be sending you docx files that can't be read in Office 2k3 all within the next 5 years.

If you can't deal with this then you are not worth my time and are incompetent.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Billly Gates]

I hope you are friendly with your help desk team? Because without ADM support anything BUT IE is a nightmare! There is no central way to manage policies with anything but IE. Most good IT departments will only support IE as it is the one where you can use proxies, keyloggers, and lock them down.

If there is a sexual harasement lawsuit and you can't find out what your chrome users did on the internet the lawyers will drool! With IE you can force them into a proxy to monitor things.

That is just common sense

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Billly Gates]

The issue is the crappy SATA driver that comes with XP. MS crippled it to make Vista look faster. Basically command queing is stripped out. Worse XP's swapping algorithm pages like a mofo too. WIth that and only one command at a time being executed by the hard drive makes I/O sssllooowww,

If you are lucky you can find a proprietary driver for XP if one exists. If not Windows 7 will run circles around XP. I can verify this with my phenomII 6 core at home. XP takes 2.5 to 3x to even boot compared to Windows 7.

I think people are making things up as an excuse to avoid change. Lighter does not mean faster with modern hardware.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the problem with IT getting in the way has to do with certain IT guys who make radical changes without considering or planning for the short term damage. If you do things in stages, where you try to virtualize services, decouple things, put in redundancy, etc. you can not only avoid a lot of problems but better protect the system from them popping up later.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[JMJimmy]

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.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[bingoUV]

With IE you can force them into a proxy to monitor things

No Mr. Billy Gates, I have worked at 3 Fortune 50 companies. Internet just doesn't work without proxy on their intranet, you can only browse intranet websites without proxy. So browsing through any client is equally monitored.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Onymous Coward]

I laugh out loud when I hear MS IS BEING GREEDY! Dude have you ever owned a mac? If your mac is from 2009 you out of support!

As if there could be only one greedy company?

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[hairyfeet]

That's funny because I'm typing this on a circa 2004 Sempron that I use as a nettop here at the shop and it runs just fine with XP, in fact I have Win 7 HP running in a dual boot and while I'm sticking with XP while I slowly but surely find replacements for all the old software I have on here it runs just fine. The key with Windows is do NOT starve it of RAM, that is the one place the OEMs really fucked up for the longest time, putting teeny tiny amounts of RAM. I have 2Gb of RAM in the Sempron, max it'll hold, and its responsive. In fact its responsive enough I've held off swapping the CPU for an Athlon64 simply because I see no point. maybe when I switch to Win 7 I'll see a point, but it plays SD videos off of YouTube and surfs and downloads just fine, and that's what I use it for so as long as it does its job it'll stay.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[hillbluffer]

Lazy ass IT.

Nope, cheap ass management. Most managers say "Is it still running? Ok, then why upgrade? Support... I don't care about support, I want my #$%^& bonus, and I won't get it if we spend #$%^&* money to upgrade computers when they don't NEED IT! Get the #$%^&* out of my office!"

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Hes Nikke]

If you have control over your network, you can force them into a proxy anyway. O_o

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[wiggles]

4 years back? I'm still gaming on my 6 year old build. The only things I've upgraded are my RAM and video card.

I'm eyeing a new CPU/mobo/RAM combo this winter because 4G of memory just isn't enough anymore. It's a shame - my CPU and the rest of my system are just fine.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[gosand]

Or sometimes it is the SMART thing to do if IT doesn't want to create extra work for themselves. I work for a very large company, and I still use XP. There is a program in place to migrate to Win7, but it's been going on for over a year now. It takes time. And when I say large, I mean LARGE... think 250k+ employees around the world. If you want to migrate that many people away from WinXP to Win7, and still have internal support, you'd better have a good plan and it will take lots of time.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[gnick]

This is fairly recent - A year ago things weren't nearly as locked down. I'm not sure when exactly LANL started blocking outgoing IE, but they are now.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[hairyfeet]

This is why "Windows 7 is the new XP" because frankly the PCs released directly before and after Win 7 are such monsters that the average user won't need to replace until the hardware actually fails. lets look at what I was selling on the low end of my new builds 5 years ago...Phenom I X3s and X4s with 3-4gb of RAM and 300Gb+ HDDs. Now is there anything that your average user does that is gonna stress that system? remember these were my "$450-$500 specials" so weren't anywhere near even high end for the time, in fact the only reason i used quads more than X2s was the TLB bug and core 2 issue meant I could get those chips extra cheap. Hell I have a customer running the latest Solidworks on an X3 and is quite happy with the system.

So when you add to this a dead economy and Windows 8 being a tweeting twitting FB shitting frankenstein monster mash up of Windows and WinPhone its a recipe for failure. People simply don't need new systems, even the Core Duo first gen and Turion X2 laptops i sold are running just fine, that is why I've been branching off into HTPCs and home theater setups, because nobody needs a new desktop when they have a multicore with tons of RAM they aren't even stressing.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[hairyfeet]

Weeeelllllll...yes and no. There are many damned good reasons to upgrade from XP to Win 7, but 7 to 8? not really any i can think of unless you have a tablet.

You see XP was made at a time when 256Mb of RAM was only for the rich, so naturally its 32 bit only. The XP X64 that was released later was really Win2K3 Workstation with the Fisher Price UI tacked on and it frankly wasn't well supported and damned near impossible to find in the wild as the OEMs didn't go for it. Then there is the fact that it was released in 2001, so now its patches have patches which leads to instability, then there is of course "WinRot" which I can keep a new system from developing but once WinRot has set it? Too late, gotta wipe.

Then there are the pluses Win 7 brings, a MUCH better UI and file system explorer that finally defaults to two pane which makes file ops easier, breadcrumbs and jumplists make getting back to where you were easy peasy, and of course the biggest one is FINALLY somebody at MSFT got a fucking clue and instituted sane memory management, where the OS will actually USE extra memory as a cache for most used programs, thus unlike XP the more you use Win 7 the faster it gets as it learns your habits and caches what you use the most.

Out of all my systems I have only ONE XP unit left, its an old circa 2004 Sempron a customer traded in that because its soooo low power makes for a great nettop at the shop, but all I ever use it for is to look up specs and download drivers. if all you use XP for is a "browser in a box"? Then its fine, although you'd probably just as well served by a tablet in that case, but if you do any kind of actual work on your PC then XP really just doesn't cut it anymore, its just creaky and buggy and crashy and has some bad design flaws that will never be fixed.

Now when I fire up a machine and see XP knowing I'm gonna have to work on it I just groan, its like going back to Win9X, just ancient crap. I mean its fricking 11 years old for the love of the FSM!

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[hairyfeet]

Actually one of the gaming sites decided to test that theory, sorry I don't have a link but my Google Fu does sucketh, so they placed XP and Vista on different amounts of cores to see where Vista gave the advantage...final score? 16, that's where Vista started to run away from XP, was on 16 cores.

Now if this guy was MY customer? I'd have to tell him that for his specific use case a switch from XP to Win 7 would make no sense unless his specialized code would run in XP Mode, then and ONLY then would it be worth the switch. Because the odds that he is running this on something with more than 16 cores is virtually nil, and the cost to upgrade will be more than any benefit he sees for such a specialized use case.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[jbolden]

I'd say desktop operating systems on Windows are stagnant not mature. You just have to look at the feature set in Window 8, or OSX to see the difference. Where in XP is the fully integrated data configuration library that syncs between application data and removes the entire paradigm of save? I.E. Auto Save + core data?

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[blind biker]

I believe the problem with IT getting in the way has to do with certain IT guys who make radical changes without considering or planning for the short term damage. If you do things in stages, where you try to virtualize services, decouple things, put in redundancy, etc. you can not only avoid a lot of problems but better protect the system from them popping up later.

That kind of approach is commendable and splendid. However, I have been in one kind of research (and development) or the other my entire life - in industry first, in academia now, for a total of 15 years. My experience has often been that often IT tries to justify their existence by doing unnecessary changes. And I don't only mean in-house IT, but also outsourced. And by "often" I certainly don't mean "always". In fact, it's because I experienced the opposite kind of IT, the non-invasive, the "if ain't broke don't fix it"-kind as well, that I recognize just what a money-hole and productivity-holes some of the IT departments have been.

At some point Windows XP will be upgraded or changed to something else, that's clear, but for once in the last 20 years, a better balance between IT business and actual productivity, is being struck. Because, quite frankly, both the OS and the hardware are more than good enough for any task we throw at them. We don't need faster CPUs, more RAM, more storage - or a new OS with more (or less, or different) bells and whistles.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[jbolden]

Microsoft Windows Vista was released Jan 2007. There were preview versions for businesses available starting early 2006. Microsoft was urging business to upgrade hardware, then. They've been advertising their EOL dates for a decade and have extended them.

As the saying goes, "A failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part". I think Microsoft has been excessively generous in allowing companies plenty of time. If you want extra Windows 7 licenses Microsoft will be happy to sell them to you today.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[jbolden]

Most of that proprietary IE stuff was added to IE 4 and 4.5. Microsoft never intended for people to running the same code for 2 decades. They don't sell mainframes.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[blind biker]

3. IT not familiar with it anymore

Well, that's a damn shame - I guess we'll have to switch to a different IT contractor company that is familiar with it. You know, supply and demand work for IT services, too.

4. IE not working on all websites

That can be a problem for some users/installations, but you'd be surprised how few they are, nowadays. At least in academia and research facilities, Chrome and Firefox are the norm.

If you can't deal with this then you are not worth my time and are incompetent.

And this is why I think your post is actually a great troll and nothing else. Or maybe you're an IT guy without a job, and your existence hinges on whether people are going to start furiously replacing Windows XP with the new shiny from Redmond, Mr. Billy Gates.

Eventually your business will get emails with docx 1.3 file formats in which OFfice 2003 can't read. Then what? Same with your marketing department. In the next 5 years all of these things will happen.

If anything, your post provides a good argument to move away from Microsoft altogether.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[jez9999]

If I install a bunch of new hardware in my machine, I don't have to reactivate XP. I've not tried it with Windows 7 - do you have to reactivate Win7? And what about switching its licence over to a new machine?

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[hairyfeet]

Vista was garbage and everybody knew it. I advised my customers to avoid Vista like an STD because it was obvious it was gonna be another ME and be replaced quickly, and waddayaknow, here came Win 7 and now finding Vista machines is nearly impossible.

So while I agree they should have been switching to Win 7 by now saying they should have switched because of Vista is just retarded, hell even the OEMs didn't switch to Vista, they just sold XP with a Vista DVD in the bottom of the box nobody used. I think I still have a pile of those POS discs in the shop somewhere, like a bad fruitcake nobody wanted it.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[BeanThere]

Eventually your business will get emails with docx 1.3 file formats in which OFfice 2003 can't read. Then what?

Then we'll upgrade then, when we need to, "eventually". I'm not sure why you are blowing smoke out your ears fuming that businesses don't want to spend money unnecessarily on upgrading much earlier than is necessary.

Most Photoshop users are still on older versions and likewise have no reason to upgrade at this point. Delay the upgrades for a year and for the same money you'll get better hardware, possibly even a newer/better version of software like PS at that point, plus the SP's will be out for Win8 so you can have bypassed all the pain that the early adopters go through.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[jbolden]

Vista was quite nice with updated drivers and machines with enough hardware. You advised your customers wrongly. That being said, so what. Microsoft advised them to upgrade. If they ignored Microsoft's advice then, that isn't a point in their favor now.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Darinbob]

Old hardware is the key. New computers and new operating systems are expensive. The planned obsolescence may work for the home users but businesses won't fall for the trick. Windows 7 does significantly slow down a computer compared to XP, especially computers with less memory.

The thing is, there's nothing wrong with XP that Microsoft couldn't fix with patches or service packs. But they won't do it because they want people to spend more money.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Darinbob]

I think a big problem in IT is a turnover culture. Most of the employees want a plug-and-play job, they want to be able to switch to a new company without having to learn anything new or having to come up to speed. Employers themselves want IT employees that are easily replaceable as well, as they're cheaper. As a result you end up with a lot of IT employees who don't understand what their employer really does and how they can add value to the company by helping it. This occurs even up at the VP level of IT.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Billly Gates]

Vista had issues even fully patched with Active Directory believe it or not. Even Windows 7 has a few of the bugs. An example is if you forget to clean the ARP tables of a Share after moving a user to a different UI Vista/7 will hang when a user logs in at the welcome screen with no error message. Networking too was problematic while XP worked fine.

MS just used Windows 7 as the fix for most of these even after SP 2. This is why businesses stuck with XP. Not just because of the hard drive thrash of death before SP 2 with its overzealous indexing.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Billly Gates]

I meant moving a user to a different OU, not a UI.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[coldsalmon]

I am a small business owner, writing this on my office computer running Windows XP. It has been completely stable and reliable for the last 4 years since I bought it, not "crashing" once, which is more than I can say for my Linux box at home. I will, however, be upgrading within a year because support is ending. We even have a "server" running XP which my father set up about 10 years ago, and which is still going strong, running 24/7 with no downtime that I can remember. I tried to replace it with a Linux box running Debian squeeze last week, but I got a kernel panic within 6 hours while running the first backup with duplicity. Go figure.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[cayenne8]

I'm eyeing a new CPU/mobo/RAM combo this winter because 4G of memory just isn't enough anymore. It's a shame - my CPU and the rest of my system are just fine.

Well, it's not like you have to throw the old one out...repurpose it into a web or email server...or set it up as a router....use it to run a freeNAS set up (you'll need more RAM tho)....

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[jonadab]

> a) it is fast even on old hardware,

How about because it will run at all (or at least crawl) on old hardware?

I personally cannot imagine the pain and anguish and suffering that would ensue if we attempted to deploy Vista or Seven on some of the desktop hardware we still have in use here. There would be weeping and gnashing of teeth, I suspect.

You see, we have a multi-tier use cycle. New computers are used for stuff where performance is important for one reason or another, which comes to somewhere around half of our computers altogether. I call this "tier 1", and I try very hard not to let hardware get much older than five years before I move it out of tier 1, but with budget constraints that sometimes gets stretched slightly. I hope to have all the tier-1 systems on Vista or later before Windows XP *officially* goes off extended support, but that's just the first tier. When a computer gets replaced in tier 1 but still works (or has parts that still work and can be combined with another partially-working system to make one whole system), I use the hand-me-downs to upgrade systems in tier 2. Then 2-3 later, if the system still runs at all, it'll get bumped out by a newer hand-me-down, and the old one gets repurposed again for tier 3.

Currently the oldest systems we are still using are ten years old, which is typical. However, the only ones that old that run Windows are the legacy testing system (which I use for stuff like verifying that trying to look at our website in IE6 or 7 at least displays the text of the page in some kind of visible fashion and that and links are clickable) and one games computer, which is very "special needs" and will not be upgraded EVER AGAIN if I have anything to say about it. (Frankly, upgrading that one from 98 to XP was a mistake. A lot of the edutainment software it runs was originally written for Windows 3.x and then patched to work on later versions. Much fiddling around with filesystem permissions and sundry other settings was involved with getting things to run on XP. You do not want to know how many versions of QuickTime for Windows it has running on it simultaneously.)

Fortunately, most of the other tier-3 systems run Debian. The oldest Windows systems that are going to be an issue for moving off of XP, really, are the tier-2 systems. Plans change as things happen (e.g., a computer dies and is not available for use as a hand-me-down as expected), but my tentative plans currently call for Windows XP to be phased out of tier 2 circa 2015. That could easily get pushed back to 2016.

No, I am not going to install Seven on vintage 2004 low-to-midrange desktop hardware. No. Just, no. That way lies madness.

Don't even talk to me about Eight until it's got at least one service pack out.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Billly Gates]

But the cost accountants and PHB sure as hell intended to and plan to run it forever. Slashdot is turning very conservative and is is weird. Don't you agree?

Slashdot used to have articles 3 years ago claiming UPGRADE TO WIN 7 NOW! It is 2010 and you still run XP?! Back then I defended the move to stay on XP saying, OH GEEZ Financial collapse is here. How are we going to not lay off employers? I know, lets upgrade your perfectly working XP computers! ... etc

Today in 2012 slashdotters now defend XP as the greatest OS ever written and I did a reverse figuring enough is enough. IE like XP is here to stay unfortunately and the only reason these people who fear change and are set in their ways will change is when we all upgrade and stop writting ancient IE 6 workarounds in websites, start using docx 2013 file formats, start sending file attachments in recent formats for other products etc.

Corporations upgraded often in the 1990s because of these reasons. When everyone sits and stops the clock it does the opposite and encourages to halt innovation.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Nilzor]

a) it is fast even on old hardware, No it isn't. If you upgrade XP it runs slow. Slow Hardware runs slow.

Yes it is. Although it doesn't beat XP on all metrics, it sure is fast enough, and significantly faster on some important aspects like startup/shutdown and javascript execution to name a couple.

I work in a programming department for a large company... when people have problems with IE, we ask them to use a different browser - we don't officially support IE in any way. Our supervisors and managers already realized how much time and money we wasted trying to.

Really? I find that horribly unprofessional. It's time to stop blaming Internet Explorer (not my blog but relevant). The only two valid reasons not to support IE9/10 are laziness or incompetence.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[helix2301]

Well I think $40 upgrade was Microsofts way of nailing coffin shut for XP.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[frank_adrian314159]

3 months in the actual cost of the upgrade was over $100,000...

What cheapskates! That's like five billable hours, right?

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[jbolden]

Slashdot is turning very conservative and is is weird. Don't you agree?

Yes! I think it is very weird. I'm shocked particular with the IPv6 conversations. I kinda think this is an example of behavior changes belief. You and I both got into IT in the 80s / 90s when things moved fast. I think the younger guys have never seen IT infrastructure turnover rapidly, so they believe it is impossible. I think they believe it is impossible that desktops could have ever been improving at the rate smartphones are today and what the implications were for corporate IT. Do you remember the mainframe guys back when we started who had the same attitudes?

To them IPv6 is impossible. I look at it like ripping out the Novell and DECNet networks and replacing them with NetBIOS/ NetBEUI. To them flipping the desktop to an entirely different OS like moving away from curses terminals to Windows is impossible. You have I have done it, they haven't I suspect that's the difference.

When everyone sits and stops the clock it does the opposite and encourages to halt innovation.

I agree. I was very upset when Microsoft and Cisco allowed the pace of change to crawl in 2001. They've created an entire generation of stagnation. That's why I'm so thrilled to see Microsoft taking the lead again to drive progress with Windows 8.

But the cost accountants and PHB sure as hell intended to and plan to run it forever.

Absolutely but I'm confident Microsoft can now that they so choose break them of that. They are in for a shock about how unpleasant it will be to stay on old systems once Microsoft wants to move. Like the people who were completely isolated on XYWrite with a dot matrix printer running DOS well into the 1990s the choice is going to be almost total isolation or rapid progress (fingers crossed).

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[hairyfeet]

I'm sorry but you OBVIOUSLY never used Vista in a business environment, here I'll sing my little Vista poem for you..

Vista...oh Vista, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways...Networking: Losing network shares and then refusing to see them until a reboot, who do you think you are, Windows 98? Networking: Playing any kind of media, even as simple as a song, can cause network file transfers to grind to slower than dialup speeds, what's a matter, two tasks at once too much for you? Operating environment: Having little "senior moments" where the entire system just freezes, not enough to cause a hard lock up, just enough to really piss me off, hey are you a new OS or are you my grandpa? File I/O...why u thrash Vista? I went through every God damned tweak and trick on the net and you STILL thrashed so damned much it killed a brand new hard drive. WTF were you doing Vista? Writing a fricking fan fic?

Now the system i had at the time? NO slouch, in fact it was more powerful than what many were running in 07 when Vista came out...Pentium 4 3.6GHz with HT, 3Gb of RAM, Geforce 7600GS, and dual 400Gb hard drives. Now this system flew on XP X64, in fact last I heard its still running great under that OS for its new owner, but on Vista? It felt like a 386DX trying to run Win98. there is NO excuse on why a system that powerful should run like a dog with an OS that "claimed" it could run on a 1GHz with a gb of RAM.

compare that with the fact I've had Win 7 running quite well on a 1.8GHz Sempron from 2004 with 2gb of RAM, just no Aero but I can remedy that with the 1650 Pro AGP card I have sitting in the parts box and I'm sorry, but Vista failed for a reason..it was full of fail.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[hairyfeet]

You ran into the thrash of death too? I had that damned OS kill a brand new hard drive it thrashed so fucking much! I wonder if anybody figured out WTF it was doing, because even killing indexing and doing every tweak and trick on the net never got Vista to quit thrashing for me.

Frankly I'd say Win 7 is a HELL of a lot more than an SP for Vista, they changed a LOT of stuff at the kernel level and it shows. Whereas Vista beat the hell out of my drives and its I/O was frankly Win98 levels of bad now with Win 7 most of the time my drives spin down, there is so little being written that they can stay spun down for quite a long time and simply use the RAM cache to load my programs...nice.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[JMJimmy]

That's 2 1/2 additional staff.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[BeanThere]

"After 11 years"? Wow, that would be pretty amazing given the business I work for didn't exist 11 years ago. We're talking about +/- 6 year old computers .. they do the job.

Sorry after 11 years you have no one to blame but yourself

What do you mean with "blame", we aren't sitting with a problem. We're sitting in a perfectly satisfactory situation. I wasn't complaining. Microsoft is the one sitting with a problem. You're the one complaining. "Blame"? WTF? Did you forget to take your meds?

Get with the times as the world does not revolve around your office and yes your office revolves around the world. Without customers and vendors you wouldn't be there.

What is this even supposed to mean - are you saying we have some sort of obligation to spend our money on unnecessary upgrades? That's the most retarded, and downright disturbed/deranged/psychotic thing I have read in a very long time.

There are certainly cost savings in TCO and power alone on newer hardware with better support for sleep

You don't think we've done the cost/benefit analyses? Done the math, and guess what, staying with what we have makes more sense. You really think that your one slashdot post blows away our own cost/benefit analyses, where we have access to all the facts and information and details? You are so full of yourself ... or let me guess, you work in hardware sales, and you're pissed that people aren't falling over hand and feet to keep upgrading and sending you business. Your post represents some sort of psychosis, you don't control other businesses, get over it.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[BeanThere]

Windows 7 really is more than just a gui update

I know what Win7 is, you dolt, I use it on my own laptop.

Without customers and vendors you wouldn't be there.

That's right, and one of the ways we've built a customer base is through offering competitive pricing for our services - which means we don't just waste money on crap and pass on inflated costs to our customers. Our customers appreciated and enjoy that, and it's why they keep coming back to us, and our business is growing.

Our customers also have many older systems, and having older systems internally is also good for our customers because it means that we make sure our own offerings still work well on these older systems. Our customers appreciate that.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Dan541]

You're right, best go back to windows 3.1.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[chrismcb]

There are two good reasons to upgrade from XP.
One is to continue to get security fixes
The other is more memory.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Kirth]

Yes, why would one upgrade Windows? It's WINDOWS. It's not like you've get a better operating system if you upgrade. Only more hassle with DRM and other "features" you don't want.

Linux on the other hand... I'm running Debian unstable with a few packages from experimental ;)

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[d3ac0n]

It's worse than even that. The only "new" hardware in my house other than smartphones is my wife's netbook, which I bought for her back in 2010. My own laptop is a Lenovo T60 with a dual-core CENTRINO processor in it. Both the netbook and my T60 run Win7 32bit with all the pretties turned on without trouble. I have an old desktop running win7 32bit as well, it's an old old AMD x3200 system with 2gb of RAM.

Why haven't I bothered to upgrade? Well, most everything I need to get done I can get done on this older but still fully functional hardware. I don't game on my PC, mostly because as a busy 40+ yr old father of three I simply don't have time for that in my life anymore. When I game, I play casual games on my Android phone. Not only am I not alone in this, I'm actually fairly typical of people in my age group.

The people who would normally be gaming on Windows PCs and the target market for new OSes and new PCs would be the 20-30 demographic. This is the EXACT demographic that is hurting the most in the current recession. Many of the younger members of this group can't get jobs, or are underemployed. As such, they aren't in the market for new PCs and are sticking with what they have. if they have any money, they will spend it on a new phone first, a PC is much farther down their list.

So it's bad all around for Microsoft. I see Win8 getting about as much traction as Vista did. Enough for them to be able to SAY it was a success, while quietly excising Metro from desktop and server versions of Win9.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[shiftless]

b) it is supported by at least one good, secure Web browser (hint: not MSIE),

... Lynx?

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Billly Gates]

I think it is the older crowd who hates change. People such as yourself who are set in their ways. THe users too and many (people in finance and HR who set the budget) have LOTS of power.

They all want the latest phones and on the way to work play in full HTML 5 accelerated apps with gradients and things there work computers with IE 7 can't do. Then freak out when you show them IE 9 that has some of the same capabilities as their phone and demand the 11 year old unaccelerated ugly XP back because it was what they used for 11 years, it is well supported, stable, it is what everyone uses, we can save money, etc.

I am disappointed in slashdot. If we had a time machine and showed these comments to slashdotters in 2002 I wonder what the reaction would be? No one would believe you! It is the equilivent of fighting for DOS and WP 5.1 which can read some word .doc files in 2002 when XP is out because damit why change! Dos/Win 3.1 work fine!!

In 2014 we can ignore these users and they will find out the hard way when they get hacked, cant browse websites, or open files in newer programs.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[jbolden]

I think it is the older crowd who hates change. People such as yourself who are set in their ways.

I think the are younger. Probably guys in the 30s. People who missed the 1990s tech boom and spent their entire careers in a world of stagnant IT.

If we had a time machine and showed these comments to slashdotters in 2002 I wonder what the reaction would be?

In terms of stagnation I suspect they'd have the "I will become my parents" the /. crowd has become the mainframe crowd that was just replaced in 2002. I think they would be thrilled that Linux is still around and has huge server market share. Shock that Unix systems (Android, iOS) dominate what's replacing the desktop / laptop. Thrilled that open source software like Firefox and Chrome went on to win the browser wars. Thrilled that Open Office has substantial market share.

In 2014 we can ignore these users and they will find out the hard way when they get hacked, cant browse websites, or open files in newer programs.

They have no idea how fast Microsoft can move the eco system when they want to, since they are used to a Microsoft that is conservative. Heck this might be something like Y2K where there is lots of money spent suddenly.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Emb3rz]

I will be sending you Photoshop CS 7 files, not coding for anything under IE 9,

--
http://saveie6.com/

Save us, contradiction man!

Also,

1. No hardware support
2. No software support
3. IT not familiar with it anymore
4. IE not working on all websites

1. Business hardware is typically monitor, mouse, keyboard, printer, scanner. I think we've got universal drivers covered in those spaces.
2. I've not seen many game-changing business applications in the desktop space recently. This is probably also a non-issue.
3. Please tell me you're joking.
4. Stop using IE.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[shiftless]

Maybe if you operate a dictatorship. I find your manner of doing business disgusting. Go back to the Soviet Union, comrade.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Douglas Goodall]

"4G of memory just isn't enough anymore" I remember when Microsoft wanted us to move to Windows 3.1 (with enhanced mode), and 4M just wasn't enough any more. And at that time, 16MB of ram costed $1200. Now they have a thousand times more memory, and that isn't enough. Considering that Windows 3.1 had TCP/IP and OLE, I can't think of what Microsoft has added to the Windows functionality that was complicated enough to have eaten all that memory and still be hungry. Now I admit that loading hundreds of patches on top of XP does bloat it's software inventory, and maybe along the way, Microsoft could have recompiled those patches into the product and simplified the rube goldberg creation that is the highly patched XP of today. Considering the huge amount of XP that s still installed and running, I think Microsoft should have spawned a division to continue sustained engineering on it for another five years. In our current economic condition, we can hardly thank Microsoft for forcing another round of hardware and software upgrades.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[hesaigo999ca]

I agree with you, but you are missing one more key element....no real incentive to upgrade!!!
I mentioned this years ago when xp was being brought into the forefront....if they pushed some free legit copies and got rid of all the win200 and 98 out there...
they would have a bigger army of secure pc running on the web.....

If they did this for all the users out there at home, then those users would get used to windows7/8 and not look back, and once they arrive back at work, they gripe to the boss he is outdated. Then this would force the boss to consider more the move....which of course also would secure the web even more from malware that does not work on newer versions of windows.

It is a power move that costs money at the start, but reaps many rewards later, as well as a bigger market margin of the desktop market, whether it be at home or work!

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[Electricity Likes Me]

>

Antiquated 3rd-party software is a frequent culprit. Microscopes, sensors, CAD machinery, etc that costs $100K+ isn't getting replaced just because its software or web interface hasn't been updated in the last 5-8 years. The lack of software updates on equipment this expensive may be appalling, but it doesn't change the facts.

Admittedly this is why all that stuff needs to stop being made to run on Windows.

Even if it only targeted a specific variant of Linux, it would be possible to preserve the ABIs it wanted while still patching the big problems.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[wiggles]

Microsoft isn't forcing me to upgrade - Valve is. I don't have enough memory to play the new games that are coming out. I'll stay on Windows 7 at least until Windows 9. Or maybe I'll switch over to Linux permanently if Valve's Steam for Linux is worthwhile.

Re:Pry XP from cold, stiff fingers

[fluffy99]

The issue is the crappy SATA driver that comes with XP. MS crippled it to make Vista look faster. Basically command queing is stripped out. Worse XP's swapping algorithm pages like a mofo too. WIth that and only one command at a time being executed by the hard drive makes I/O sssllooowww,

If you are lucky you can find a proprietary driver for XP if one exists. If not Windows 7 will run circles around XP. I can verify this with my phenomII 6 core at home. XP takes 2.5 to 3x to even boot compared to Windows 7.

I think people are making things up as an excuse to avoid change. Lighter does not mean faster with modern hardware.

NCQ/AHCI functionality came out AFTER XP, so it's more like MS didn't go back and rework drivers or pressure the vendors to update their WHQL drivers. The simple reality is that you just need to install the newer drivers from the vendor. As for boot times, if you're just measuring the time to get to a desktop that's a bit misleading. Vista and Win7 put a lot of emphasis on boot times, mostly cheating by allowing services to continue loading even after the user gets to the desktop. Networking might not be usable yet but the user has a desktop to look at.

No uncommon to hear people runing XP at work

[Anonymous Coward]

.. really .. stop the presses

$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[vossman77]

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.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[Eldragon]

A local library has the same problem. Checkout hardware has drives for XP and Win2k. The service contract to upgrade these machines is far beyond the available tech budget. So this particular library will be running off XP until the hardware dies and replacements can no longer be found; my guess would be another 10 years.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[Anonymous Coward]

We're in a similar situation: we've got XP machines hooked up to 96-well plate readers, UV imaging boxes and fluorescent microscopes. They're all old but still perform fine, but if we upgraded to anything else we'd basically be looking at new machines because some of the vendors have gone under and those which haven't have new software packages which don't support our machines or don't have drivers for the old machines which play nice with W7/8.

As much as we'd like the new hardware, we're not going to upgrade tens of thousands of pounds worth of machinery just because MS are dropping support for XP.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[tibit]

This could be probably made to work on a Linux host with almost any virtualization solution out there (KVM, VMware, VirtualBox) :)

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[El_Muerte_TDS]

You would still be running Windows XP on those VM guests.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[micheas]

Look into Upgrading to Linux?

While people compare Linux and Windows 7 and have strong reasons for supporting A over B or vice versa, it looks like this is your only upgrade path that I can see, especially, if you have enough microscopes that you might still have them in service in 10 years.

If you plan on keeping those microscopes running in 10 years you may well need to get them running on IPV6 which would be much easier on Linux than XP.

What I don't get is why you didn't start getting a plan together for when Microsoft said they were going to scrap XP. You knew that you either needed new Microscopes or to find something other than Windows to run them about four (five?) years before Microsoft EOLed XP.

I am sure that there is a lot of Windows centric software that is running on the computers attached to the microscopes, but XP support for that software is going to disappear over time as people migrate to the windows 8 version of the software.

Personally I would find a window that you could dual boot one of the microscopes into Linux and see if you couldn't come up with a solution over the next year or two.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[Tridus]

The normal scenario for these is the company either discontinued that line of equipment, or went out of business. Said equipment is so expensive that you don't replace it until it's broken. The OS on the computer it's connected to just doesn't matter to lab people as long as it works. If you only have drivers for XP, you're using XP until the equipment dies.

It turns out few CEOs like "XP is going away, give me a million bucks for a new sample analyzer."

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[Anonymous Coward]

For all the specialists saying a variety of "no way, my expensive hardware is too expensive to replace for this reason," you aren't the target demographic of the original blog post. The target demographic are the companies that are not upgrading the computers at employee desks. I highly doubt your microscope controller software is on a system that is also used by salesmen to browse the internet. I would be surprised if your extremely expensive specialty hardware is even on a network that can be accessed directly by a marketting depatment of any kind.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[canadiannomad]

Benefit being that it would just be an image, so any problems you could just roll back. Also it would be easier to isolate from the network.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[interkin3tic]

Get a new microscope from some company that doesn't force you to use an extremely shitty propietary file format and an extremely shitty program for operating you expensive confocal or other microscope. Instead, buy a microscope that uses open source software.

Oh, wait, such a company doesn't seem to exist. From my experiences with Olympus, they seem to constantly update their software specifically to break features and prevent you from using 3rd party analysis tools like Imaris, let alone FOSS software. One would think that since you bought a fancy new spinning disc from them, they'd let you run the analysis software, which is generally not worth paying for on it's own, on your computer. But no, they also like to make you use dongles on any other computer too. It's fucking ridiculous.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[lister king of smeg]

even after compatible hardware is gone you will probably be able to run it in a vm as hardware acceleration of that old of a hardware will probably be a available

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[NatasRevol]

You forgot to mention that the van has eight 2500 HP engines...

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[PlusFiveTroll]

I guess it depends on how the equipment is hooked to XP. On hardware that can be seen by a virtual machine I've had some success virtualizing the XP box. It's much easier to cut the size and attack area of a VM down then a full machine running the hardware below it. Also it's very easy to backup and restore the entire VM image if something does happen.

If you are stuck to hardware, firewall the crap, but also make sure you have replacements for the computer hardware. I suggest same model replacements so if the mainboard dies you can switch it out without windows freaking out and asking to be reinstalled/reactivated.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[Patch86]

Well one answer to that is "that'll learn you to buy Windows for system critical hardware". If you had bought Linux, and Linux-compatible microscopes (and damnit, scientific equipment is one of the few areas which does have decent Linux driver support), you would not be having this problem.

I hope you remember this experience when you do come to upgrade. If you upgrade to Windows 7, you'll have the exact same problem in 5-15 years time.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[avandesande]

VMWARE has a product that will let you wrapper an application in an OS so it will run on newer operating systems. No business relationship to vmware, just trying to be helpful.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[jd659]

Recently I purchased a several-thousand-dollar scanner. The software that is required for the scanner to operate requires activation and this is completely unacceptable in my books. What if the company goes bankrupt, or decides to shut down activation service? I want my scanner to work. So I figured out how to save and replicate the activation profile so that I can install the software at any time without relying on their service. Only then I kept the scanner, otherwise I'd send it back. The same goes for any version of OS that I use -- I need to be able to have my computer running and not to be tied to some proprietary service that may or may not be available. For Windows there are VL builds that can be installed without activation, or it can be installed and activated in the virtulized environment or some cracks that bypass activation can be used. Only if there's a way for me to keep on using the critical software without being at the mercy of some large corporation, I will use it.

And for Facebook, I don't care if it goes down some day.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[jader3rd]

so what do you do, other than put it behind a firewall and hope for the best.

What has ever gone wrong with the tried and true plan of 'hoping for the best'?

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[Crudely_Indecent]

Bad-analogy-guy - is that you?

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[DragonDru]

Less than a year ago we had a piece of laboratory equipment die due to the hardware of the controller PC. After guessing about the probable failure rates of various options, we purchased a new version of the instrument. The instrument arrived with a new controller PC with WinXP installed on it. The installer then told me how his company had to really work to find a copy of WinXP for the system.

So the plan of upgrading out of WinXP will only work once all hardware vendors no longer have access to copies and instrumentation suppliers stop being able to get copies.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[Attila Dimedici]

Do you have any idea how expensive those microscopes are? Let's just put it this way, the place I work now could replace their entire IT infrastructure for the cost of some of them (and even a cheap one costs as much as a pretty nice server). Further, it is unlikely that the IT department gets to decide if those microscopes get replaced.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[DanFelixPierce]

I'll do you one better.

We have several high end interferometers manufactured by a company that no longer exists. The equipment is worth ~$900,000.

And they are all controlled by computers running Windows 98.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[satuon]

A lot of cafes in my country are using some Turbo Vision based software for processing orders and receipts.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[TheRealMindChild]

Run XP in VMWare. You will be able to access the device, with the proper driver.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[asmkm22]

I'll second this. I have a few clients in the medical industry that are tied down to XP due to the software like Medisoft or Lytec having zero support for Vista or 7. The software companies seem more interested in having you pay for newer versions, but when the software is 10 grand and up, it's no wonder people choose to stick with XP.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[trdrstv]

Makes Sense, I know of a Machine shop that runs metal punch machines with Windows 3.1 software. (not even 3.11) because the software actually does everything those machine presses are actually capable of, so there's no reason to network them or upgrade them.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[Onymous Coward]

Oh, that's very interesting.

Here I thought running full VMs was a fun and clever way to support legacy apps. A mostly transparent wrapper takes that to a new level.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[hairyfeet]

You see? THIS, this right here, is why Ballmer should have been fired a half a fricking decade ago. if his fat ass would have gotten Longhorn out on schedule (Nooo...Vista is NOT Longhorn, Ballmer had them throw Longhorn out and and start over because it was more like XP X64 and not as bling heavy as Ballmer wanted, had to compete with Apple on the shiny ya know) then so many wouldn't be trapped on XP now, but it took so damned long to get Vista out the door, and it was half assed and reeked of fail anyway, that XP hung onto to the point many simply can't afford to trash it because too damned many other systems depend on it.

What MSFT should have done is bust ass on XP Mode in Win 7 with a mantra of "if it runs on XP, it works in XP Mode" and made damned sure all those businesses could just switch without downtime, maybe even supported cloning existing XP installs for XP Mode VMs, but Ballmer is too damned busy drooling on an iPad to see he is royally fucking up and losing the business market, the bread and butter of MSFT. Stupid, that's what it is, fucking stupid.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh....you can do that in XP proper without all the VM bullshit, just have a disc image on a partition and if anything goes wrong you can just roll it back. I've been doing this for years with customers using the free Comodo Time Machine (although I'm having to try out Paragon as CTM is no longer supported but still works on XP-Win 7) and if anything goes wrong they just hit the Home key on boot, pick "clean restore" and voila! Back up and running in under 20 minutes. Since i have their docs on a different partition they don't even risk losing anything, easy peasy and no VM hassles.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[jbolden]

Run XP as a guest operating system on a Windows 8 hypervisor. Win 7 for example shipped with virtual XP for exactly this sort of situation.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[jbolden]

Yeah that'll work suing a several hundred billion dollar company with a first rate legal department that is not lawsuit adverse.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[hairyfeet]

I'm sorry but Linux is for programmers and BY programmers and the odds of it having drivers for such a funky specialized piece of equipment, one where the company that made it probably never gave a shit about Linux and may have even gone OOB years ago? Virtually nil.

The people like you that look at Linux as a panacea don't get into the nitty gritty logistics we are talking here because if you did you wouldn't even suggest it. What they would have to do if they followed your advice would be to reverse engineer the drivers for the hardware (no small task and NOT cheap), build their own software to run the scans, again no small task, and then have everything certified for HIPPA compliance where sure as fuck is NO small task and expensive as hell.

So I'm sorry but Linux would be a BAD IDEA with a capital B. The best plan would be to isolate the system on a VLAN and let their users access that way, this would allow them to keep XP without worrying about lack of support after 2014. Since XP lasted so long you can still find many newer systems with XP drivers so they will be able to get plenty of replacement systems for probably a good decade. A LOT cheaper than following your advice.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[hairyfeet]

Bimbo Newton Crosby, the guys that keep saying "Just use Linux!" have no damned clue about this kind of specialist gear, how it has NEVER been supported by Linux, how there is ZERO chance the company that made it offered FOSS drivers or software for it (since vendor lock in is so high on specialist gear) and how the cost of having to pay an entire team of developers to reverse engineer this stuff, not to mention possible lawsuits from the company that made it since like you pointed out they use DRM like dongles so DMCA applies, means its about like saying "get magical fairies to make it work for you!" for all the usage such statements has IRL.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[steviesteveo12]

Why would a microscope need to run on IPv6?

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[micheas]

Saving data to the SAN?

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[micheas]

Obscure scientific devices tend to have drivers. It is worth an afternoon checking it out and making a decision based on actual data.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[unixisc]

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.

One potential solution - install Windows 7, then install Virtual PC, and then after opening a session of XP Mode, install those microscope drivers, and do whatever you did as before. Only difference - the Virtual Machine needn't have its own networking - just use it for the XP software that has to be used, and for the rest of the stuff that can be under Windows 7, use the networking connections in that.

I did something similar this week. I was using XP, but decided to upgrade to Windows 7. So I installed it from scratch, after backing up, but found that the printer model I had had XP, but not Windows 7 drivers. So I did exactly the above - installed the original printer drivers in the virtual machine, but then, under the Windows 7 control panel, the printer was now an active printer which could even be set as the default.

I similarly went ahead and installed Acrobat 6 on the VM, and that too worked, but only caveat - that one doesn't show up under Windows 7. Not a big deal - if I need to edit a PDF or something, I can still do it under the VM.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[JonySuede]

Your making sense like the guy from The Old New Thing blog at MSDN, stop it now !!!
Else, watch out for flying chair...

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[burning_plastic]

When dealing with certain pieces of equipment, the cost of service contracts often gets renegotiated after each expires and if the vendor doesn't want to support it anymore they just jack up the price of the contract to a non-viable level. So then you just wait until the machine stops working before you upgrade. We had this happen with a Leica confocal microscope - the contract expired, and then the proprietary board that connected the scope to the computer died. Since no more boards existed world-wide the scope was useless as a confocal and so was eventually repurposed as a standard epi-fluorescence scope.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[interkin3tic]

No, there are some that are supported by linux. The Deltavision deconvolution microscope, for instance, is run using linux.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[lennier]

Run XP as a guest operating system on a Windows 8 hypervisor. Win 7 for example shipped with virtual XP for exactly this sort of situation.

I've supported at least one piece of medical hardware for which the drivers only exist on XP and which simply did not work with a VM. In this case, because the cheap USB security dongle was badly coded and the VM didn't virtualise it.

VMs work well except for tricky corner cases of drivers and security dongles. Which isn't surprising since security dongles are written explicitly to stop people doing things like running them on VMs.

Why manufacturers of expensive hardware insist on adding cheap and buggy hardware copy protection to their cheaper and buggier driver software which is utterly useless without the expensive hardware itself, I have no idea. But they do it all the time.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[hairyfeet]

It just amazes me how much money is shit down the drain when that could be easily avoided by just talking to the grunts down in the trenches. I've said it before and I'll say it again...Put ME in charge of MSFT and in less than 5 years, hell i could probably do it in under 3, I'd turn that ship around and be labeled another Steve Jobs.

All you have to do is simply LISTEN, that's all, listen to the grunts in the field and they'll be happy to help you get the ship back on course. For mobile? Build it cheap, build it simple, do NOT tie the Windows branding to it as that is just confusing, instead make damned sure that "it just works" is the mantra and that your grandma could share photos between her MS Phone, the X360, and the desktop.

For the desktop? Add little features that are "must have" while leaving the core experience ALONE, we've had 30+ years of WIMP and it frankly is the best design for a keyboard and mouse. Here I'll even give you a feature that would sell like crazy MY new Windows 9, aka "Win 7 with more coolness"...anywhere connection. This would take the guts of remote assistance and extend it so that even your grandma could remote into her system, imagine all those users that are at the office and go "Damn, I forgot to bring file XYZ from home I was working on last night" no problem! you just log into the MSFT server using your username and password along with your USB key (giving you two factor auth) and voila! The MSFT server sends a wake on LAN signal to your home system and you grab the file, easy peasy.

The ONLY reason MSFT is in bad shape right now is the clueless PHB at the top named Steve Ballmer, if you brought in someone that would LISTEN to the grunts and users and give them "more of the same, just better" and price it competitively, say $50 for Home, $100 for Pro or a family pack? they'd be raking in the cash instead of throwing the Hail Mary that is Windows 8, which I personally think is gonna fail.

BTW I don't know if its still true or not but that blog used to be run by Allchin,one of the guys that bailed after Vista because the PHBs wouldn't listen. He and others said the marketing group had taken control away from the designers and with Win 8 you can really tell, its a "designed by committee" mess of an OS.../facepalm/.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[hairyfeet]

But then in their case they wouldn't be stuck on XP, now would they? the guy even mentioned the software uses those damned dongles for antipiracy measures, I've never heard of a Linux software that uses dongles as GPL frowns on adding proprietary stacks to Linux.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[unixisc]

If the microscope was remotely accessed by the workstations over the LAN? Especially if it was just a case of data capture, and not actually having to go into the lab and fiddle w/ the microscope. Although I wonder whether microscopes would have USB connections, but then again, the likelihood is that such expensive equipment are more likely than not to be shared devices - needing to be accessed by several computers of that lab, and where it having a network address would make more sense.

Would such equipment need to be a part of any public internet, or would it just need to be a part of a LAN where it can be remotely accessed? I'm suspecting the latter, in which case, IPv4 would be adequate - just give it a 10.x.x.y address and go w/ it. Only reason I suggest that - XP does a bad job implementing IPv6, so IPv4 might just as well be used. Also, one wouldn't want to give a microscope a publicly accessible IP address any more than one would give a printer that.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[jbolden]

Well that sounds like a vendor problem. They created a piece of software with deep ties to a specific OS version which is now unsupported.

That being said, Windows drivers don't know if they are talking to a USB port or a virtual USB port. Something like a virtual dongle server will work you just inject it into the stream. I know there a dongle servers that allow for dongles to be shared on the network (defeating the whole point) and those are quite successful.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[Maxoverdrive]

you could /possibly/ convert the xp machine to a virtual machine and run it inside w7/linux/whathaveyou... assuming you could 'fix' the licencing server that would freak out when you changed the hardware (or convince ms support of the need to transfer)

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[sjames]

The things cost half a million dollars each. More than one institution owns one. They can either replace them at a collective cost of tens of millions or they can spend likely less than $100,000 on an open source reverse engineering effort that could get them another decade or two of use.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[semi-extrinsic]

In my experience, FOSS drivers are seldom provided by manufacturers, and often provided by enthusiasts who reverse engineer the proprietary drivers. If I had one of those expensive microscopes, I would get a couple of MSc students in EE or CS with a passion for Linux hacking to work on the drivers as a part-time job. My guess is that $20,000 would get you a long way towards a FOSS driver. You would have to answer if that price is worth it, but if you can avoid upgrading your microscope for another five-ten years, I guess it is.

And fuck the DMCA, email the drivers anonymously to some Chinese research group using the same equipment, and have them post it on the interwebs.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[JonySuede]

I don't know if its still true or not but that blog used to be run by Allchin

Well he sign his book and comments as Raymond Chen...

Put ME in charge of MSFT and in less than 5 years, hell i could probably do it in under 3, I'd turn that ship around and be labeled another Steve Jobs.

I my opinion Raymond Chen should at least have been put in charge of Windows and maybe CEO instead of Mr Chair.
some random good post on that blog :
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/01/02/9265754.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/09/09/10208136.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11/22/1122581.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2005/01/18/355177.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/10/17/55345.aspx

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[toddestan]

That's also assuming that the microscope software doesn't have to talk to some specialized hardware. If it's a USB/serial/ethernet you might be okay, but if it's firewire or some propriety card in the PC then you pretty much have to run on the bare metal.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[bhiestand]

The things cost half a million dollars each. More than one institution owns one. They can either replace them at a collective cost of tens of millions or they can spend likely less than $100,000 on an open source reverse engineering effort that could get them another decade or two of use.

Or they could just keep running XP. They won't just go out and decide to make drivers in some organized fashion. Pretty standard collective action problem, really.

And even if they did, why the hell would they do it for linux? And which distros should they support? Are they going to port the app/front-end/whatever too? Who is going to guarantee they work into the future?

This is probably a good niche business if somebody can do the reverse engineering to make this sort of gear work. But it'll be closed source, and priced to be profitable.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[sjames]

That may well be how it works out, to their detriment. At some point, many of the owners will end up hoisting the Jolly Roger to keep the thing going.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[4phun]

A lot of cafes in my country are using some Turbo Vision based software for processing orders and receipts.

Not a problem. Thousands upon thousands are turning to Apple iPads for processing orders and creating receipts. It is quite an interesting phenomena to see such an explosive change. Already I am getting asked everywhere do I want a printed receipt or would I prefer an email receipt. I always take the email version which makes my life easier and saves on paper clutter. I don't care if they use my email address to shoot me a special deal to get me to come back either.

That is another key example of how Apple created a disruptive change in how an industry operates. Everyone seems to have simultaneously discovered they don't really need a PC to replace a cash registrar. Today for example I had a guy slide my American Express right there into his iPhone case which had a credit card reader and I signed the screen with my finger. That is right up there as the world's smallest checkout terminal.

Another sea change due to smart phones is the appearance of QR Codes everywhere. I am seeing some businesses devote one whole window display to a gigantic QR code that can be easily read a block away. These point to catalogs, special deals or the menu of the day.

Bottom line XP doesn't do these things and when it is time o stop using it there is no need to waste money on a new PC that isn't particularly well designed for the checkout task.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[StonyUK]

Seeing how often the Linux driver APIs change, what gives you any confidence that vendors would bother to upgrade those either? In 5-15 years time you'll find yourself with a PC that contains hardware whose drivers got dropped from the kernel tree years ago.

Re:$500,00 equipment with WinXP

[canadiannomad]

That negates the fact that many places try to share their computer with other tasks, including looking stuff up online, newer software, wanting hardware upgrades, etc.... The VM solution at least lets them isolate the antiquated program from their modern environment(that is, if the VM will let them access the specialized hardware in question).
The solution you mention, I agree is better if the computer is single use and will be used until the computer dies... But when you want to (or are forced to) upgrade the computer, more memory(may require new Motherboard), faster CPU(64bit), bigger HD(try going to a store and buying an IDE harddrive these days), better video card(mini-PCI what?), you can find yourself without OS support, and therefor out your expensive toy. In many cases virtualization can isolate the problem to just the software/hardware that you need.
(I have had to do this for my mechanic because they needed their antiquated POS system (which used a dongle for copyright protection) a CO2 scope, as well as internet on the same machine while the computer around it kept needing parts replaced or upgraded...)

Won't happen

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in a hospital setting where most, if not all, computers run XP. In radiology specifically, the PACS software we run is only certified for windows XP and ie 6.

Hospital doesn't want to invest money into upgrading pacs software.

Re:Won't happen

[Anonymous Coward]

I too work in Healthcare IT for hospitals and I will tell you that while I may agree that it probably won't happen , it absolutely should. I know of hospitals still running NT4. When security patches are no longer available for an OS such as the case with NT4, it becomes a major security risk. With the new laws such as HIPAA and HITECH, hospital IT staffs risk massive security breaches, lawsuits and fines if hospitals such as yours take that stance.

Re:Won't happen

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the pitfall of making an "appliance" (such as a medical device or a scientific instrument) run on a desktop OS that has a limited lifespan and a wide attack vector for exploits.

Hopefully IT departments are prepared to handle this.. Don't network the equipment unless absolutely necessary, and if it is necessary, put them on isolated VLANs that do not have access to the internet and have limited network access internally to limit vulnerability.

Re:Won't happen

[CFBMoo1]

I think people noticed that hospitals don't want to invest in keeping equipment up to date. At least the virus guys did anyway.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429616/computer-viruses-are-rampant-on-medical-devices/

Re:Won't happen

[PlusFiveTroll]

I work in a hospital setting where most, if not all, computers run XP. In radiology specifically, the PACS software we run is only certified for windows XP and ie 6.

Hospital doesn't want to invest money into upgrading pacs software.

I do quite a bit of work in veterinary medicine and the costs associated with upgrading is pretty large. The scary part of a lot of this software isn't that it's certified to work on XP, it's that its so crappily written that it only works on XP with admin access and any number of bandaids to make it work. What I've done in a few cases is virtualized the XP box where it was possible. Trying to keep this stuff running over the long term is going to be fun.

Re:Won't happen

[jellomizer]

Upgrade your software and stop going with Siemens products.

Re:Won't happen

[The Grim Reefer]

I work in a hospital setting where most, if not all, computers run XP. In radiology specifically, the PACS software we run is only certified for windows XP and ie 6.

Hospital doesn't want to invest money into upgrading pacs software.

Indeed. Upgrades like this are exactly why businesses will continue to use it well past 2014. I'm in the medical field too and there are still places running Windows NT for the same reasons. One hospital I dealt with was running 2K until just recently. They chose to skip Vista for obvious reasons plus the expense of upgrading 80,000 computers is not a simple or cheap task. This is also the case for manufacturing. I've talked to people who have $200K+ equipment that's attached to NT and 2K systems for control. It's crazy for a company, particularly a small one to have to drop half a million dollars every time Microsoft updates their OS. Granted, the companies that don't give a realistic upgrade path to their customers are also at fault.

I wish that Microsoft would have a home/standard version, similar to what they currently have. Except that they would not keep this version bogged down with legacy support as they tend to do. Then have a commercial version that can deal with all of the old crap that is needed. These types of users aren't interested in the latest greatest shiny features. Aero Glass looks pretty nice on a home users system, but it doen't do shit for someone using a computer to control a CNC machine.

Re:Won't happen

[guruevi]

The lawsuits and associated costs are minimal compared to some overhauls.

Lawsuit settled with a couple of identity protection services: $2M
Overhauling all software to run on the latest platforms and implement e-records: $50M
Having no tech specs nor existing companies to support the software you just implemented and have history repeat itself every decade: Priceless

Re:Won't happen

[guruevi]

So what would you go with?

GE: Linux 2.2 and Sun Solaris 7 (not kidding, I have to keep resuscitating a Sun SPARCstation 20 just so we can compile crap for the GE scanner)
Philips: WinNT and XP
Fujitsu: Home brew unix-like system

Re:Won't happen

[RabidReindeer]

I work in a hospital setting where most, if not all, computers run XP. In radiology specifically, the PACS software we run is only certified for windows XP and ie 6.

Hospital doesn't want to invest money into upgrading pacs software.

I do quite a bit of work in veterinary medicine and the costs associated with upgrading is pretty large. The scary part of a lot of this software isn't that it's certified to work on XP, it's that its so crappily written that it only works on XP with admin access and any number of bandaids to make it work. What I've done in a few cases is virtualized the XP box where it was possible. Trying to keep this stuff running over the long term is going to be fun.

The Wal-Mart Shopper mentality.

1. Thinking that the cost of something is the cost at the cash register. Despite what everyone thinks, computers are not a fixed cost, there is ongoing expense. Sooner or later, all software becomes obsolete. Not because there's something wrong with the software, but because the world in which the software lives changes. Sooner or later, you not only cannot run the old software on the new OS, you often cannot get replacement hardware that can run it when the original equipment dies. If you don't budget for upgrades, you'd better either plan to be gone by then or be fortunate enough to be able to toss the whole thing. Emulators only go so far - Windows 98 is dead and getting no new security updates but that doesn't mean hackers don't still consider exploits.

2. Expecting that "IT doesn't matter" and that whoever delivers fastest and/or cheapest is "good enough". So much software out there is crap, just because people won't accept that quality takes time, effort, and money.

Re:Won't happen

[gfxguy]

In a completely unrelated industry... television production, we have a render box that was written on 32bit Red Hat about 6 six years ago. The company that sold us the system created proprietary modules. Now it's 2012, and our on air render box is an old version of Linux that cannot support more than 3GB RAM. We can't upgrade, because it would break the proprietary modules.

So this company managed to Microsoft our asses using Linux. Bravo. For the record, during evaluation six years ago, I said "no." They never listen to me, though.

Re:Won't happen

[DigiShaman]

Tried the VM approach with a materials stress testing machine. Didn't work out too well. It's software that can only run on XP with an RS232 port to access test results. To say this specific vertical hardware/software solution is expensive would be an understatement.

I haven't priced one out in awhile, but I'm guessing the newer versions will just run some form of Linux with an SMB connection back to a Windows file server.

Re:Won't happen

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a linux box that works. This is not different than all the appliances out there that secretly run linux.

Re:Won't happen

[John Bresnahan]

Tried the VM approach with a materials stress testing machine. Didn't work out too well. It's software that can only run on XP with an RS232 port to access test results. To say this specific vertical hardware/software solution is expensive would be an understatement.

I'm not sure why this would be a problem. I helped move a SCO Unix-based legacy system to Windows, while running the legacy system in a VMware virtual machine. One of the major reasons to do this was because VMware allowed us to make USB- and Network-based peripherals look like legacy parallel and serial ports. The last I heard, the system was being used in over 14,000 locations.

BTW, did you know you can map parallel and serial ports in a VMware virtual machine to named pipes?

Re:Won't happen

[Mephistophocles]

When security patches are no longer available for an OS such as the case with NT4, it becomes a major security risk. With the new laws such as HIPAA and HITECH, hospital IT staffs risk massive security breaches, lawsuits and fines if hospitals such as yours take that stance.

Sorry, but at best, that's not the whole picture, and at worst, it's just plain inaccurate. If the upgrade costs more than the likely cost of a breach, an upgrade won't happen. Upgrades can cost many millions, not just in hardware/equipment costs, but in re-training, software re-coding, etc etc. While non-compliance can cost money, the reality currently is that it usually just doesn't. Compliance is enough of a moving target, and audits rare enough (especially audits that do more than just check to be sure that the correct policy/procedures are actually written down), that the risk just isn't high enough to justify the massive costs of upgrading.

So secondly, your statement about "massive...lawsuits and fines" just isn't accurate. That is a risk in the case of gross negligence, but I doubt there is a review board in the country that would consider failure to upgrade an operating system which is working and passes their pen tests, and which the cost of upgrading is cost prohibitive to say the least, gross negligence.

Lastly, HIPAA isn't a new law, chief - it outdates XP by 5 years (HIPAA passed in 1996).

Re:Won't happen

[hillbluffer]

The Wal-Mart Shopper mentality.

1. Thinking that the cost of something is the cost at the cash register.

Welcome to the mentality of most management. They think ONLY of the current quarter, the bonuses they will get and how to pump up the price of their stock options by keeping things running as cheaply as possible. They don't CARE about the future because they don't plan to be around that long. They'll either move on to a bigger company, or take their "golden parachute" and retire to the islands. You can cite maintainability and support to them all day long, and it's just like teaching a pig to sing. They _will_not_care_ and get mad at you for wasting their precious golf time talking about it.

Re:Won't happen

[Billly Gates]

That Walmart mentality is all the bean counters count. It is impossible to see the hidden costs in an accurate measure so they assume they do not even exist!

Not upgrading typically shifts the cost from the company to everyone else who has to support it. That is a win according to the accountants too. Now you need IE 6 still because all your suppliers require you to have it because your company requires them to support, etc. Everyone losses in such a scenario,

Volkswagon has that problem. IE 6 is required because every vendor would have to upgrade and every vendor wont upgrade because Volkswagon wont upgrade. Ancient browser support is the number one issue behind factory equipment keeping XP alive well after it should be dead.

Something has to give.

Re:Won't happen

[gfxguy]

No.

Re:Won't happen

[desdinova 216]

but doesn't reverse engineering software violate the DMCA?

Re:Won't happen

[argStyopa]

"Sooner or later, all software becomes obsolete. Not because there's something wrong with the software, but because the world in which the software lives changes."

This is, simply, bullshit.

I can write a letter with Wordperfect 3.0 perfectly fine, thanks. And it runs on my Zeos 386sx hunky dory. If all I want to do is to type documents, I NEVER NEED TO UPGRADE. Ever. Ever.

I know several businesses - including accounting firms, customs brokers, etc - that are running staggeringly ancient software on a simple server that pretty much is never touched. If it does what they need it to do, why would they EVER change?

As posters have already posted several times, there are many embedded systems that run xp just fine thanks, and barring some IT asswipe stealth "upgrading" the hardware because of some companywide mandate, they will continue to run just fine.

The fact is, this constant-upgrade treadmill is 80% marketing driven. Yes, Win7 is a stabler, better OS in pretty much every way than Win95. I get that. But I can run Win95 (or DOS) for that matter on systems that Win7 wouldn't even BOOT.

This 'announcement' from MS is the equivalent of Apple telling everyone that they "should just get the new iPhone". No real good reason, aside from some trival sideways improvements.

And I tell MS the same thing I'd tell Apple: bite me.

Re:Won't happen

[aaarrrgggh]

No, the issue is that the equipment has a 10-year design life, but the software has a five year design life.

Re:Won't happen

[jbolden]

I agree. But this was the argument 15 years against tying these systems to Windows. Microsoft has never indicated any desire or willingness to be in the permanent or very long term support model. They've been quite generous in slowing down from what they were in the 1980s. Today they are indicating a desire to move more quickly.

On the other hand there are and have been OSes that do have a track record of very long term support. For example IBM's AIX has been supported through all these years.

Re:Won't happen

[jbolden]

Windows 7 runs XP as a guest OS.

Re:Won't happen

[Mephistophocles]

But this was the argument 15 years against tying these systems to Windows.

True, and I'm guessing you were also one of the people making that argument. I said then and maintain that Windows isn't in the same class (and wasn't intended to be in the same class) as AS400, AIX, etc. Windows (server, SQL server, etc notwithstanding) is fine for a small business that intends to grow for 5 years and then sell, as it is fine for the consumer who has little (or at least least much less) need to think 15 years ahead. That doesn't mean that Windows has no place in the large enterprise. It just means that it's been adopted, many times, incorrectly.

15 years ago Linux wasn't a viable alternative, but I wonder if more attention should be paid to it now as a longer-term solution. The argument that Windows is easier to use, and therefore should be adopted wholesale on end-user systems in the enterprise just doesn't hold much weight for me; those of us who remember training nurses and techs on pre-Windows systems will tell you that people can and will learn the software they have to use in their day-to-day jobs; Windows isn't a magic bullet that makes a drastic difference in those training costs. It may reduce it somewhat, but at what penalty? Is millions of dollars in forced upgrades worth a slightly less aggressive learning curve? I don't think that's justifiable. Good Linux admins have become far easier to find in the past few years, so the support obstacle is not as formidable as it used to be - IMHO all that is lacking is the industry-specific software developed on a Linux platform.

And by the way, I'm not Microsoft-bashing, as you said they never intended to be considered in the same long-term-solution terms as solutions provided by IBM and others. The error was made by those companies that adopted Microsoft systems in the wrong ways.

Re:Won't happen

[cheesybagel]

The sad thing is for that amount of cash you could pay for someone to develop your own customized solution to which you had the source code. Oh well.

Re:Won't happen

[Darinbob]

Yep, I see XP a lot at my dentist or doctor's office, and when I worked with medical devices I'd see it a lot in various hospitals. These places don't have the budget to roll out fancy new computers every 3 years like some over funded companies do. If it ain't broke then don't fix it, and the current stuff ain't broke. Sure they'll roll out new stuff eventually, but it takes time to evaluate the applications and hardware and get new licenses.

People like to blame hospitals for rising health care costs, but most of them really are on a shoestring budget.

Re:Won't happen

[Darinbob]

There are a lot of medical systems that are purchased as a system, not as just an application. That is, your PACS system that you purchase comes with the computer that it runs on, you don't buy a computer and then the OS and then the PACS. So the entire system is then supported by the seller, and will be upgraded and fixed as long as it's on a service contract.

Re:Won't happen

[RoknrolZombie]

I think I used to work there.

Re:Won't happen

[swillden]

So this company managed to Microsoft our asses using Linux. Bravo. For the record, during evaluation six years ago, I said "no." They never listen to me, though.

WSI?

No.

Must be WSI.

Re:Won't happen

[lennier]

So this company managed to Microsoft our asses using Linux. Bravo. For the record, during evaluation six years ago, I said "no."

So did Richard Stallman, and everyone was like "wah wah stallman-sux wah wah get your Free Software politics out of our commercial Open Source wah wah we need binary modules to have a software ecosystem".

Although a working ABI and a kernel that didn't break compatibility every five minutes would also have worked.

Re:Won't happen

[cheesybagel]

Blech. I can understand people not wanting to upgrade from XP, but Windows 95 and DOS are unstable POS. I think a lot of companies will upgrade from XP to Windows 7 in the near future. However Windows 8 is too much of a change to stomach.

Re:Won't happen

[cheesybagel]

I have to keep resuscitating a Sun SPARCstation 20 just so we can compile crap for the GE scanner

Hmmm? Compile? This is not C/C++ compiling right? You could do that with a cross compiler.

Re:Won't happen

[cheesybagel]

Not if it is done for interoperability purposes.

Re:Won't happen

[RabidReindeer]

If you want to run in isolation and you have the ability to (re)create the environment, that's fine. As far as I'm concerned, the only really compelling reason to move off Office 97 was to see the end of Clippy.

However, it can get really cumbersome once you move outside the box. DOS wasn't originally designed for the Internet, so just emailing the resulting document to someone else means doing things that the original setup wasn't designed to handle. The world in which the software lives has changed.

Windows XP is a whole different can of worms, though. It's immensely more complex than DOS, and requires a constant stream of of security fixes, bugfixes, etc., which Microsoft plans to turn off shortly. But, as I said, the exploiters will keep going, so the system is going to have progressively more holes over time up to the point where the existing XP base is so small that nobody wants to hack in anymore, even though the software itself freezes.

That's not even mentioning the fact that unlike DOS, Windows XP "phones home" to Microsoft. Who could presumably switch the whole thing off, if they felt like it.

Re:Won't happen

[theArtificial]

Honestly, I think PlusFiveTroll is right, old software will stay as long as physically possible, after which it will move to virtual machines.

I completely agree with this too. I've had success using a webcam through a VM which the host was unable to use because the vendor refuses to release new drivers.

Windows does it wrong, because they break compatibility with every version they release. Then again, that's their business model, and it's making them craploads of money.

Out of all of those operating systems Windows sucks the least (hear me out!). It runs more hardware, has more applications, and is supported far longer. Windows has the best backwards compatibility of any of the popular commercial operating systems out there. Lets see you run a binary from 1998 on a Mac today, Rosetta is being phased out and support for it is lacking in Lion, and not to mention they've switched architectures; or Linux for that matter, good luck piecing together ancient libraries. Your comment is more appropriate directed at their development tools. On the OS side Microsoft has steadily made improvements, most of the woes were from Microsoft enforcing good development practices, (example, see the "Store Application Data in the Correct Location", or Microsoft's general programming guidelines.) why do you think initially many applications required administrator access to run? Sloppy programmers.

Windows doesn't have a monopoly on sloppy programmers. Whether this is due to ease of development or coder competency is a different topic. Sloppy programming plagues companies big and small - just a few months ago ATI had drivers which would BSOD if ASLR and DEP were enabled.

Re:Won't happen

[guruevi]

Yeah, if you're implementing your EHR/EMR that way, all your records will be unavailable at the first snag you hit which on a centralized system can be many (single point of failure becomes the farm, data centers, the (wireless and wired) networks, the software, Windows Update ...)

EHR/EMR in REAL hospitals is implemented by having read-only copies of relevant databases stored on key workstations in areas and have full records for patients and special cases in the area on individual workstations, bedside computer units, head nurse's iPad's and doctor's iPhone's.

Re:Won't happen

[guruevi]

Yeah, you wish that would happen. I work in the reality. 100k patient records potentially on the street and the 'fine' was not even close to $1M which included the lawyers' cost and the bogus ID protection service that continuously up-sells their own services. They just wrote it off as the cost of doing business, gave everyone involved in the breach a seminar on it and a couple of mea-culpa's from the CIO.

Re:Won't happen

[guruevi]

Yes, you could end up with an awesome solution but you would have to hire a really good project lead and programmers that know what they are doing. Given the quality of medical software I have seen so far, the so-called cream-of-the-crop that have actually worked on some of those things couldn't program their way out of a box using Logo.

Re:Won't happen

[jbolden]

It was always easy to train on people on Unix systems. The issue was with office / clerical staff who had already developed a windows culture. There the conversions were really hard. The only companies that have realized how addicted to Microsoft they are those that have made a serious attempt to move away. Which is why I don't think Windows 8 poses any challenge.

In terms of replacement clients. I think Linux has been ready for a decade. And I think its success in: server, embedded, super computing and even being #3 desktop in popularity show that.

OTOH now I own a business (small) so I can do what I want, and my business uses OSX. Our custom stuff ends up as much as possible being rather generic Unix. GUIs we try and keep lightweight. Where they aren't in all fairness more often than not I end up tying them to proprietary technologies myself just to save 40% or so on development. Much as I'd rather be using Linux widgets like Qt. But at least if/when I swap them out I won't whine I didn't know.

Re:Won't happen

[jbolden]

That's embedded effectively not desktop. Its the vendor's job to replace the technology or not. I don't count that as the hospital's problem.

Re:Won't happen

[hairyfish]

This is, simply, bullshit.

I can write a letter with Wordperfect 3.0 perfectly fine, thanks. And it runs on my Zeos 386sx hunky dory. If all I want to do is to type documents, I NEVER NEED TO UPGRADE. Ever. Ever.

I know several businesses - including accounting firms, customs brokers, etc - that are running staggeringly ancient software on a simple server that pretty much is never touched. If it does what they need it to do, why would they EVER change?

Not long ago my neighbour came over and asked me if I could help with a PC he was having trouble with at his workshop. I don't normally do this sort of thing but he works in an engineering shop (real engineering - making stuff out of metal) and was working on an electric car project that I wanted to check out, so offered to take a look. Well I get there and his PC is a 386 running DOS 5! It only runs one application, and CAD app that controlled a gas axe robot. If it works, why change? In this case it stopped working due to hardware failure (hey 20 years isn't a bad run for a PC in a metalwork shop). This is where I see virtualisation saving us form the endless upgrade treadmill. Abstract the App and OS from the hardware, then you never need to upgrade you app ever again.

Re:Won't happen

[sjames]

Funny thing that. Back at the turn of the century, the Linux fans told businesses like hospitals and equipment manufacturers that they should go with Linux so they could meaningfully support the OS long term where needed. The business people swore they would be upgrading in 5 years anyway and so XP would be just fine.

So I give them a word from Nelson Muntz: HA-HA!

Re:Won't happen

[midgetpoker]

I worked in a bank where everything ran over IPX. Our massive (expensive) upgrade simply tunneled IPX over TCP. I suspect people will want exactly the same upgrade path. Same old apps on the same old system, only sitting on top of a new one.

Re:Won't happen

[bhiestand]

Tried the VM approach with a materials stress testing machine. Didn't work out too well. It's software that can only run on XP with an RS232 port to access test results. To say this specific vertical hardware/software solution is expensive would be an understatement.

I haven't priced one out in awhile, but I'm guessing the newer versions will just run some form of Linux with an SMB connection back to a Windows file server.

I'm also surprised that the RS232 was an issue. I got similar industrial equipment working with, believe it or not: Windows 7 Pro's "XP Mode". I had to disable some OpenGL? settings and teach people to manually attach the USB dongle on reboots, but aside from that, it works without a hitch.

Re:Won't happen

[nickserv]

For the record, during evaluation six years ago, I said "no." They never listen to me, though.

You should have told them your /. UID was under 100k. Maybe they would have listened to you then. :)

At my institute, it's still "popular"

[blind biker]

All our research and analysis software works fine with XP, all the office, design (CAE/CAD etc.), editors, image manipulation, diagram plotting etc. etc. etc. works fine. No fucking need to upgrade means no upgrade happens. I know, this is shocking to many people on the MS Windows upgrade treadmill, but sometimes, you know, common sense prevails.

I know, I know, awfully shocking.

Re:At my institute, it's still "popular"

[r1348]

And what will you exactly do once the last XP machine breaks and newer hardware won't have XP drivers?

Re:At my institute, it's still "popular"

[0123456]

Every OS will eventually stop receiving security updates. And if 50% of companies are still running XP, Microsoft will be forced to keep updating it.

Re:At my institute, it's still "popular"

[blind biker]

And what will you exactly do once the last XP machine breaks and newer hardware won't have XP drivers?

There will be enough XP-compatible new hardware. Or "NOS" hardware. OEMs understand that, this time, there's a gigantic demand for WinXP-compatible hardware, and some of those OEMs have been burned by Microsoft (who sells itself Windows 8).

I am guessing that there is a significant likelihood that WinXP-compatible computers will be available in the foreseeable future. Actually, because of the large number of existing XP installations, it's a default assumption of a non-negligible amount of people. And such a massive expectation creates a specific reality, with which not even Microsoft can fuck.

Re:At my institute, it's still "popular"

[r1348]

That sounds like a lot of wishful thinking to me.
For the sake of your career, I hope you're right.

Re:At my institute, it's still "popular"

[ebh]

If I had to solve this, I'd buy a modern box and set up a virtual machine on it that runs XP. The virtual hardware will last a lot longer than the physical hardware it emulates.

Oh, and I'd do this long before the last XP machine breaks, so that I'd have plenty of time to port and test legacy apps.

Re:At my institute, it's still "popular"

[jader3rd]

And if 50% of companies are still running XP, Microsoft will be forced to keep updating it.

Microsoft's update to XP is Vista. What magical force do you think exists that can get MS to patch XP one more time?

Re:At my institute, it's still "popular"

[satuon]

It depends. Does the box need to be connected to the Internet in order to perform its function?

Re:At my institute, it's still "popular"

[Rob the Bold]

And if 50% of companies are still running XP, Microsoft will be forced to keep updating it.

Microsoft's update to XP is Vista. What magical force do you think exists that can get MS to patch XP one more time?

Money might work, if enough customers were willing to pay to keep updates coming to avoid obsoleting old hardware and/or software that only works with XP.

Re:At my institute, it's still "popular"

[jbolden]

How will they be forced to keep updating it?

They've been for a decade indicating they intend to EOL it. The dates have been out there for years. They aren't making money on old XP licenses. So when they stop supporting it, they just stop.

Re:At my institute, it's still "popular"

[couchslug]

Consumers don't spend shit for software, specialty hardware, or clues.

There are still older CNC machining centers running CP/M. When something costs over a hundred grand and makes you money, unnecessary downtime is bad.

Re:At my institute, it's still "popular"

[jbolden]

with which not even Microsoft can fuck.

Of course they can, they own the copyright. That being said they are unlikely too. But don't confuse can't with won't.

Re:At my institute, it's still "popular"

[hairyfeet]

Yeah no shit, just built a brand new Athlon triple for a customer and guess what was on the driver disc along with Vista and 7? XP drivers.

So if I can buy brand new gear today with XP drivers i doubt finding NOS will be hard after 2014, hell I had a customer that hung onto Win2K until last year simply because he had mission critical software that wouldn't run on XP. Its really not hard to find the hardware if you need it, I can go to someplace like Starmicro and get CPUs going back to the Slot A and Pentium 3, really not hard to build a NOS system these days.

Re:At my institute, it's still "popular"

[BeanThere]

I've got news for you, most people actually don't care much about security. If they did, Windows would never have become so widespread in the first place.

Re:At my institute, it's still "popular"

[FaxeTheCat]

Money might work, if enough customers were willing to pay to keep updates coming to avoid obsoleting old hardware and/or software that only works with XP.

My guess is that those actually willing to spend money rather spend it on updated software and new hardware. Those who stick to XP are more likely not to want to spend money on the OS. So the result is given...

Re:At my institute, it's still "popular"

[FrankHS]

I recently worked at a company that had 286 computers running on the production line. They have plenty of smart people working there. We ended up buying one on Ebay (a great source for obsolete hardware).

I have no doubt that hardware and software that works with XP will be available for a very long time.

As to whether it is better to upgrade the XP applications, or replace them is a decision that needs to be made. In some cases it makes sense to upgrade.
  In the example I gave, we bought several spares on ebay. that cost around $300 that should keep the machine running for the forseeable future. Replacement of the machine would have cost upward of $100,000.

Re:At my institute, it's still "popular"

[sjames]

Forced by who/what?

Re:At my institute, it's still "popular"

[bhiestand]

I can understand most of those, but how long do you think that's going to hold into the future? Are you using XP64?

It seems that some work is getting much more complex over time, esp. image and video manipulation. I had to upgrade some systems because 4GB of RAM just doesn't cut it these days.

UE

[Anonymous Coward]

with all those pirated UE out there XP will live forever in third world

Figures...

[RLU486983]

Micro$oft has an operating system that is running fairly stable and well and they want to axe it... puzzling!!

Re:Figures...

[StonyUK]

Does your clever use of the dollar sign indicate the money Microsoft want to save by not having to support an 11 year old operating system after they have already released three newer versions. Or perhaps the money they would like to reinvest in research and development but can't because they have to keep supporting a decade old legacy? I think after 11 years, people have had a good run. After all, what was an XP licence? $200? What do you still own that you bought for $200 in 2001 and which is still maintained by the vendor?

Coke

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news, Coca-Cola recommends consumers drink more soda pop.

Re:Coke

[arth1]

In other news, Coca-Cola recommends consumers drink more soda pop.

Now, this is more akin to the Coca-Cola Company recommending that we all switch to New Coke(TM).

Re:Coke

[r1348]

No, it's more like Coca-Cola recommending consumers not to drink from expired cans.

Re:Coke

[CanHasDIY]

No, it's more like Coca-Cola recommending consumers not to drink from expired cans.

No it's not.

This was a bad analogy from the start, and only got worse as the replies started to accumulate..

Re:Coke

[Abreu]

No, it's more like Coca-Cola recommending consumers not to drink from expired cans.

...and they won't sell you any more Coca-Cola Classic, insisting New Coke is better and you'll love the taste, once you get used to it.

Re:Coke

[hairyfeet]

Man hasn't everyone figured out "new coke" was the scam of the century? Old coke was made with sugar, they knew people would have a shitfit when they switched to HFCS because it would taste different, so they came out with "new coke" which was made with HFCS. if it sold? Fine and dandy, if it didn't? Put out old coke made with HFCS and say "My bad" and everyone will be so happy not to be drinking new coke that they won't notice they been had.

I have to wonder if MSFT isn't pulling the same scam with Win 8, if it sells? Fine and dandy, if it don't? they say "My bad, here's Win 7" and people will be so happy to not have Win 8 they won't nopticed MSFT still got them to upgrade from XP...its a win/win for MSFT, just as it was for the Coca Cola co.

Re:Coke

[Crosshair84]

The scam of the century is how the US government keeps sugar prices in the US twice that of world sugar prices. Sure I live in an area with lots of sugar beet farming, but the farmers can always grow something else. (Hemp would grow nicely on some of the high-salt land if they were allowed to.) Robbing Peter to pay Paul does nothing except make both poorer in the long term.

Re:Coke

[hairyfeet]

Well then I hope you agree with me that "free trade" should be banned in favor of fair trade, because as it is ALL the countries are fucking rigging the playing field! You wanna see that same shit in other countries look at how Japan screws the shit out of AR rice with tariffs so their home grown rice, which is frankly inferior, gets the lion's share of the market, or how China controls the Yen and won't allow American imports without high tariffs, instead forcing any American corp that wants to sell to China to open a factory there so they can get around the tariffs!

So as much as I agree with you that trade with Cuba should be opened and all the corn lobbyists should be told to fuck off, frankly we are getting royally fucked in the global markets and have such a huge trade deficit precisely because the other countries are rigging the field worse than we are! This is why I tell everyone that whenever a politician says they are for "free trade" they should call them out on it, because with all the market rigging its a total lie that only benefits a handful while fucking millions. Then what REALLY pisses me off is they call countries like China and India "nationalist" for rigging their markets...and still trade with them! Well duh, its called "being smarter than stupid greedy Americans" and maybe we should do the fucking same until they agree to a level playing field!

Re:Coke

[Crosshair84]

That is exactly how we got into the mess we have in the first place. One group needing protection, then another and another. If Japan is subsidizing their exporters that means they are effectively giving us stuff for less. If I have a friend who sells me a $2 beer for $1, how is doing that to his benefit and why should I not take advantage of the offer for all it is worth..Likewise with the Chinese subsedizing the production of solar panels.

Those policies are expensive, hurt the counties own citizens more than they hurt us, and will ultimately collapse, along with big government, as our 40 year old fiat money system collapses. The Chinese are already starting to get serious unrest and bubble conditions in their country with the inflation they have to create in order to keep the dollar from dropping like a rock, they will not be able to continue for much longer without getting a possible revolution. Very similar to what the US Federal Reserve did in the 1920's to prop up the British Pound, which fueled the stock market bubble of the mid/late 1920's that was the cause of the 29 crash. (and the 2000 crash, and the 2008 crash, and the cause of the current bubble in the government bond market that will crash.)

Re:Coke

[hairyfeet]

But see that's the bitch here, they are NOT boosting the exports, they are effectively blocking us from competing on their home turf. A bag of AR rice that should cost $4 there costs nearly $40 because of all the tariffs they put on it, and an item made in the USA will cost 8 to 12 times more in China than that exact same object, even if you imprt all of the materials and simply have a Chinese put it together, because while they are happy to take our money they WILL NOT allow our goods into their markets. this is why our trade is so fucked, all these countries are willing to take our money, which of course is stupid because ever since the gold standard was dropped by Nixon its just been monopoly money printed as needed, but it makes America pretty much unable to compete because we will willingly trade with those that won't allow an American good on their shelves while we allow their goods onto ours, even when we shouldn't like foods from China where their environmental laws are non-existent.

But here is a video you should find informative Crosshair, and especially look at the charts starting at around 3.35...notice the HUGE jump? this bubble is gonna make the 29 bust look like a bad weekend. they've talked about Japan and the lost decade? Historians are likely to talk about America and the lost century, if we manage to survive without breaking up like the USSR. Basically you have the retirements and the poor completely locked into the market thanks to 401k and 403b and when that bubble pops it'll be worse than the bank runs, as these people are gonna be left with NOTHING, no disability, no welfare, no retirement, it'll be like Zimbabwe where you need a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread, its gonna be ugly friend, REAL ugly.

Secure boot is to migrate windows users.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the real reason MS is pushing trusted bootloaders and UEFI. They know the FOSS community can deal with it, their true motivation is so people cannot continue to run XP on new machines and will be forced to move that marketshare to windows 8.

Re:Secure boot is to migrate windows users.

[guruevi]

You don't need UEFI for that. Just put in a semi-recent SATA controller and WinXP installers choke on it. UEFI is to keep home-brew and FOSS out, they couldn't care less if you got XP to run on it.

Re:Secure boot is to migrate windows users.

[jbolden]

Anyone who can use a homebrew an OS will be fine with UEFI. That group of customers has nothing to worry about. As far as FOSS users, there will FOSS systems that will install easily on UEFI. Microsoft is working with several of them quite openly to insure that.

Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source Windows XP, then nobody will use it. Its base will become a muddled mess of forks until it eventually fades into nothing.

Re:Solution

[dmbasso]

What could really happen in this fantasy world: one stable distribution with only security fixes and minor improvements would estabilish itself, backed by a foundation. Several local business would trive, offering support and perhaps contributing with fixes and improvements. Money would not be funneled to one single company anymore, and the overall cost for everybody would be way lower.

Re:Solution

[micheas]

Only if the use the BSD license.

Re:Solution

[Improbus]

This is already being worked on: ReactOS (http://www.reactos.org)

Re:Solution

[stms]

I'm confused isn't that what happened with Vista?

We were thinking XP looks pretty good

[Anonymous Coward]

So good in fact, we might just upgrade some of our Win98 machines to XP.

Re:We were thinking XP looks pretty good

[BoRegardless]

Wait, wait, follow the Four Seasons Hotel and get Win2000. They still use it on the reservations desk.

Re:We were thinking XP looks pretty good

[Abreu]

Wait, wait, follow the Four Seasons Hotel and get Win2000. They still use it on the reservations desk.

You don't want to know what software airlines use for some systems... [shudder]

Nicely done, PR.

[HiGuys]

"...most new hardware options will likely not support the Windows XP operating system"

Alternately, Windows XP will not support new hardware, but that doesn't shift the blame now, does it?

Re:Nicely done, PR.

[Drummergeek0]

How is this insightful?

It is on the burden of the hardware manufacturers to write drivers, not the OS developer. Especially for new hardware. How in any way does the blame fall on XP and Microsoft?

Re:Nicely done, PR.

[arth1]

How is this insightful?

It is on the burden of the hardware manufacturers to write drivers, not the OS developer. Especially for new hardware. How in any way does the blame fall on XP and Microsoft?

It is insightful because of Microsoft driver signing. A 3rd party can write as many drivers as he like, but if Microsoft won't sign them, and the customers have to jump through hoops to get them accepted by the system, it's not a viable option.

Re:Nicely done, PR.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

We'll see if they start playing any games with WHQL/driver signing. If they don't, it's the hardware vendors' problem. If it turns out that "Windows XP driver Exists" is an unofficial ticket to substantial additional delays in getting the WHQL signature for the Win7/Win8 driver... Well, that'll be a different story.

Re:Nicely done, PR.

[Drummergeek0]

Actually, the driver's still work, but there is a greater risk of malicious code without the signing. They can still release the drivers. It falls on the consumer to take a risk to keep their 13+ year old (after 2014) OS. I still fail to see how this is Microsoft's problem.

Re:Nicely done, PR.

[gigaherz]

"Hoops" is one click on a warning screen. This is XP not Vista/7 x64.

Re:Nicely done, PR.

[Anonymous Coward]

The PR didn't work so well for us. While we did leave XP, we left Microsoft completely for an Open Source based solution, Linux.
We are happy to report, we are happy.

Re:Nicely done, PR.

[HiGuys]

The problem comes when you do not have admin rights and XP doesn't trust the drivers you are trying to install. (And yes, in an ideal world, you wouldn't need to do this).

Re:Nicely done, PR.

[arth1]

"Hoops" is one click on a warning screen

Only if you're a local administrator.

Re:Nicely done, PR.

[gigaherz]

The customers tend to also be administrators of their own systems. I don't know how remote administration works, if that's what you meant, but non-privileged users sure shouldn't be trying to install drivers.

Re:Nicely done, PR.

[arth1]

The customers tend to also be administrators of their own systems. I don't know how remote administration works, if that's what you meant, but non-privileged users sure shouldn't be trying to install drivers.

Not even when they insert a USB key or drive that requires XHCI drivers installed to even work in UHCI/EHCI mode, or they hook up the camera their boss upgraded to a newer model, or try to access a shared printer which requires driver install?

Yes, ideally, one should have an IT department that takes care of these things immediately for the user. But that isn't reality most places.

Re:Nicely done, PR.

[gigaherz]

I suppose you have a point there. There is always VMs though, you can run a locked down XP on virtualbox or similar, and run the old apps that can't or won't be upgraded there. Of course there is always weird combinations, like a piece of hardware essential to the company that only works in old computers, but usually those are isolated cases, and can easily be treated differently. And of course there will always be an exception, but the exceptions are not really worth the effort.

The point is, as a corporation, it's not in Microsoft's best interests to continue to support a 12 year old product. New drivers are up to the hardware manufacturers, and in an the cases where the XP architecture doesn't allow the new devices, then there's not much that can be done. Supporting new driver models and new APIs is exactly what the new versions of the OS are for.

The lifespan of the XP platform was known 12 years ago, and they extended it as much as their policies allowed. If bad luck or bad planning on the customer's side means they can't continue doing business because there's no way they can upgrade the system, and the old systems are not secure anymore, then it's not their fault. Hell a lot of people still use DOS-based software because it has been tested and debugged for so long, upgrading would be a risk too great to take. Yet for most practical purposes, DOS is dead, and the world continues.

Send us money!

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Dear satisfied XP user,

We can't make any money if you insist on using Windows XP. Please upgrade to our new Windows 8. Since software developers also need money, you may notice that you'll have to replace the software that will not work in Windows 8.

While we're at it, the hardware vendors would love some of your money. Your old computer probably won't run Windows 8 anyway. So support our hardware partners. You can save yourself some time by just go ahead and buy the new Computer and it will come with a crippled version of Windows 8 that we'll be glad to upgrade for you at a reasonable cost.

We're happy that your computing needs are being satisfied with what you have, but we would be even happier if you send us money for our new OS.

Thanks for spending!
Microsoft

Re:Send us money!

[zippthorne]

Although you make a good point, the fact remains that they will never close all of the security issues in a software product as large as XP. The best we can ever hope for is for them to close as many as possible, and address newly discovered issues in a timely manner. They can only do this if they have a revenue stream of some kind - developers need to eat, you know.

The upgrade treadmill is how they handled this issue historically - putting out new versions and deprecating the old ones and using sales of new products to continue to fund fixes for the old version for a time. Obviously, they can't fund it forever this way unless people actually buy the new products, though.

How would you suggest they solve the funding dilemma?

Re:Send us money!

[starfishsystems]

After training a whole generation of people to mistrust software upgrades because, defective by design, they just move the pain points around a little - after all that training, does Microsoft really think that people will want to move off XP?

This is called the Law of Karma.

Re:Send us money!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

How would you suggest they solve the funding dilemma?

The details are a nighmarish, ever-shifting, morass of acronyms and "talk to your rep"; but Microsoft already has a plan where customers can pay annually for "Software Assurance".

Obviously, Microsoft wants to be bug-hunting as few codebases as possible, and presenting as unified a "platform" to 3rd party application vendors as possible, so it is to be expected that the cost/seat of continued support would rise over time as the number of seats in the field dropped; but they already have a mechanism for charging customers on an annual volume basis, which could easily enough be extended to offering paid security support after the support period provided by a boxed license is over...

Not necessarily something that they want to do; but they could.

Re:Send us money!

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Although you make a good point, the fact remains that they will never close all of the security issues in a software product as large as XP...

To be honest I was going for funny. However it is obvious that there are businesses out there that can't or not willing to leave XP. Microsoft could simply sell support services to these customers. Windows XP had a long run and to be fair Microsoft has supported it for a very long time (an eternity by today's standards). There are businesses that had custom software made that aren't willing to give up something that works just so Microsoft can focus solely on Windows 8.

Sure Windows XP won't have the latest bug fixes, but the companies that rely on it can mitigate the risks without purchasing an upgrade.

I had a friend who ran a small office. One day his secretary had to move out of town with her husband. He did what would come natural and placed a "Help Wanted" ad in the local paper. He required that the new hire knew how to use a word processor and more specifically Wordperfect running on an IBM XT. Despite the fact that Pentium computers running Windows 95 were available, he had no desire to upgrade and no need to use that computer for anything else than a word processor. You wouldn't believe the number of phone calls from people trying to sell him a new computer.

One day he came in my office and ask if he should be concerned since a salesman told him that his machine wasn't running the most up to date software and was prone to malware and security exploits. Since he didn't even have a modem installed and he was pretty much set in his ways on what he used his computer for, I didn't see any need for him to try to learn a new computer system. Eventually he found a new secretary and that old machine was in use up to the day he finally retired (to my and everyone else's surprise).

It shouldn't come to anyone surprise that not all businesses exist for the purpose of buying upgrades.

If Windows 8 is a good product then Microsoft shouldn't have any problems staying fed.

With the current trend of a new major OS version coming out every two years, I find it hard to justify NOT using Linux or the various BSDs for any independent software destined for long term use.

Re:Send us money!

[Patch86]

How would you suggest they solve the funding dilemma?

They could go the Red Hat route for Enterprise customers ("if you want security updates, pay us a small license fee every year for eternity"). For consumers, they could rely on the "natural upgrade cycle"- that is, most people buy a new computer every few years, with a new copy of whatever the latest OS is.

Forcibly withdrawing support is a great way of undermining trust in your product. If you're a large hospital with hundreds of XP devices that really can't be upgraded without a hardware change, finding your hospital infrastructure grinding to a halt (or becoming open to massive security holes) overnight will really sting. They may still upgrade to a new MS OS, but they'll resent it.

Re:Send us money!

[Billly Gates]

Pennywise but dollar dumb.

How many months did it take for him to loose productivity and money finding someone under the age of 60 who has even used that product before? How much money did he loose or have his secretary not be able to answer emails because the system was obsolete?

If you had spent $600 for a new PC with XP and Office with a lan connection so she could answer emails, get directions from google maps or mapquest, check out websites of vendors, could he have saved of made?

Why not switch to typewritters while we are at it? Then you could save A TON of money.

Re:Send us money!

[Master Moose]

Yes,

this reminds me of my Lawyer, Up until 5 years ago, everything was still being typed up on an electric typewriter. . Not a P.C. to be seen in his office.

Electronic communication was by fax.

Re:Send us money!

[Bill_the_Engineer]

How many months did it take for him to loose productivity and money finding someone under the age of 60 who has even used that product before? How much money did he loose or have his secretary not be able to answer emails because the system was obsolete?

No more than 2 weeks if I remember correctly. Emails? This was mid-90's his industry used telexes (and he had a dedicated machine from Western Union for that) and faxes which was a stand alone machine too. It worked well for him.

Today the situation hasn't improved much. You'd be surprised how many people still need to be trained to use Word or even Excel.

Re:Send us money!

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

No one I know wants to 'upgrade' to Win 8, if they want to replace XP at all. Win 7 will be the next "OS that won't die"

Re:Send us money!

[jbolden]

Microsoft never advertised XP as an embedded system. Not once. They never asked hardware devices to lock themselves into XP. They have repeatedly year after year after year advised people on appropriate migration paths. They have published numerous articles asking their OS customers to pressure their vendors to upgrade their systems.

Lost trust in what? That Microsoft is going to support you even if you ignore everything they tell you to do?

Open-source XP

[Anonymous Coward]

We saw Vista, 7 and now 8 and each generation offers such awesome improvements over the previous... I dare Microsoft to open-source Windows XP on May 1st, 2014. I don't see it happen, but you may want to have a look at ReactOS. If you ask me, OpenXP would be a better name for it.

Re:Open-source XP

[jader3rd]

There's too much backwards compatibility and code that's still be used in Vista and 7 for Microsoft to open source XP. People could go through the XP source, find bugs, and then try to see if the same bugs still exist in currently supported products.

Re:Open-source XP

[hillbluffer]

Quote from their page: "Please bear in mind that ReactOS 0.3.14 is still in alpha stage, meaning it is not feature-complete and is not recommended for everyday use." I've looked at it several times, and wished they'd get it to at least beta.

Re:Open-source XP

[UnknownSoldier]

That's never going to happen due to Microsoft's pride and ego.

Give an OS away for free? AND the source?! That's ludicrous !! :-)

Still Running Here

[Bigbutt]

Well, in VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro. I need IE for access to some services and I can't seem to modify Outlook email groups using the Outlook for the Mac client plus there's one set of old hardware that requires a very specific version of Java for me to be able to get a console on the system.

[John]

Worth upgrading to Windows 7

[Daetrin]

Windows 7 is a pretty decent OS, and you can make it look just like XP or earlier if you want. And hopefully by the time they stop supporting Windows 7 they'll have come out with something decent for Windows 9, or the PC will be totally irrelevant.

Re:Farewell XP

[JonJ]

On that note, I think it would be good to say goodbyes to Windows Vista too. Windows 7 and 8 are truly better and the only OS we currently need, on top of Mac OS X. That trio is something beautiful and hard for anyone to break.

Yes, let's all celebrate a duopoly of walled gardens. That'll be grand.

Re:Farewell XP

[Mitchell314]

I agree. Especially Windows 7, it's fantastic. If Microsoft keeps up the good work, they'll eventually catch up to being even more that a dust mite on Linux's boots. :P

Re:Farewell XP

[Anonymous Coward]

Farewell XP. You were the bestest and most perfectest OS in history, but Windows 8 is even bestester and more perfecter than anything ever made in the whole wide world EVER!!1!!1! I know this because Windows 8 is just so good and awesome that it broke out of Microsoft and I saw it and it's awesomer than XP was. It's time to update to Windows 8!

And the same minute the article was posted, too! What a strange coincidence! It's as if Microsoft is so behind the times that they haven't figured out we've been on to their shills for the past few years! But we know THAT'S impossible, given how awesome of an OS Windows 8 is, and that's so trendy and hip! That couldn't have been made by a company stuck 11 years in the past like that!

Srsly?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

What kind of arm-twisting, exactly, is MS planning against Dell, HP, etc. to get them to stop shipping boring corporate boxes that don't support XP?

Yeah, sure, the odds of having XP run properly without a bit of scrounging on some random machine from Best Buy(this goes double if it's a laptop, triple if it's some wacky touch/hybrid/thing), aren't getting any better; but if your business is shipping pallet-loads of identical machines to assorted volume customers, you damn well better support the OSes they want supported. If you don't, the largely interchangeable shipper of near-identical machines will.

Even if MS plays serious hardball, and just starts refusing to WHQL sign XP drivers, XP doesn't force driver signing very hard, so IT shouldn't have much trouble with that. Now, I'd be totally unsurprised to learn that XP toasts the battery life of newer laptops with super-fancy power saving features, or requires that you turn on the 'legacy bios emulation' switch in whatever UEFI pit the system ships with; but I'd be shocked to see the end of the ability to buy XP boxes(through corporate and volume license channels, not necessarily at retail) before 2020...

Re:Srsly?

[jbolden]

Maybe. First Microsoft owns the copyright. If they want to play hardball they can do a lot more than just not sign drivers, though I don't think they'll do that.

Second the reason OEMs can create hardware that supports a full range of devices is because Microsoft has a very good QA facility for them to test in. Once XP is gone from that facility, and it already is, it gets harder to create hardware that support XP as it exists in the field. But again there are hundreds of millions of used systems that run XP fine, so that's not a huge problem.

More likely though, they'll do exactly what they say they will. The new versions of updates on all their server products won't support XP clients. So for example Office 2013 doesn't work on XP and VIsta. There is a new Exchange virus and the upgrade doesn't work with XP.... It just gets increasingly painful to use XP and the customers do migrate.

And remember Windows 7 ships with XP in virtual mode. So the cost of upgrading is comparatively low. Sure the really stubborn stay on XP for years after support expires but that is a vanishing share of the market and mostly irrelevant.

Re:Srsly?

[colinrichardday]

What kind of arm-twisting, exactly, is MS planning against Dell, HP, etc. to get them to stop shipping boring corporate boxes that don't support XP?

Refuse to sell/allow XP licenses? What are Dell and HP going to do? Install Linux?

It's good enough, and Vista/7 just plain aren't

[Tomji]

much better.

I use both XP and 7, and had used Vista before. I use XP on most of my virtuals. I like just about 4 new features.

1.) Pin app to taskbar.
2.) Shift Right click "Copy as Path". (very easy to retrofit).
3.) The improved "Search Programs and Files".
4.) "Real" x64 support. (WinXP x64 is much more of a edited Windows 2003 build and finding drivers for it is hard).

In fact, XP had no feature whatsoever over Win2K, but it did offer some big improvements for the corporate side of things just as (much better) WMI and GPO.

Re:Farewell XP

[jellomizer]

Slashdot: Back in 2001. XP is horrible it looks like it was made by phisher price....
Back in 2002-2004 we giggled in glee as malware like Code Red started to severely infect Windows XP
XP is still bad.
But Vista was a flop, it took way too long and offered too many issues. So we got use to it. Granted XP was better then ME or 98, but that was due to Microsoft Finally pushing the NT Kernel on consumer OS's.

XP long run was due to Microsoft Failing last decade.
Trying to Make Vista (Longhorn) a super mega OS, where they just couldn't do it, taking time away from smaller improvements.
Fighting with Apple iPod Halo, where people started to take Mac's seriously again. And Apple was quick to release new versions of it's OS.
Bad press from the FTC ruling. Yes they didn't get punished by the feds as much, but in terms of user perception it was got bad. People didn't use Microsoft Products because they wanted to but because they felt like they had to.
Firefox - Safari - Chrome: These web browsers kicked the butt on IE 6 and Developers took notice and started making their pages more Other browser friendly. Plus these other Browsers work just as well on other OS's. .NET made development too hard. (I actually like programming in .NET myself) but Microsoft sacrificed VB for it. Because VB was meant to be an easy to program language that any poor slob can code. .NET turned vb from a GUI scripting language to an OO language. Giving a huge learning curve to the Non-Developers programmers (Businessmen, Engineers, ... who wrote a program to fit their need) Yes it created higher quality code and saved us IT professionals form VB hell but if you needed to hire a real developer to make your software. That developer just may choose some more platform independent languages to do the work, even if they did use .NET they would have made more Web Based applications just so they can debug problems better, and have better contol of the software. Good for us, bad for MS.

Great advertisement

[ugen]

Time and experience are what proves products to be (or not to be) successful.

XP is successful by all accounts - it is relatively stable, productive, makes sense (more or less). The way to move users to a new system is to provide something those users *actually want*, without taking away things they already have. Simple, as soon as Microsoft does that - we'll all switch, voluntarily, and may be even give them some ca$h.

Personally, I won't move simply because I can't be sure binaries I build on Windows 7 will work on XP (yes, they "should" but I don't really care to try). That and XP had the last control panel that had some logic to the way things were laid out and grouped.

Re:Great advertisement

[cbhacking]

XP is practically 32-bit only (its 64-bit port has almost no driver support). This means less than 4GB of addressable RAM, once drivers are mapped in. By 2014 we'll have smartphones with that much... Also, more RAM means more programs resident in RAM at once, which means instant task switching, which improves productivity because people don't get distracted waiting for the OS to thrash the requested data out of the pagefile (swap). Also, XP's memory management algorithms are archaic - they're from an era when 256MB was a lot of RAM for a PC, not a really crappy smartphone - and will very aggressively move data out of RAM to the pagefile. This means that XP makes much poorer use of additional RAM than it should, again leading to reduced productivity.

XP doesn't support ASLR. DEP alone is trivial to bypass (there are entire compiler toolchains that build ROP payloads these days) and this means that nearly any memory corruption bug is trivial to turn into a working exploit on XP. It's much, much harder on newer versions. Additionally, there are a lot of bugs in older Windows versions that are either fixed during development of newer versions, or the relevant feature was re-written without the bug (and received a hell of a lot more security testing). There's a reason that practically every Windows 0-day exploit works on XP, but very few of them work on Win7 (even if Win7 theoretically also contains the vulnerability, the mitigations in place make successful exploitation much, much harder).

XP's support for SSDs is practically nonexistent (it treats them like any other block device, leading to terrible decreases on performance over time). You claim XP is productive, but the productivity boost that comes from the OS being able to load programs and files near-instantly is also significant, and SSDs are a huge help there. Newer versions of Windows can also use removable Flash storage as a solid-state cache, which again dramatically improves access time for frequently used data or programs. XP feels *laggy* on fairly modern hardware, compared newer Windows versions. Yes, there is a tipping point where XP will run better just due to its lower minimum specs, but that tipping point is a long, long way below even low-end modern PCs (my parents' netbook from three years ago runs smoother on Win7 than it did with the XP that it shipped with).

XP's built-in search is a complete joke. Index-based "instant" search is a tremendous improvement in the latency of "dealing with the OS" (finding files / emails, launching programs, managing data, etc.) and that, again, translates to improved productivity due to higher efficiency in how people use their time. Yes, it requires a little adjusting to "the new way" of doing things, but spend a couple days actually using it and trying to use XP instead will feel like using a slide rule instead of a graphing calculator.

Believe it or not, all those UI changes on the desktop are a lot more than just eye candy. Aero Snap (snap windows to fill exactly half the screen with a quick click+drag or a key chord) makes multitasking or comparing / combining data tremendously faster. That's a very significant productivity boost for many types of work - it's pretty close to turning each monitor into two, and I expect most /. users are famailiar with the benefits of multi-monitor setups - and it very quickly becomes reflex to the point that, again, trying to use XP is purely an exercise in frustration. You may claim that XP "makes sense" but if you haven't actually used a more productive UI, you won't know what you're missing!

As for your "personally" bit, that's absurd. Binaries built on Win7 work on whatever platform you target them for, most certainly including XP (you can be damn sure MS doesn't run its build machines on XP...) and of all the supposedly technical reasons I've heard for not switching, that's most likely the most boneheaded. If that is representative of your understanding of software development, I hope to hell I never have to use any software you

Re:Great advertisement

[ImprovOmega]

XP's support for SSDs is practically nonexistent (it treats them like any other block device, leading to terrible decreases on performance over time).

You generally make good points, but I wanted to address this one. Whenever I build a Windows XP image here at work, I always format the box with Win7 PE first, with an align=1024 on the partition to set it on a megabyte boundary. Conveniently, this fixes the boundary issue that one would typically experience with SSD's. You're right that WinXP is not natively aware of how to properly handle SSD's, but the fix is fairly trivial and, at least in the enterprise, something that any competent image builder should have fixed long ago.

Re:Great advertisement

[cbhacking]

That's a good point, but it doesn't really solve the SSD problem. TL;DR: Win7 supports the TRIM command, which tells solid-state storage when supposedly-valid data is no longer required. Without this command (which XP lacks), SSD performance degrades rapidly over time under real-world usage.

The issue is that Flash storage doesn't actually support modifying a portion of a data block; it instead reads the entire block into volatile memory, modifies one portion of it, and then writes it back to persistent storage. Since each block of the persistent storage has a limited number of writes, the write usually occurs onto a fresh, unoccupied block. (Obviously, the SSD controller needs to maintain a mapping between the logical address of the written data, which didn't change, and the physical block that is storing it, which did change.) This is called wear leveling, and it is vital to the health of Flash storage. In its basic form, it works just fine up until the point that that the entire storage has been written to. At that point, the SSD starts re-using the blocks that it (at one point) had data in, but then needed to modify that data (and remember that "modify" can be any kind of write, including things like changing filesystem metadata or writing a new file). Meanwhile, the blocks of the storage that aren't getting modified sit there, static.

The problem occurs when a lot of data is deleted. The OS now knows that addresses 0x10000000 through 0x70000000 are free for use. However, the SSD doesn't know that. Since a file deletion only consists of removing the node in the filesystem, the data is allowed to remain because, on a magnetic disk, there's no need to clear it. However, if an address in that range of old deleted data - say, 0x20000000 to 0x20000100 - becomes highly volatile, the SSD now has a problem. It can't overwrite any of blocks that are storing the rest of the deleted data, because it thinks that the data there is still valid. Instead, it must copy the entire block where there the logical address of 0x20000000 is currently located and write it to a new location (many, many, many times) without ever overwriting data that is actually deleted. Instead, that highly volatile block ends up being written repeatedly to a relatively small number of physical blocks, wearing down their longevity.

In the worst case, you could end up with a filesystem that is 99% free space, an SSD that thinks it is 99% full, and one block on the SSD that keeps geeting written to the few locations that aren't being used to store "valid" data on the SSD. That's not a realistic case, but it's an extreme form of the real-world typical usage of storage on workstations. There's usually a large amount of unimportant (deleted) data being stored on the SSD, not linked to by anything in the filesystem but consistently maintained intact by the drive controller because the OS wrote to those addresses once, and might, at some point, ask to read them again. This both slows down the SSD and lowers its useful life.

The solution is the TRIM command, which tells the SSD that a range of logical addresses (which the drive controller will map to physical blocks) are no longer holding important data, and can be freed up for wear leveling (without even the need to read in the data that they currently contain before overwriting it). Win7 uses TRIM whenever data is deleted, meaning that the SSD and the OS both have the same idea as to how much of the storage is available for overwriting. So long as the storage doesn't get overly full (and SSDs reserve a portion of their capacity so that they always have somewhere to write to, even once blocks start going bad, without appearing to lose capacity), the SSD will remain highly performant.

Re:Great advertisement

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow... long reply from somebody missing the point completely. Most people do NOT need more than 4GB of RAM; most people wouldn't know the difference between a normal and a solid state drive if their lives depended up it. Most normal people (i.e. not many of us reading this) want computers to perform a simple set of tasks - as time goes on, that list becomes larger and more complex, but there is still a vast number of people who are perfectly happy with computers that were last considered state-of-the-art a decade ago.

Microsoft has reached market saturation - the only way they can continue to earn money is to convince a sizable minority that they must upgrade every few years. If they manage to swing it, the subscription model will be a lifesaver - guaranteed income stream for minimal work.

They are expanding into tablets after seeing Apples (and more recently, Google's) success in that field - totally missing the fact that the table market will also reach saturation, and a new player at this stage needs something better than "Look! It's almost as good, and costs almost as much!"

Dear Microsoft,

[sootman]

Do you need a bigger hint that your OSs have become WORSE in recent years, not better?*

Keep that page as a template -- you'll be saying the same thing about Windows 7 in a decade if you continue in the direction you're going with Windows 8.

* yes, I know -- more stable, more secure. But the parts that people SEE and USE is what's sucking.

XP

[the eric conspiracy]

Well, I like Win 7 because it has nice 64 bit support, something that XP never really managed well.

Otherwise I haven't seen any other particular benefit, and in fact a lot of pain associated the MS upgrade treadmill and their business model of churning the user base as fast as possible.

So yes they can sod off.

IF my computer dies, then I will upgrade.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have told our IT dept that the machine I have had since 2008 is just fine for the work I do, and XP is fine too. So I have asked they keep their upgrades for me until 2014 when XP is no longer supported, unless my machine wakes up one morning and dies. We try to have a 3 year cycle, but I told them to skip me. I have even told them to keep Office 2007 and higher off it, since it is just a pain in the brain to try to figure out where they hid all the services. And the Ribbon is so foul that I want to live without it as long as possible.

So, I have become a Ludite, that formerly couldn't wait to get the next great thing. I used to be our company's Network Administator and came to hate "upgrades".

I do use Windows 7 at home on my personal machine and have acquired a likely for it.
Windows 8 though has nothing to attract me.

Just works

[EmperorOfCanada]

I have largely left Windows behind but I find that when relatives hand me their Windows box to fix that Windows XP is easier to set right. Just all those little things like the serial number having a much higher chance of working. I find (especially with Windows 7) that I put the correct version DVD in and it rejects the MS serial number that is glued to the box. Then it goes downhill from there.

Then if I have to install any corporate crap like Citrix that it has an inversely proportional ratio of functioning properly to version beyond XP.
Lastly I test my own stuff on Windows by either compiling the program occasionally on windows or running my web apps on IE in a VM. Again the XP VM tends to be speedy and small. Windows 7 tends to be cranky in a VM so even though I am just running it for a few minutes I find it less pleasant. This is not some kind of show stopper just an observation that Windows XP is not glaringly worse than Windows 7 for basic usage.

So I would not ever recommend that someone pull Windows 7 off their machine but that some corporate type with an Office full of XP machines running just fine doubtfully will reap much reward through a huge upgrade. Personally if I were in charge of an office full of XP machines I would organically just replace dead machines with a new machine running whatever newer OS came with it. Someone might complain that supporting multiple OS versions is a cost in and of itself but if supporting multiple OS versions is a cost then your IT structure is either really really big or your IT people really suck.

Re:Just works

[Billly Gates]

That is because you are not familiar with Win 7. Not htat Win 7 is inferior. I hate XP! I used to run it and support it but I no longer have all the mouse clicks and settings memorized anymore. It doubles my time now as I have to sit and think and wait on where that setting went too.

With Windows 7 you have instant search. This is why I dislike Xp so much. Want to change the power settings? Hit the WIndows key and type power, then enter BAM! Power settings. IN XP? I think it is in the control panel somewhere?? I would have to click around to remember where.

After doing that you cringe going back on an XP box. XP is dying. Its SATA driver does not even support command queing! It is not scalable. XP is a security risk. The power settings like sleep hardly ever work and adds to energy costs. This is especially true for an office of pentium IVs. It is time to make plans to leave unless you have some aweful software or strange equipment.

In many clients I have upgraded to Windows 7 the first thing they notice is a 50% decrease in malware. The second is lower energy costs. True it could be due to some icore3 and AMD phenom II systems that sip energy and do not use 100 watts like the old ones did. Sleep support is nice that is not even enabled by default in XP.

Once newer and better .NET versions come out that are not compatible with XP it will make many more programs not work with it. Hardware acceleration with DX 11 is nice too for many programs. IE 9 for example is fluid when you go up and down on a page while IE 8 flickers and is unreadable. One of the major reasons right there why IE 9 was not backported to XP.

Re:Just works

[couchslug]

"I find (especially with Windows 7) that I put the correct version DVD in and it rejects the MS serial number that is glued to the box. Then it goes downhill from there."

It's effortless to install using the latest KMS activators and OEM serials.

Google "my digital life" for informative forums.

This is nothing new. Many Slashdotters can probably recite a Windows 98 key from memory.

Why?

[MyLongNickName]

My company has roughly 200 employees. From my perspective, I will plan to migrate off of our remaining XP machines (about 30) only because of security updates. In early 2014, I understand that security updates will cease, though I expect it will be extended. Were is not for this deadline by Microsoft, I wouldn't force the upgrade. In a corporate environment, the OS isn't terribly relevant, but the applications are. You'd be surprised how many application are still not ready for a native 64 bit environment, some niche programs that we rely on just won't work unless a 32 bit OS is emulated.

So, if Microsoft continued XP support indefinitely, I would never move. XP SP2 is the first OS Microsoft has offered that is solid and stable (just don't let users run as admin).

Re:Why?

[jbolden]

I doubt it will be extended. They've extended the date several times already.

Re:Why?

[ameoba]

When did you start expecting OSes to be stable, long-term investments that could be ignored and left running forever? Win 3.1 (1992)? Win95? Win98? Windows 2000/ME? Windows XP (2001)? XP SP1 (2002)? XP SP2 (2004)? Windows Vista (2006)? XP SP3 (2008)? Windows 7 (2009)?

You've done major upgrades countless times before - I remember plenty of instances where XP Service Packs broke backwards compatibility. If you've got too many things breaking, maybe it's because you've skipped over several major upgrade points already so, rather than being able to incrementally update broken shit (which, I might add, was likely shoddily done to begin with) you're forced to upgrade everything at once?

Vista and 7 can run in 32-bit mode, if you're really concerned. They also pretty amazing backwards compatibility management - have you even looked into Windows XP Mode?

Re:Why?

[MyLongNickName]

There is no fundamental reason that an operating system needs more than periodic security updates to remain viable. There is absolutely NOTHING that our company needs from an OS that Windows XP doesn't provide. So, from my point of view, the only reason to upgrade is because we are forced to. Why should I be required to update an OS simply because the manufacturer wants a few more bucks?

We have an app that does not work in XP mode, or at least couldn't until this year. Very legacy, specialized app... no knock on Microsoft here, just a legacy app used by a couple thousand actuaries across the country. The thing looks like it is a DOS program with a slapped on front end. Regardless, it hated running in Windows 7.

just rename windows 7 windows xp 2

[Anonymous Coward]

just rename windows 7 windows xp 2 or windows xp the good edition.

Opportunity for Linux

[gmuslera]

Even Microsoft is telling people to abandon the XP boat, Windows 8 seems to be Vista 2.0, and Windows 7 is looking like being a dead end (if you invest on it, will end pretty much like XP). If people must change and think that is not wise to go to Windows 7, well they could go to Linux, that share some of the possible objections of switching to windows 8 (training, not running some of their old apps) but having a lot of advantages (freedom, they could use their own hardware, the user interface could be more similar to WinXP than Win 8 is, safer, etc). And now native apps are less a concern, as most of usual apps work in the web.

Re:Opportunity for Linux

[El_Muerte_TDS]

If only Windows 8 would be Vista 2.0. A year after Vista was released it was quite usable, because there were finally stable drivers available. For the rest there is not that much difference between Vista and 7. Windows 8 is a completely different ballgame.

Re:Opportunity for Linux

[ibsteve2u]

For the first time - and I'm saying this from the perspective of having used Windows from before it could network - I think you're right. The GUI change of Windows 8 is dramatic enough that a user retraining effort/cost will be incurred, plus there will be a hardware cost, plus licensing costs. If you're running a shop with more than a dozen systems...no, scratch that: Everybody should seriously look at whether they're willing to continue on the path of buying new Windows stuff because Microsoft says they have to.

The big question: Is the U.S. economy going to provide us with the income to meet Microsoft's demands for expenditures? I don't see anybody doing anything about the inequitable nature of free trade; that is, I still see other countries rigging their currency exchange rates to ensure that the United States is not competitive, and I still see U.S. corporations - to include Microsoft - prioritizing "shareholder value" and the CEO's pay over the longevity of the corporation itself and America herself. Further, I still see the banks and America's HNWIs using the oil and gasoline commodities markets as the vehicle from which they can levy their own private taxes - which means the cost of living in America will continue to rise. And as America's jobs continue to go offshore, that means the ability of offshore nations to outbid America for food raised and grown in America will continue to increase.

Finally, there are plenty of efforts underway to export U.S. shale gas as well as refined fuels such as gasoline and diesel...and there are moves underway to export U.S. crude oil. What does that mean? That means we will not be able to bring manufacturing back to America by using our own cheaper energy to offset the offshore labor made cheaper by rigged currency exchange rates.

My point is stupid policies - forced oil addiction, voodoo economics, inequitable free trade, and deregulation - have decimated our manufacturing and service sectors...savaging the bottom of our tax base while cutting taxes at the top. That means we're becoming third-world; we need to - as individuals, and as businesses - look at cutting costs.

One way is getting off of the Microsoft permanent upgrade cycle. Our leaders won't save us...they're owned by the 0.01% who are getting fatter and wealthier by destroying America. You and I - Main Street - must look to saving ourselves.

Re:Opportunity for Linux

[PlusFiveTroll]

Stick a regular start menu on 7 and it's pretty much Vista 3.0. That said, I've been using 8 in the manner it's shipped so I can learn how it's going to fuck up, which the Metro does in weird and strange ways to confuse the shit out of anybody with windows experience. Other then that Win 8 runs as well as Win7. I've not had any major issues with the underlying operating system.

Re:Opportunity for Linux

[PlusFiveTroll]

Oops, meant to say, stick a regular start menu on 8...

Re:Opportunity for Linux

[jbolden]

Microsoft's fees are a tiny percentage of GDP, multiply them by 10 and they don't matter.

I agree with you that free trade hasn't worked to the US's advantages. We've allowed a system to be created where the benefits of trade in terms of prices are broadly shared but the disadvantages in terms of wages are concentrated. We've combined that with a tax system which is anti-progressive. The result is the creation of an Oligarchy.

That's easy to fix though by taxing wealth, creating a VAT and making domestic wages count against the VAT.

Re:Opportunity for Linux

[swillden]

Another thing... how is WINE doing these days at emulating the 32-bit API from WinXP? WINE always lags, for obvious reasons, but it seems likely that the support for XP apps is probably quite good. Linux might be the best option for a modern OS that runs those old apps.

Re:Opportunity for Linux

[ElusiveJoe]

As much as I love Linux, it always has at best 80% of needed functionality, 20% is missing. Years go by, new technologies and hardware are released, 80/20 rule is still true.

Re:Opportunity for Linux

[gmuslera]

The Chromebook bet is that the 100% (or pretty close to it) is not in the desktop, but in the net. If for it you just need google chrome, then have more than enough with a full Linux distro with it installed. The biggest missing point are some games, but that is not an issue for companies that have to decide to where migrate from XP.

Re:Opportunity for Linux

[gmuslera]

Unlike Windows 8 desktop, you can choose to not run Unity/Gnome 3 and pick some of the multiple alternatives available. Heck, you can run Sugar as desktop environment if you like. And you business Windows XP sofware probably will run under Wine, or are better alternatives available by now, either in the net or linux native.

Microsoft is stupid

[bored]

I went to a brand new dentist office the other day. They were running XP on their brand new xray machines.

If Microsoft were smart, they would release an XP R2, they could call it "Windows for Business" and sell if for $150 a license.

If they were feeling generous they could remove the licensed RAM limits, give it a GPT boot option (heck they don't even have to do any work, just package it with some of the 3rd party options).

Re:Microsoft is stupid

[PlusFiveTroll]

The OEM pro editions sold for $139. If they were smart they'd sell it for $599.

Re:Microsoft is stupid

[yuhong]

Any chance it was XP embedded edition? That is still available & shipping.

Yep, MS in fact will support Windows Embedded Standard 2009 based on XP past normal XP end of support. MS is able to do this because they distribute the patches using a private extranet.

Re:Microsoft is stupid

[bored]

Any chance it was XP embedded edition?

I don't believe it was. They were using it like a normal PC running a camera app, and some patient information system. Complete with a second monitor mounted in front me so I could see the pictures/xrays/etc. Pretty slick actually. I believe the start menu said XP Pro.

What licensed RAM limits? XP like other 32-bit OSes is limited to 4 GB.

Per process! Not counting AWE type extensions.

With PAE (which is turned on in later XP service packs due to DEP) the kernel can access 64GB. All the 32-bit server versions of windows since W2k support this. XP does as well if you hack the license. Its M$ FUD that you can only access 4GB of RAM in 32-bit mode with x86. Linux could do it too, and a large number of other processors (PPC for example) are also designed this way. If nothing else you can use the extra space for a disk cache.

Re:Microsoft is stupid

[StonyUK]

They did release an XP R2 for only $80. It's called Windows 8, it has the increased RAM limits you want too.

Re:Farewell XP

[Rob the Bold]

On that note, I think it would be good to say goodbyes to Windows Vista too. Windows 7 and 8 are truly better and the only OS we currently need, on top of Mac OS X. That trio is something beautiful and hard for anyone to break.

Yes, let's all celebrate a duopoly of walled gardens. That'll be grand.

I don't have/use the Windows 8 or the latest Mac OS, do Microsoft and Apple have an application approval requirement now, a la iOS? That would certainly keep businesses that rely on home-grown software away.

Payback is a bitch, baby!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Oh, all those days they spent increasing the switching costs of their customers. How many Vice Presidents wrote in their annual review, "I did this clever thing to thwart our customers from Windows. Made lock in more secure. Now the vendor lock is stronger than ever!".

One trivial example: How many gaggled, "I introduced a space in all the important and default folder names. All those geeks trying to use cygwin to run shell scripts have to redo their scripts to quote their path names. ha! ha!! haa! Their support cost goes up. Our customer switching cost goes up. Our lock is getting stronger!"

And finally, they find their customers are unable to get out of XP to Win7!!!

Serves them right! Pay back is a bitch baby! You deserve it. All I got is that unspellable German word, schadenfreude or something.

Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 years!

[Sycraft-fu]

Seriously trying to whine about MS requiring people to occasionally upgrade their OS is rather stupid. They support their OSes for quite a long time, 10 years is the standard support but some are extended (like XP). That is pretty damn good, rare you find other OSes with support that long.

So XP is now coming to an end of that support. You can upgrade to 7 or 8, which have guaranteed support until 2020 or 2023 respectively.

Oh, and Windows 8 works just fine on older hardware, as does Windows 7 (yes we've tested it at work).

Enough with the silliness.

Support & New Hardware

[Hatta]

If you don't use Microsoft's support, and you don't plan on buying new hardware any time soon, there's no reason to switch.

Kinda like

[Sparticus789]

So it's like saying "Stop driving that 1965 VW Bug, you should upgrade to the brand new Pinto!"

Re:Kinda like

[Green Light]

The Ford Pinto was an awesome car! Well, except for that whole exploding fireball thing...

Corporations going to Windows 8 on PC's? Dream on

[sasparillascott]

Companies are very conservative when it comes to embracing Windows versions, for the most part, most big companies just didn't do Vista at all. Think large corporations will go to a small touch screen (phone and tablet) focused UI based version of Windows (where Metro applications are full screen only) just because Microsoft wants to sell phones and tablets? With all the associated costs there. Dream on Microsoft.

Microsoft should actually give their customers what they want, instead of trying to shove stuff down their throats cause they think their buyers have no choice. Microsoft why not just charge users $5 a year for further XP security updates...they'd make a ton of money as XP is still close to 45% of all the systems out there.

Why...just why?

[saveferrousoxide]

Why Windows 8? Windows 7 is a worthy successor to XPSP2 or maybe even SP3. Its interface is roughly similar (in that you'd be able to fumble your way around) and its interface is actually designed with a desktop in mind. I don't get why MS hemorrhages R&D money rather than milking perfectly good cash cows.

<rant>Why M$ is so determined to force Windows 8 down everyone's throat when people are just starting to get used to 7 is just mind boggling (aside from the obvious, and perhaps only, reason of making more money). I think people would take MS more seriously if they treated their products with appropriate timelines. We don't need a new OS every two years. We (pronounced /I/) barely want a new IDE, DB, or Business Suite (Office) every 2-3 years, but at least those are giving the users new and cool stuff most times (though VS2012 is a little short on that).</rant>

The Best is the enemy of the Good

[GerryHattrick]

Six PCs with licensed XP in this house which couldn't now run Win7. One more offline Libretto with 98 (kitchen, favourite game only) and one putrid netbook with extra memory and mysterious Win7. Several have Linux on Wubi for fun, but it's not much fun you know. XP is here to stay, whatever Microsoft prefers. Win8 is surely for laughs only.

Re:Farewell XP

[mcgrew]

However it's time to update to Windows 8!

It's raining here in Illinois, how's the weather there in Redmond? W8 is, from what I've read, NOT an upgrade in any way. If you're upgrading from XP, upgrade to W7. That is, if the hardware is powerful enough to run it.

I think it's borderline criminal to not support an OS until the last computer running it is in a landfill. If the engine in your '57 Chevy blows up, you can still get it repaired and replaced. If MS didn't write such buggy software, it wouldn't have to be supported. Security updates are only to fix the developer's fuckups. MS should be forced to support all the software they've been paid for that's still in use.

Navy finally going to Win 7

[jfdavis668]

We are finally transitioning to Windows 7 (and IE 8) in the US Navy. A lot of the delay was caused by people fighting tooth and nail not to change from XP. These are not tech savvy people, and they fight any change which may impact their work. As long as their system is working, they don't want anyone to touch it. I see the same with commercial companies. Leave well enough alone.

Re:Navy finally going to Win 7

[jader3rd]

As long as their system is working, they don't want anyone to touch it.

Unfortunately these people only see the end user interface, and don't understand the backend at all. With the insecurities of XP of XP they don't understand that what they have works, until it doesn't.

Yep, time to upgrade (not necessarily to Windows)!

[Dakiraun]

I'm not surprised that a lot of folks are still on XP - at my university (where I work as a NOC network admin), the majority of the Windows machines are still XP. XP is simply what was put on older machines, and then a few years back with everyone hating Vista, new machines that had it were back-rev'd to XP Pro. Newer machines are mostly coming with Windows 7 Pro, however, a considerably number of people are installing alternate OSs on them alongside or to replace Windows 7. So far, exposure to Windows 8 has been 100% negative (the only time I ever recall seeing staff completely of the same opinion), so I don't see it ever catching on at all.

So yes... come April 2014, like or not, XP will be dead, and businesses will have to get off of it. They just don't necessarily have to stick with Windows for whatever they install instead.

Well given that is isn't MS's job to write drivers

[Sycraft-fu]

No it really isn't MS's problem. Basically hardware vendors are responsible for driver support. They are welcome to support whatever OSes they like. Many vendors discontinue support for old OSes with new hardware. Since people with old OSes don't tend to get new hardware, they find it not worth their while to spend time working on it.

Same deal with software. For example Cakewalk has discontinued XP support with Sonar X2. Since it is nearing EOL, they don't feel it worth their while to test their new software on an old OS.

If you want a company that updates their OS forever, well good luck with that unless you are willing to pay a hefty service contract. Even then you will probably discover the updates will be little more than bug fixes, and if you want support for new hardware they'll require you to update to a new version.

They're late to the party on this one

[g051051]

I've been telling people to get off of Windows XP since 2001!

Re:Because it's not an investment.

[r1348]

The return is to keep your damn business rolling.
Those XP boxes will grind to a halt one day, and who will take the blame?

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[0123456]

Except the netbook I bought in 2010 came with XP. So it only gets four years' support.

Not that it matters since I wiped Windows and installed Linux instead, but XP was for sale until very recenlty; the only reason you can claim it was supported for a long time is because it was for sale for a long time, unlike the new compulsory-upgrade-every-two-years cycle.

Linux? Backwards compatible?

[Viol8]

"and its backwards compatible to 1991."

For most C source code? Yes

For most statically compiled binaries (assuming you have a.out support enabled)? Probably , though some kernel ABIs have changed.

For dynamic binaries (which is most of them)? Dream on. Sometimes they don't even work between one minor version update of a distro and the next due to library updates.

So no, linux isn't the magic bullet in this regard. To give MS credit , they do do backwards compatability quite well, though how long that'll last now win8 is on the block with Metro apps is anyones guess.

Re:Linux? Backwards compatible?

[serviscope_minor]

For dynamic binaries (which is most of them)? Dream on.

Viol8, I have a dream! In my dream, you can take all the dynamic dependencies with you.

Oh.

That's not a dream, it're real life. It's also the way it is done on windows, with each program carting around a bunch of DLLs, by the way.

How do you think the generic, pre-compiled and decidedly non static programs like firefox, openoffice and matlab work on everything?

Re:Linux? Backwards compatible?

[jimicus]

Probably by providing specific versions of the libraries they depend on.

A quick look at Firefox for Linux suggests I'm right:

  - libmozsqlite3.so - Oooh, I wonder what that could be? Not SQLite, by any chance?
  - libnss3.so - Network Security Service libraries. Most Linux distributions would already include this anyway.
  - libssl3.so - More SSL stuff. Would usually be in the same package as libnss3.so.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this - indeed, it's exactly what applications on Windows and OS X have been doing for years. But lots of Linux distributions aren't really devised with that in mind, mainly because it becomes an absolute pig to keep your software up to date if an issue is found in a library.

Re:Linux? Backwards compatible?

[jbolden]

Not long. Part of the clearly stated goal of Windows 8 shift is to get away from the Win32 / COM stuff and force updates to older .NET stuff. Assuming they stay on track the "upgrade treadmill" will be getting much faster, more like Apple. Since the change to .NET Microsoft has been looking for ways to decrease their compatibility burdons / legacy with fragmenting their platform. So far they've leaned towards being cautious. Today they don't think they have that luxury anymore and need to move faster.

Re:Linux? Backwards compatible?

[Viol8]

"That's not a dream, it're real life. It's also the way it is done on windows, with each program carting around a bunch of DLLs, by the way."

Good luck getting a modern version of firefox running on linux 1.x with the version of glibc that came with it!

Hint - firefox only comes with its own specific .so's, NOT generic system ones.

my company just switched from XP

[KernelMuncher]

I work in finance and our company just made the transition from XP to 7 this summer. And that only happened because we were upgrading our hardware which happens every 3 or 4 years. As to the ancient machines being discussed in the thread that are still running XP, I'd be worried about the hard drives going bad. Forget the OS, the hardware doesn't last forever !

Re:my company just switched from XP

[WuphonsReach]

That's pretty sad if you're upgrading every 3-4 years still.

We built our own dual-core desktops back in 06-09 time period. Two of them have failed in that time, but due to bad caps on the motherboard (which a simple MB swap took care of).

All of them were dual-core, 2GB RAM, WinXP, around 2GHz. This year, we're upgrading them all to 4GB RAM, Win7 and putting SSDs in.

Which, barring more capacitor plague, means the next physical upgrade for them will be in 2016 or later.

(The "power" users get newer, quad-core CPUs and 8GB+ of RAM.)

Re:my company just switched from XP

[PlusFiveTroll]

Generally mirroring the old hard drive to a new one solves the old drive problem. Also fixes a lot of the speed issues, being that new hard drives or even SSD's are much faster. Many companies are pushing the hardware replacement cycle even longer. Where it used to be 3 years, now 5 or 6 years isn't out of the question with decent hardware. Unless there is a significant change in software, the multicore, multigigahertz computers were pushing out now should be good for a decade.

That said, I've moved most my clients to Win7 so we can standardize the support and use SSDs.

Re:my company just switched from XP

[Improbus]

We still haven't replaced the Pentium IV Windows XP machines I installed for my company back when I started in the IT department ... 10 years ago. I work for some cheap bastards.

A problem with closed source...

[jd659]

A problem with closed source systems is that if the company decides that it's not in its business interest to support some old but popular software, NO ONE ELSE can offer such support. Even if there's a demand for the continued support and other people willing to offer it, the business opportunity is not there since Microsoft controls the market. The more Microsoft pushes people off some platform, the harder everyone should consider some alternative solutions.

Besides, what support are we talking about here? If 11 years after Windows XP was released is not enough to fix the glitches that were made during the development, how long enough is enough? Twenty year to fix the bugs?

Win 7, sure. Win 8? Nope.

[nighthawk243]

We're starting to Migrate to Windows 7 where I am at. Windows 8 is too untested with our systems to even consider it.

Plus anyways, you know how much of a pain in the ass it is to tell end users where something is at without the safety of the start menu to fall back on?

Re:Why is a microscope online in the first place?

[Tridus]

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.

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[dywolf]

If it ain't broke, don't fugg with it.

Sure!

[sqrt(2)]

Sure thing, MS. Pay for our new hardware and our office will gladly upgrade.

We won...oh, noes!!!

[hyades1]

Microsoft should quit trying to replace XP and build on its success. Tens of thousands of small businesses use ancient, outdated computers which work flawlessly with their ancient, outdated peripherals. XP is all they want or need. For example, what use does a small garage have for a modern computer? Office 2007 meets their business needs. Dial-up internet access is enough to keep them in touch with customers and suppliers. They might still generate their bills on a dot matrix printer with one of those old typewriter ribbons.

It's a good bet a lot of places like this have been replacing worn out machines with ones from home that were rejected by their teenage kids. I know one garage that's still running on Pentium 3's. The owner has no interest whatsoever in changing.

Microsoft could leverage a lot of other products by going out of its way to serve this large, almost invisible market, because the people who own and operate these businesses have kids, and the kids are where new tech will find a ready market.

Re:Farewell XP

[drakaan]

...If the engine in your '57 Chevy blows up, you can still get it repaired and replaced...

Well, yes, but Chevy's not currently making engines for it or offering warranty support. Are you saying I should be able to take my 56 year old automobile back to the manufacturer and have them replace the carb with a fuel injection system?

Let XP die already. It's "unsafe at any speed", to piggy-back on your metaphor.

In other news

[SuiteSisterMary]

In other news, nobody here is running Red Hat 9, either.

Re:In other news

[roc97007]

Right, but I bet you still have a server running RHEL 5. And I'm pretty sure Red Hat isn't in a panic for you to switch to 6.3.

Re:In other news

[SuiteSisterMary]

What does not upgrading a 5 year old OS have to do with running a 10 year old one?

Red Hat Linux didn't even exist when XP was released. Now they're on version 6. Obviously, one is intended to upgrade.

Re:In other news

[roc97007]

What does not upgrading a 5 year old OS have to do with running a 10 year old one?

It's not really a matter of years. The issues are the same. Is it necessary to upgrade? What does upgrading buy you? What are the likely issues with upgrading?

We've stopped our (outsourced) Linux support team from upgrading RHEL unnecessarily. They would do this as part of the regular patch cycle, and we found that (a) often this would bring us out of certification compliance with the application, (b) in the case of burn-it-to-the-ground-and-rebuild, we'd always be missing a dozen system settings and necessary packages. (And yes, we do have a build template. It doesn't help.) and C, the various support groups don't do a good job communicating with each other, and often find themselves out of supported alignment with their various system packages. Which often leads to scenarios that would be hilarious were they happening to someone else.

Red Hat Linux didn't even exist when XP was released. Now they're on version 6. Obviously, one is intended to upgrade.

Intended by whom?

Sure, there are reasons to upgrade. Features or bug fixes you really need. That certification matrix mentioned above, has a minimum certified version, and you don't want to get too close to that. But upgrading every release? That puts you in a permanent state of Upgrade Hell, and I don't know about you, but I have better things to do.

When we *do* upgrade, it's usually to the most recent version certified for the application, -1 minor revision. Which means we routinely jump over a bunch of interim releases. This is usually accompanied by a major app release and/or a hardware refresh, because if you're going to be in hell, you might as well spend the time in the most roasty part, and get it over with.

In the case of migrating off XP, there really is no need. XP still works, no Windows XP instance is outward facing and they're all behind a series of firewalls, and XP still works. When you have six thousand workers running apps who don't give a crap what the OS looks like as long as their app works, you mess with that at your peril.

Now, caveat, a development environment may be different, if you're developing Windows applications. (Our development environments don't do that, and they all still work on XP.) But for people for whom Windows is not an end in itself, XP is still fine.

Re:In other news

[roc97007]

PS: Mind you, I would never have said this about any previous release of Windows except perhaps 2000, which is still in use (twelve years after release!) in a few environments where it still does the job. When those boxes are finally retired, the replacements will probably run 7. They will almost certainly not run 8.

Re:In other news

[Culture20]

Actually, Redhat Enterprise Linux is on version 6, but it's kind of like version 15 because there were 9 versions of Redhat Linux before RHEL.
RHEL 3 (released in 2004) has an end of extended life of 2014-01-30.
FYI, RedHat Linux 1 was released in 1994, well before XP.

Re:In other news

[SuiteSisterMary]

By that logic, you have to go back to at least windows 1, if not even dos.

Re:Farewell XP

[interkin3tic]

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.

Yea

[Chrisq]

We are upgrading to Windows 7 as I write this. We fully expect to skip 8 the same way we did Vista

Re:Yea

[roc97007]

We aren't exactly upgrading to 7. All legacy machines will still run XP, because there's really no reason to upgrade them. New machines will run 7. This decision was only made after an extensive pilot program to make sure 7 would run everything important to the business. 7 passed. We are fairly certain that 8 will fail.

Re:Yea

[cpghost]

Our over 12k machines are still running FreeBSD, and we don't plan to change that anytime soon. But there's also a couple of 600 or so PCs with XP for office folks that we are slowly updating to either FreeBSD, Linux or Windows 7. After serious evaluation, we've decided that we won't touch that Windows 8 abomination with a 10ft. pole here and plan to stay with XP and then Windows 7 as long as security updates are available. There's no need to rush.

Re:Yea

[cbhacking]

Out of curiosity, why would you expect Win8 to fail to "run everything important to the business"? In terms of app compatibility, Win8 is *much* closer to Win7 than XP is to any OS released since 2007. Most XP apps could be persuaded to run on Vista (yes, most could, contrary to the popular opinion) but it sometimes took some work (setting Compatibility modes, running as Admin, etc.). Here's the thing, though: Win7 didn't change any of that; it still treats XP software the same way that Vista did. If you think otherwise, it's due to the software vendor releasing fixes for the broken shit that XP let them get away with, nothing more. By the time Win7 came out, many developers had done this, so Win7 was seen as more compatible than Vista. In reality, in terms of legacy code, they're the same. Win8 is the same thing again, with full compatibility with Vista and Win7 apps and the ability to run anything that they ran, even if it was originally targeted for XP or even something older. The only app compat issue that I'm aware of with Win8 - and I've been running it on one of my boxes (a convertible tablet) for over a year - is that just as Win7 no longer includes really old versions of .NET out of the box, Win8 no longer includes any version of .NET prior to v4 out of the box. They can, of course, be installed (and the OS will offer to do this automatically if needed).

Now, if you claim that the new UI will fail to pass your extensive pilot program, you might have a point because that actually is different from Win7 (less so than many think; I spend almost all my time in the Desktop, and launch programs using the Start search the same as I do on my Win7 boxes). The app compat isn't going to be an issue, though.

Re:Yea

[roc97007]

Um, yeah, this isn't really about Vista. It wasn't compatibility that stopped us moving to Vista. It was mostly because it's UNNECESSARY. The OS is just a program loader and a manager of resources. Say it with me please: The OS is not an application. Now, as the OS gets more mature, changes are made to the work environment, compatibility with devices, new interfaces, and so forth, most of which aren't interesting in the enterprise world, where ops personnel log on and run three or four apps and that's it. Sometimes just two apps: Email and browser. Or Email and 3179 emulation. Or Email and CIS app. These people don't need or want a new OS -- they want to be able to do their job unhindered by whether their windows have rounded corners or what tiles are.

We didn't migrate to Vista because (1) we did not need to, and (2) there is no 2.

Now, the fact that Vista was having some issues -- performance, speed of file transfers, compatibility with existing hardware, and all that, helped the decision along. Not to mention, changes in the GUI, which OS-philes think are so wonderful, are actually a detriment in Customer Service, in a depot, or anywhere where people need to get routine work done. Not to mention having to re-certify all mission critical applications.

And so, new equipment arrived with Vista Home, and was re-imaged with the corporate copy of XP Pro, and everyone had the same environment, everything worked and was administrated the same, and we could get work done.

When the decision was made to upgrade, 7 was mature, and experiments showed that Windows 7 Pro's XP compatibility was sufficient that minimal things had to be done to get it to work in the corporate environment.

And even THEN, there was and will not be a mass upgrade to 7. Why? See (1) above. Rather, the upgrade to 7 is a gradual thing, with new hardware gradually replacing the old, reimaged with the corporate copy of Win 7 and all the settings that make it work for us.

And this condition will continue until it's impractical to continue any more. And WE get to decide what "impractical" means, not Microsoft.

And so, current plans are to skip 8. There are arguably various reasons for this, including none of our stuff being qualified for the-gui-formerly-known-as-metro, having to field a new set of hardware requirements, and having to retrain users and admins on a new version of the OS. Even if you think this is all trivial, it is still work.

But for the MAIN reason, the PRIMARY reason why we are not migrating to 8, see (1) above. The rest is fine for water cooler discussions, but this is a sufficient reason in and of itself.

Re:Yea

[cbhacking]

You missed the point. The reason I brought up Vista was that you seemed to be under the impression that there was an app compat issue with win8 (according to an admittedly somewhat strict parsing of your claim that "an extensive pilot program to make sure 7 would run everything important to the business. 7 passed. We are fairly certain that 8 will fail.") It was to contrast the popular opinion (that Windows Vista, or Windows 8, are incompatible) with the truth (that all PC builds of NT 6.x have the same app compatibility).

If your point was not that you expect Win8 to be incompatible with your software, you may want to take more care in how you phrase your predictions regarding it. As it is, it appears that you are spreading FUD, presumeably intentionally (since you appear to speak from a position of knowledge on the subject). I can sertainly understand businesses choosing to only upgrade their OS every 6 years or so, instead of every 3 (the latter being approximately the gap between Windows versions). I can somewhat understand the confusion over the new UI (I honestly find the Charms bar to be a bigger change than the new Start screen, since the way I use it the Start functionality has had almost no change at all). The hardware requirements part is pure bull - Win8 has lower requirements than Win7 - which reinforces my belief that you either really don't know what you're talking about or are intentionally spreading FUD.

As for "we did not need to", for sufficiently strict definitions of "need" you probably didn't need to use anything newer than NT4. Obviously, there are advantages to not using a 16-year-old OS, but there are also advantages to not using a three-year-old OS. It's up to each individual or organization to decide when those advantages make upgrading worthwhile, and it's not my place to attempt to convince your organization to chose a specific point. However, as a fellow member of this community, I *will* ask you to avoid the dishonesty (be it intentional or otherwise).

Re:Yea

[roc97007]

Tell you what; let's meet back here in a year, and compare notes.

New Headline

[darkpixel2k]

Headline should read: Microsoft urges business to give them more money

Another unused example for open source

[fikx]

Would someone PLEASE run an ad campaign that uses this to push open source? This is one of the main reasons source code should come with the software you buy: you're not tied to one vendor. (and no, I don't think the source should be in the wild/public in every case...but the source should be part of you get when you put down money)
I'm always disappointed that someone doesn't put out a matching message to business when MS pushes this: "you know how MS is pushing you to mess with all your PC's again? If you had the code along with the software, you could hire another company to keep XP running/patched for you"
Just always seems like a missed opportunity...

Re:Another unused example for open source

[Culture20]

you know how MS is pushing you to mess with all your PC's again?

FOSS operating systems aren't going to fix that problem. Even RHEL WS, CENTOS, SLED, and Ubuntu LTS make you upgrade sooner than 10 years. I suppose you could pay out the wazoo to get someone to fork them and backport patches forever, but that's a losing game too. A better phrasing might be

you know how MS is pushing you to pay for all your PC's again?

But management already does that for MS Office and Visio and Acrobat and Creative Suite, etc. An extra $X per machine for a site license of Windows 7/8 is a drop in the bucket. Trying to explain to them that Open/LibreOffice and GIMP/pdfedit/etc can satisfy 99% of use-cases falls on deaf ears a lot.
maybe

you know how MS has you locked in to only using MS products again?

To which their response is: "Yeah, we're already locked in. Tell that to some startup companies so they don't make the mistakes we did." or "Huh? It gets the job done. What's your angle?"

Re:Another unused example for open source

[fikx]

"FOSS operating systems aren't going to fix that problem. Even RHEL WS, CENTOS, SLED, and Ubuntu LTS make you upgrade sooner than 10 years. I suppose you could pay out the wazoo to get someone to fork them and backport patches forever, but that's a losing game too. A better phrasing might be"

On this, I've always been curious: Wouldn't your average company pay through the wazoo (to a third party or in IT budget) if it meant they could keep their old apps, infrastructure and the same look and feel for their users? I always think it's the same money either way: pay MS as opposed to pay for the code maintenance, but it's all theory to me since I know of no concrete facts to say it is the same.

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[yuhong]

Yea, end of sales do not matter under the MS support lifecycle. What matters is when this version was released and when the next version was released. MS guarantees Mainstream Support for at least 5 years after this version was released and at least two years after the next version was released and Extended Support for five years afterwards. This is how the April 2009 date for end of Mainstream Support for XP was calculated (Vista was released in January 2007).

But of course they do

[roc97007]

How else can they sell new copies?

I'd much rather see...

[roc97007]

...microsoft convince the various manufacturers that are still embedding Windows 98 to switch to... durn near anything released in this century.

Re:Farewell XP

[DeathFromSomewhere]

Maybe you should actually try Windows 8 before ranting about it. There is a lot more to it then just the metro stuff.

For those who can't ditch XP

[TheDarkener]

Can your apps run in Wine under Linux? This might be a very feasable "workaround". I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet.

Re:For those who can't ditch XP

[cpghost]

In our case, when it's not simple office stuff that IS replaceable or WINEable, many of those apps use XP drivers to access specialized hardware. Wine doesn't adequately support the Windows Driver Model to be a serious replacement in this field.

Re:For those who can't ditch XP

[Billly Gates]

There are workarounds but companies are lazy and do not want to worry about it. Citrix is a big one. NO wine is not a replacement in a real production environment.

Re:Sure, this'll happen

[gfxguy]

After reading a story about how much wasted time and money there is in trying to develop and maintain web applications that are compatible with IE, our manager told us to ignore it and recommend browser upgrades to our clients who had problems. I couldn't believe it, but hey, I won't complain about it either.

The Microsoft OS Business Model

[zifn4b]

Lets have a look back in time at the history of Microsoft. Windows XP was the first stable version of Windows that was targeted at a typical end-user. Yes, yes, there was Win 2K Professional but it was targeted at business. Windows XP was a very attractive choice for those migrating from Windows 98/ME that were notorious for crashing at least once daily. And that was the incentive to upgrade. The operating system didn't crash repeatedly.

Once XP was released, Microsoft really dropped the ball on providing incentives to keep upgrading at a premium price. If anything Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 are like Plus Packs. They are just adding (mostly useless) new features that no one needs. They created an artificial restriction that in order to play games on the latest Direct X you had to be running the latest version of Windows. This was quite a departure from the older Direct X versions.

Microsoft would be better off selling the Operating System separate and letting people purchase the features they want a la carte. That pretty much would eliminate all of this nonsense. If the features really are worth paying for (which most of them aren't) then they would be able to support the feature on multiple versions of the operating system. Novel concept! Why does there need to be a monolithic operating system will all the bundled crap on it?

Re:The Microsoft OS Business Model

[WuphonsReach]

Vista was a disaster (lack of drivers, new security restrictions), but Win7 is pretty nice. There's enough new stuff in the Win7 UI plus improved security that it's actually a nice upgrade over WinXP.

Win8, OTOH, is looking like garbage with its entirely new UI approach that is confusing as hell.

Re:The Microsoft OS Business Model

[DanFelixPierce]

Microsoft's mistake was waiting too long between major OS updates. Starting with Windows 1.0, Microsoft released a new version every 2-3 years. Windows XP came out in October 2001. But Vista didn't come out until Jan. 2007. This allowed XP to become well entrenched especially in business. It was the practice at many companies that bought new computers, to downgrade Vista to Windows XP Pro. Windows 7 was a success because companies finally upgraded their computers that they had bought in 2003-2005.

Re:The Microsoft OS Business Model

[cavreader]

The majority of Windows OS stability problems in the past was caused by 3rd party hardware drivers not the OS itself. Just one of the drawbacks in supporting an open hardware ecosystem. Apple went the other route and locked down the hardware in an attempt to avoid similar problems.

Re:The Microsoft OS Business Model

[jbolden]

Reread your post. It basically says that Microsoft would be better with a model where people don't pay them than one where they do. How is that better for Microsoft?

As for
Why does there need to be a monolithic operating system will all the bundled crap on it?

Because they have an entire ecosystem. And the level of technology that existed in 2000 is not the level of technology that is available today. They believe, rightly, that customers would be better served by more advanced features and higher levels of integration.

Re:The Microsoft OS Business Model

[jbolden]

During that period of time Microsoft was establishing their server products as business standards. They were winning the battle for the business server market. They also were fighting off the Sun / Oracle Java initiative and had to bring out the entire transition to .NET. Longhorn took longer than expected, but mainly they didn't want to risk a major migration of the enterprise desktop when the move to Server /Java based systems was still viable.

Re:Farewell XP

[NatasRevol]

Depends on which Windows 8 you're using.

Why I still have Windows XP licenses.

[Antony T Curtis]

XP Pro has more functionality than Windows 7. To get equivalent function for which I currently use, I would have to purchase Windows 7 Ultimate. The price tag for it is more than the cost of the machines that it would be running on.

It is simply too expensive for little-to-no gain in functionality.

Re:Why I still have Windows XP licenses.

[Billly Gates]

?? What does XP do that WIndows 7 can't?

The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is some hate the new explorer. You can download a better one from www.filehippo.com, but Windows 7 is superior in almost anyway. I can't stand XP anymore.

Re:Why I still have Windows XP licenses.

[cbhacking]

OK, now I'm curious. The only thing I know of that you could do on XP Pro but can't do on Win7 Pro is enable the POSIX subsystem, and hardly anybody seems to use that. If you use Win7 Enterprise instead - which is the volume-licensed edition, and therefore what reasonably large businesses would be expected to use - then you get everything.

I'm not going to bother arguing about gains in functionality with you; you're intentionally blinding yourself if you can't see the vast improvements that things like BitLocker, instant search, Aero Snap, taskbar pinning (much better than quicklaunch), and so on provide. That's leaving aside the under-the-covers stuff like 64-bit, SSD support, ASLR and other huge security improvements, a memory manager that actually knows how to make good use of over a gig of RAM, instant resume from sleep and much faster startup and resume from hibernate, etc.

Re:Why I still have Windows XP licenses.

[ByteSlicer]

the vast improvements that things like [...], instant search

Lol. Win 7 has its strong points, but search definitely isn't one of them...

I've had many experiences where I was searching for a file that I knew existed on my computer, filling out the exact file name in the filter. Each time it took a long time to come up empty. One time the file showed up in the search result only after I manually located it.

Also: good luck figuring out the advanced search options like find by extension (sure, Google will tell you, but it should be a quick assist or at least in some local help text).

I'd rather have the XP search back (classic mode of course, not the dog), flawed as it was, at least it found what I was looking for. Luckily there are some useful 3rd party search tools to 'fix' this.

Re:Farewell XP

[Drakonblayde]

This is only an Internet problem. A person or business who runs XP can do so for as long as their system works. Oops, but XP requires activation when reinstalled, as do Vista and 7. So Micro$hit still has the ultimate control when they stop activating a version of Windows.

In the case of XP Professional, the big businesses use Volume License keys, and they do not require online activation. The final death will be when security updates are no longer pushed. No IT Director who wants to keep their job wants to be caught using an OS when that doesn't have active security updates if/when their company gets compromised. They'll run it right up until End of Support, and then life will become utter hell for the admins and IT drones who will be responsible for carrying out a massive and frantic upgrade with little time for planning, and likely virtually no time for testing.

Re:Farewell XP

[Anonymous Coward]

Any real enterprise customer's don't need activation.

Re:Farewell XP

[CanHasDIY]

...If the engine in your '57 Chevy blows up, you can still get it repaired and replaced...

Well, yes, but Chevy's not currently making engines for it or offering warranty support. Are you saying I should be able to take my 56 year old automobile back to the manufacturer and have them replace the carb with a fuel injection system?

No, what he's saying is that Chevy shouldn't be able to prevent you from installing a new engine in your '57 just because they no longer support the platform.

Which is why car analogies often turn goofy when talking about software and licenses - cars are treated as tangible, durable goods, whereas software (which, if you have a CD, is a tangible, durable good) is not treated in the same manner.

Re:Farewell XP

[CanHasDIY]

Maybe you should actually try Windows 8 before ranting about it. There is a lot more to it then just the metro stuff.

Tried it; Took over 20 minutes to boot the installer in a VM with 2 cores and 2 GB of RAM. Once I finally managed to get the behemoth installed, (and after another 10 minutes of booting), I get presented with the ugliest, most useless interface I've ever seen on a desktop machine.

Not interested.

Re:Farewell XP

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're upgrading from XP, upgrade to W7. That is, if the hardware is powerful enough to run it.

Win7 actually uses fewer resources than XP and generally runs better on limited resources than XP.

Microsoft Urges Businesses To Get Off XP

[interval1066]

Oh, I'm sure they do.

Hospitals

[Spiked_Three]

I immediately think of all the hospitals running XP. Is there ANY hospital that is not?

What do you think of your brilliant money saving management now? Just curious?

Oh I'm sure you will just continue to run XP, until your hardware dies. You then will create an entire new business of 'antique' hardware, that sells at a premium. No matter how hard you try, your brilliance is bound to cost ME a ton of money sometime in the future, idiots.

Re:Farewell XP

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 8 has the Windows Store which is a walled garden for Metro-style apps (and Microsoft seems to consider non-Metro apps to be legacy but they still work), but according to Wikipedia, enterprise installs of Windows 8 allow for non-store apps to be installed.

OS X has the Mac App Store which is not a walled garden; there just has been speculation on Slashdot that it may become one in the future.

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[interval1066]

Except windows 8 is so radical a departure from current infrastructure practices that the cost for a conversion is prohibitive for many shops. Windows 7 is cool, if you're not relying on some of the network and security apps that came standard on Windows xp.

Re:Why is a microscope online in the first place?

[jasper160]

It could easily be routed or firewalled to allow it to talk to the required systems instead of the internet.

Upgrades in 2014

[blue9steel]

Sure, we'll upgrade when the support runs out, no reason to before then. They should be careful what they ask for though, because upgrade doesn't necessarily mean moving to the newest MS OS, we're probably going to switch to a mix of OSX, SLED and Win 7.

It is also KMS

[m0s3m8n]

Don't forget that when you upgrade past Windows XP, you will have to implement a KMS server to handle your licensing. If you do imaging as a method of updating workstations, you will have to deal with this.

Re:Farewell XP

[RulerOf]

Tried it; Took over 20 minutes to boot the installer in a VM with 2 cores and 2 GB of RAM. Once I finally managed to get the behemoth installed, (and after another 10 minutes of booting), I get presented with the ugliest, most useless interface I've ever seen on a desktop machine. Not interested.

If it took you 20 minutes to load WinPE 4, which the installer is built from, then I'd go so far as to say you've got bigger problems than not liking the interface. I can't say I've tried it, but I'm pretty sure you can flat-boot (no RAM Disk) WinPE 4 with less than 100 MB of RAM. You can count the services that start up on your fingers.

Metro apps aren't very good with a keyboard and mouse. Try them with a touchscreen. For everything else it facilitates, like find-as-you-type, command execution, and so on, it's close enough to the functionality of its predecessors' Start menus that you shouldn't have a problem using it. Yes, everything is in a totally different spot on the screen, but it's not exactly difficult to figure out. For everything else, just stick to the desktop.

...and?

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:...and?

[jbolden]

Why would they expect that? As for customers not checking. I agree Microsoft in being so generous about support has encouraged this complacency. Apple by contrast with rapid and aggressive upgrades doesn't have this problem.

I'm not sure how your evidence even supports your theory.

Re:...and?

[Radical Moderate]

Vista was released January 2007, and soon after that you could not find a new PC off the shelf with XP. MS is ending support in 2014. So the last XP buyer will have had 7 years to replace his PC. Seems pretty reasonable to me.

Yes, I realize MS continued to offer XP for some time after Vista to enterprises who wanted to downgrade, but that didn't apply to retail customers.

Paddling furiously to get there....

[ElVee]

I'd be happy to get right on migrating chop chop just like MS wants. Our MS TAM keeps pushing pushing pushing, but the problem is that I have 30k+ workstations to manage. Just the act of physically upgrading the OS on each of those workstations takes plenty of time as it is. Plus, there's the matter of keeping the business going while I upgrade all those workstations.

First, however, I have to create a Win7 OS build that works on all the one-off situations I have. That a work in progress. Then I have to test the OS build on all those one-off situations. Then I have to test the bajillion apps I have and figure out what works and what doesn't. Then I have to determine what can be remediated and what has to be replaced. Then I have to get the budget for both remediation and replacement of those apps. Then I have to test, certify and package what's been remediated and replaced. Then I have to determine what will need to be certified by the various government agencies that we operate under. (We have to get governmental blessings in some cases to change hardware and/or software). Then I have to buy replacement hardware for those workstations that are below the waterline for the new OS. Then I have to schedule (and pay for) end user training on the new OS in various languages in cities all over the globe. Then I have to plan the overwhelming logistics of putting a new OS on all these workstations all over the globe in a manner that doesn't disrupt the business. In addition, I have to deliver replacement hardware to the right place at the right time with very limited resources (that is, not enough people to install so many boxen). Then I have to have the support infrastructure in place to support the inevitable issues that will come roaring in. Then I have to have procedures in place to investigate these issues on the new OS and do whatever is required to unbreak whatever is broken, whether it be sending the software back for fixes or unforeseen hardware replacements.

So, yeah, pardon me if I'm running a bit behind. I've got a lot of work to do with too few staff, too little time and not enough money. But, what else is new?

Re:Farewell XP

[Anne Thwacks]

Fantastic? That may be how you see it. I have spent the weekend helping several friends who have been exposed to Win7 for the first time, and decided they want what I have (Ubuntu with Gnome shell) instead. Leaving aside the horrendous problem of "search bars", and activation, it is particularly maddening the way you get all the popups, and files you download/save "magically" go somewhere other than where you put them.

Re:Farewell XP

[Kwyj1b0]

No, what he's saying is that Chevy shouldn't be able to prevent you from installing a new engine in your '57 just because they no longer support the platform.

According to PC World, you can still continue to activate the software. And enterprises use volume licenses that do not need activation. So I don't see the problem.

No sympathy

[Mr_Silver]

I'm amazed the number of people complaining.

Whenever I hear people moan about how they're running XP and it has been working just fine for the last ten years, I immediately think to myself that they've been lucky that they haven't needed to do part of their job for so long.

The folks running and maintaining servers or software products do an upgrade once every couple of months and you cannot do one upgrade in ten years?

Upgrading any hardware and software (not just Windows) is part of the cost of doing business, if you haven't factored it in (and after 10 years, calling the "upgrade treadmill" is a tad overly dramatic), then what forward planning have you been doing?

And if you really cannot upgrade, then maybe you should consider looking at implementing backup plans now? Because at some point, whatever you are relying on will stop working and you'll have to do something. It's not like you don't have any prior warning.

Re:No sympathy

[Mr_Silver]

You are comparing server upgrades to desktops? Really?

Why not? Upgrades are a fact of life and whilst a server upgrade might be easier to perform, they're more frequent.

Meanwhile the desktop guys have to do quite a bit more work but, on the flip-side, have ten years to prepare for it.

In short, it's work that has to be done. The only difference being that whilst the desktop guys have to contend with hardware too, they at least get ten years to get themselves prepared.

Do you think that's not long enough? If so, how long do they need? Twenty years?

Re:No sympathy

[Sir_Eptishous]

No shit!!! WTF is up with all this "XP LUV"? W7 is much more stable and easier to use. I cringe when I have to jump on any of the few remaining XP machines I have to support. Cringe...

This is like someone who just opens their closet and throws/pushes things into it and then wonders why one day when they open the closet door that a wall of crap comes falling out to bury them.

People have had how long to prepare to move off of XP? How long?

Re:Why is a microscope online in the first place?

[Attila Dimedici]

I don't know about this particular microscope, but when I worked at a pharmaceutical company the PCs connected to microscopes were networked so that the data collected on them (usually using a camera attached to the microscope) could be saved to a network drive. In addition, it allowed for users to use their network logons to access the PC, which allowed a log to be kept of who collected what data on the microscope (something that is required if the data being collected will be submitted to a regulatory agency).

Won’t anybody please think of the children?

[partyguerrilla]

But where is KDE going to steal its interface from?

Upgrade for Free?

[Techmeology]

So where are the free upgrades to Windows 7?

The options aren't appealing

[thetoadwarrior]

Windows 8 is down right appauling and even Windows 7 and that lame ass UAC crap gets in the way too often. Why should Vim, for example, be locked from using folders in it's own directory just because I'm not running as administrator? Microsoft has to realise that they got their way and locked people into their systems. Unfortunately they screwed up and locked them into specific versions and they're scared that the situtation will reach a point where any option is viable and therefore they are excluded.

That's why we've got VB6 in Windows 8. There is no other reason other than by not doing that people are left having to build from scratch and there are far better non-Microsoft solutions out there.

What about Dos, Win 2000, NT 4?

[Pengel the squib]

Our company still uses Win 2000 and NT 4 on most of their machines. Whats an upgrade?

HW + needs = !win8

[Sun.Jedi]

I've had TV's that lasted near on 20 years without any repairs or updates. My Atari 2600 works just fine as well and that is older. XP works for what I want to do, and I understand the security risks. As long as the hardware runs, my kids can hit webkinz, gmail, IM, and run whatever stupid shoot-em-up games we approve of. The other kid does all that with Fedora on even older hardware. The kids have sports and limited PC/TV time as it is. There is no need for more bloat to do what they already CAN do. (sorry MS, no $$ from me ;))

Our home PC used to be thought of as a life improving/changing device. Now its a convenient method of communication that has retained some entertainment value. I do enough with enterprise servers/storage as a career. Long gone are the days where I leave my work PC, run/drive/scamper home, "maybe" eat something, and immediately get on my home PC ... I don't know whether my use cases are typical, but I doubt I'm alone. Win8? Thanks but no thanks unilt the HW dies and isn't easily replaceable.

Still on XP at home...

[tilante]

... because my PC is a VM running under Parallels on my Mac, and I see no need to buy an upgrade for something that only runs games and a few specialty programs that don't have Mac versions until and unless I absolutely have to.

Re:Poor serial driver support

[PlusFiveTroll]

Are you using on the motherboard serial ports, how is the bios setting them up? USB serial adapters? Are these multicore machines? What are the issues you're seeing?

I know from the Linux development threads that I've read, that a lot can go wrong in multicore/multithread processes that attempt to access serial devices. Also things like power management can make port do odd things.

For the most part I don't see MS fixing the issue. Most people outside a few specialized industries are hoping that RS-232 just goes away since it drags a lot of legacy stuff along with it.

Re:Farewell XP

[TheRealMindChild]

I have installed Windows 7 on > 100 machines. We used legit keys. Honestly, I never ever seen an activation problem. The closest to it was the one workstation without an internet connection, which was easy enough to deal with.

but it would reduce risk

[Chirs]

since there is little reason for the XP VM to have full network access.

Re:but it would reduce risk

[tibit]

Ta-da. You can even leverage the firewall on Linux to only open the necessary holes etc.

Re:Because it's not an investment.

[udachny]

(same person, second account, the until it's about a day from now)

It's not a return, it's a cost.

Anything can happen, your building may collapse due to an earthquake or a terrorist attack. What are you supposed to do, live and work in a bunker?

If you buy a hammer and it works for nailing those nails day in and out, why should you be upgrading the handle without it actually breaking?

It's a cost, it's not an investment. Investment means that you have a reasonable expectation of a return on that investment. A cost means that you have to incur it to stay in business, but it doesn't mean you have to incur it before it becomes a problem.

You may need contingency plans in case it becomes a problem, but it doesn't mean you have to immediately address all such things, because running a business and being profitable is hard as is with the normal everyday expenses, having to deal with 'what ifs' is left to be a distant 100th on the list.

If you work for a place where you think this may become a problem, bring it up with your management, if you have an actual argument that shows why the computers will stop working one day (I guess the bits in the DLL files will wear out), it's up to the management to decide whether to spend any money now or wait until it happens or do something to prepare for that problem in the future but not go full ahead with the immediate knee-jerk reaction.

You think your part is the most important part of running a business, the XP windows installation? You are way off on that.

put it behind a firewall

[Chirs]

Cheapest option is likely to just stick a consumer-grade router box with firewall in front of it.

Re:Farewell XP

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

If it isn't broken, don't fix it. XP isn't broken.

Also, we do embedded software in a liabiliy-touched arena. Now we have to requalify a whole new tool version/OS combo? Just because some ass wants us to pay another hundred dollers per workstation? Screw that.

How about we just pay the hundred ransom and keep the XP?

Re:Farewell XP

[sribe]

If the engine in your '57 Chevy blows up, you can still get it repaired and replaced.

Maybe, depends. I've got a '61 GMC and parts can sometimes be difficult to come by.

Re:Farewell XP

[shutdown -p now]

In what sense isn't Mac App Store a walled garden? It's moderated, and they force a sandbox on apps now.

Re:Farewell XP

[dialate]

Windows 98 does not require activation. XP activation can be backed up for a particular machine, and survive minor updates like a hard drive.

But, much like 98, I am sure a support community will emerge. See the Windows 98 Forever campaign . No joke, and you can run 98 today still get support, and with fairly recent hardware and some support. Recent security updates, updates so that you can run 2k/XP software, usability and reliability updates, hardware drivers for new equipment, available programs, etc.

my reason for win7

[unique_parrot]

trim for ssd (without any fuzz) and working usb3 drivers. (btw for the can't upgrade because of...: universal restore works perfect on virtual machines. just sometimes problems with the oem serial)

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[Billly Gates]

That is the fallacy it is broke. Will it read photoshop CS 7 files? Nope. Will it get security updates? Nope. Is the architecture not secure. Yep. Will it read Office 2k13 files with office 2k3? Nope. Will it read PDF files make in Adobe 12? Nope, Will its IE read HTML 5 sites? Nope. Will FF and Chrome still support it after 2014?Nope.

You know refusing to upgrade has costs. The costs externalize to the rest of us. Why should I have to learn IE 6 hacks in 2012? Why should drver makers, IT staff, developers, and everyone on the planet cater to users who refuse to upgrade and increase our costs for free? You think it is free for Dell to do QA for 3 different operating systems? What about MS?

Yes, people have been working for free doing extra stuff like IE 7 comaptiblity and making a website look shitty all for your convenience for years. The time is coming and it is time to let XP go. At some point it is not my problem but yours.

Lanlers represent!

[Anonymous Coward]

Were you that guy from Section 6 who's always going on about Linux Linux Linux in the downstairs breakroom? Hey, remember me? Tallish, skinny, crazy haircut, from the Tacnukes handhelds group? Used to always make lunch food metaphors about your OS proclivities? Hey, hey- "Not that kind of toast!"

Re:Farewell XP

[Billly Gates]

Why is that guy a troll? I mean come on!

I was wondering why he got modded down to -1. It is not flamebait to give a good reason to upgrade even if he is a new poster. Many such as myself and hairyfeet hate XP and want to kill it with Windows 7. That does not make me a troll. Just the obvious that I do not like supporting older platforms because they externalize cost and hurt innovation for the rest of us.

Re:Farewell XP

[Hes Nikke]

In what sense isn't Mac App Store a walled garden? It's moderated, and they force a sandbox on apps now.

In the sense that the walled garden has a gate (keeper) that allows you to download any app from any other source and still run that. You can't do that on the interface formerly known as metro, though you can still run classic windows apps sourced from anywhere on the Windows 8 desktop (but not on the Windows RT classic desktop).

Re:Farewell XP

[CanHasDIY]

No, what he's saying is that Chevy shouldn't be able to prevent you from installing a new engine in your '57 just because they no longer support the platform.

According to PC World, you can still continue to activate the software.

Yea, and according to my contract with Verizon, I have access to unlimited data, but we both know that's not really the case.

As for XP activation lasting beyond 2014, I'll believe it when I see it.

Still on Win2K here

[hedley]

Win2K in VMware on the lan w/a static ip. Just for Outlook(lookout) though. Many other apps have faded away from versionitis.

Corporate gives out Windows7 laptops and there are many many XP machines still that will prob never fade away as they are in lab settings hooked up to equipment.

H.

Planning the move to ..say what?

[WaffleMonster]

I don't know what is more amusing thinking businesses base their decisions on anything other than their bottom line or they would choose to "upgrade" to Windows 8.

Normally the spectre of loosing vendor support can itself be an important driver for change yet XP is soo old and soo well understood I doubt this much works anymore even when security patches stop.

If I were a hardware vendor and I knew XP is the second most popular operating system in the world the question of support becomes more rhetorical than an actual question.

My lab is listening to MSFT - we got off WinXP

[WillAffleckUW]

My lab decided to listen to MSFT.

We got off WinXP. We replaced it with Linux running on 128 core blade servers.

Thanks for the push, Worst MSFT CEO Ever Ballmer!

(and you wonder why you lost money this quarter ...)

Re:Farewell XP

[RulerOf]

Don't have one, and I'm sure as hell not going out and buying one just to try out some lame OS I have no intention of ever actually using. Not to mention, what a bullshit sales strategy - "Oh, our new system won't run on what you already own? Then just buy new stuff!"

Well, no, of course you won't.

What I'm imagining will happen here is that the software will have the capability long before the hardware does. There was a long period of time where a mouse was an optional item for a desktop computer. Economy of scale may make the same true of the touchscreen. Only time will tell, of course.

If you've got an iPad, try Splashtop's Windowns 8 remote access app. It hooks into Windows 8 through a HID driver, and gives an excellent idea of what the interface is supposed to be like.

Re:Hospitals and XP

[WillAffleckUW]

A lot of non-UI devices are running on Linux or BSD now.

Most of us code in languages that run on anything.

Re:Farewell XP

[RulerOf]

Windowns 8

Woot. I win today.

Quit your bitching already!

[gman003]

Microsoft is end-of-lifing a decade-old OS. It's already 11 years old, and will be declared fully unsupported in another two years. Which means they'll support the OS until seven years after the replacement is released.

Compare this to Apple. OS X 10.1 is the closest in age to Windows XP, and it was end-of-lifed in 2002. In fact, their most recent "supported" OS is 10.6 (Snow Leopard), which is only three years old - approximately the age of Windows *7*. And I can verify that many application vendors seem to consider 10.6 the minimum, some even 10.7.

And let's compare this to Linux. There's not enough space or time to get into every distro, so let's focus on Ubuntu, the most Windows-like distro. The oldest "supported" version is the server variant of Hardy Heron, the 8.04 Long-Term-Support release, which was released in 2008 (around the time of Vista SP1). For a desktop variant, you can only go back to 10.4 LTS, released in 2010 (around the time of W7 SP1). And those are the long-term support versions. "Regular" versions can only go back to 2011.

Come on now, guys. Microsoft does a lot of things wrong, but they've been downright saints about ditching XP, doing far better than pretty much everyone else.

Re:Quit your bitching already!

[Billly Gates]

There is a psychological different between Windows users and non-Windows users. They hate change. They are middle aged, set in their ways, and fear change more than they look at the positives of what change may bring. If they didn't have this mentality they would be more likely to get a Mac or experiment with Linux correct?

Most people who are not reactionary have went to Windows 7 or another platform already. I find it hypocritical those in IT who love technology and change all of the sudden at 35 became neophytes and fight tooth and nail with their cost accountants by the side (their old enemies) and look for reasons on why Windows 7 is really just Vista SP 2 or is just a gui change.

Translation

[kelemvor4]

Microsoft urges businesses to spend more money with Microsoft.



The funny thing about all the "love" on the net for XP these days is that it too was not great at release... I remember "XP" being joked about standing for "eXperience the Problems".

Re:Farewell XP

[jd659]

Maybe, depends. I've got a '61 GMC and parts can sometimes be difficult to come by.

The difference is that there are third party manufacturers that will be happy to offer compatible parts for your GMC as long as there's demand for them. In case of Microsoft, third parties are explicitly prevented by making any changes to the operating system (whether by EULA, DMCA, certificate control, inability to run own update server, etc...).

The 32bit versions are well compatible

[Blaskowicz]

c) it supports about 15 years worth of professional applications (some of which are not available anymore)

Good of consideration is the 32bit version of Windows 7, and maybe Windows 8 (if they didn't remove features). Old hardware such a Pentium 3 1GHz with 1GB ram can run it, most probably limited by hard drive speed, every new hardware can run it too. You still get to keep DOS virtual machine and Win16. It can do a lot of the things a computer under Windows 98 coud do ; if there's incompatible software, it most likely does't work with XP already. Compatibility is about 25 years of applications.

Corporate users: WinXP - Win8 are you kidding?

[Shempster]

If a web browser serves as a front-end to all of a large corporation's apps, I would recommend the $250ish Google Chromebooks over Win8. But only because Win8 UI is ridiculously confusing & alien to Windows users. Win8 will only accelerate enterprise IT to look elsewhere, including Google's low cost Chromebooks for its users. Microsoft should have continued refining the desktop UI, like Win7 did - Hint: should've kept desktop PC/Workstations and Laptops in mind as a priority, should've added some of the best desktop features from Linux, and kept touchscreen tablet & monitor features as a secondary amenity - not a priority. Win8 makes it appear Microsoft is in a rush to abandon Intel & AMD and PC/Workstations in general. Microsoft's Win8 is unfriendly with regards to desktop workstation user experience, and is a waste of time and money when compared to alternatives (front-ends) from Google. Microsoft had better support Win7 for the same length of time it supported WindowsXP. I won't recommend Win8 to any enterprise network.

Wal-Mart Shopper mentality

[dmpot]

If you don't budget for upgrades, you'd better either plan to be gone by then or be fortunate enough to be able to toss the whole thing.

You seem do not realize that in many industries the traditional upgrade cycle for expensive equipment is 15-25 years! So they did plan for upgrade, but that time may be 10 or more years away from now.

So if anyone has the Wal-Mart Shopper mentality here, it is those who think that the typical PC update cycle is suitable for everyone. It is not about updating PC, but updating the whole infrastructure (which relies on a lot of crappy third-party software) and re-training the whole personal to use it. It is completely unrealistic to do that every 3-5 years as you do in the IT-world...

If I tell you that you need to buy a new PC and replace all software (which you got used to) every 6 months, how would you like this idea?

Re:Wal-Mart Shopper mentality

[RabidReindeer]

If you don't budget for upgrades, you'd better either plan to be gone by then or be fortunate enough to be able to toss the whole thing.

You seem do not realize that in many industries the traditional upgrade cycle for expensive equipment is 15-25 years! So they did plan for upgrade, but that time may be 10 or more years away from now.

So if anyone has the Wal-Mart Shopper mentality here, it is those who think that the typical PC update cycle is suitable for everyone. It is not about updating PC, but updating the whole infrastructure (which relies on a lot of crappy third-party software) and re-training the whole personal to use it. It is completely unrealistic to do that every 3-5 years as you do in the IT-world...

If I tell you that you need to buy a new PC and replace all software (which you got used to) every 6 months, how would you like this idea?

I thought that was supposed to be the ideal according to the software vendors! But the IRS expects you're going to replace computer equipment every 3-5 years, which is why they changed the depreciation rules to allow for computer equipment.

Your scenario isn't hypothetical to me, though. My Windows machine came with XP welded in. I have doubts about its ability to stand the strain of Windows 7, and already am hurting because I cannot install IE9 on XP.

Re:Farewell XP

[jbolden]

Trying to Make Vista (Longhorn) a super mega OS, where they just couldn't do it, taking time away from smaller improvements.

They could have. Aero was obviously in Vista. WinFS ended up in SQLServer. Palladium wasn't technically difficult, just politically difficult.

They chickened out.

As for a lost decade. Take a look at Microsoft's server / business offering today vs. a decade ago. That's where they spent the effort.

Office 2003 can read .docx just fine

[Chemisor]

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!

Re:Office 2003 can read .docx just fine

[Billly Gates]

There are newer format versions. Word 2013 docx is not compatible with Office 2003. Eventually you will get emails with someone on the other end expecting an answer.

Re:Office 2003 can read .docx just fine

[Chemisor]

Word 2013 docx is not compatible with Office 2003.

Well, Mr. Billy Gates, perhaps you should update the compatiblity pack to support those. Or are you worried that nobody will use your Metro Office 2013 otherwise? You should be.

Re:Office 2003 can read .docx just fine

[Paracelcus]

LibreOffice http://www.libreoffice.org/
OpenOffice OpenOffice.org
Apache Open Office

All have support (to varying degrees) for .docx
With the appropriate add ons, etc

Re:Office 2003 can read .docx just fine

[qwak23]

I suppose it's time I finally came out of the closet.

I actually like the ribbon!

Re:Farewell XP

[jbolden]

MS should be forced to support all the software they've been paid for that's still in use.

Why? Why would we want to create a situation where software has to be so expensive as to fund a development team indefinitely for sale?

Even if it were free, I don't see the advantage is allowing technological stagnation. GM isn't paying for the replacement on your '57 Chevy. If you mean some sort of high priced legacy support, companies like IBM offer that on, Microsoft never promised anything of the kind. Frankly Microsoft by supporting their OSes for so long has created the belief in their customers that they are entitled to support. Microsoft should have an n-2 rule like Apple. The day Win 7 ship, XP is unsupported. n - 3 is very generous.

Re:Farewell XP

[jbolden]

Well if we are going to use that analogy.

You can free feel free to use another kernel and have programs link against the XP DLLs long after Microsoft stops support XP.

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[dywolf]

No its not broke. And you misidentify the fallacy too. The fallacy is that everyone even cares about the things you list.

Do you need CS7 files? I dont.
Do you need security updates? I dont; my lab's computers are all strictly off-network.
Secure acrchtecture? Who cares? Do you? Cause it doesnt exist (theres a concept called ORM, operation risk management, you should learn about it; basically, worry about the things that need worrying about).
Adobe12? PDF's still load fine in older versions, particularly of archived materials that are intenionally stored with compatibility in mind.
HTML5? Agan, not relevant.

You are not hte market for XP. People who care about these things arent the ones trying to hold onto XP.

I, and the electronics lab I'm in. however are EXACTLY the market that needs to hold onto XP. Legacy hardware, legacy software, crap dating from teh 60s that someone wrote an interface for years ago that worked on Win95 and still does on XP (and doesnt on Vista/7/8) and now no one even knows what the interface commands ARE anymore for that old hunk we still need to support. And we get paid good money to do so. The joys of military contracting.

Sorry pal.
It ain't broke.
It don't need fixing.
Learn to see beyond your own small world; there are more demands out there than yours and the constant latest and greatest arms race.

Re:Farewell XP

[jbolden]

Talk to Microsoft. Pay for a large support team and I'm sure they'll be happy to keep supporting you. But it ain't gonna but $100 per.

Re:mod up

[Billly Gates]

XP does not run well on modern hardware. Not what the XP loyalists would have you believe and the SATA driver is a big issue. It can't do command queing.

So the hard drive only executes one command at a time synchronous wise while the paging algorithm goes batshit in XP. It slows down an icore7 quit nicely compared to even a Pentium IV with a UMA controller. It is time to leave it behind as hardware is barely even supported on it anymore and surely not optimized.

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[dywolf]

Addendum:
but hey, MS dumping it just means there will be EVEN MORE money to be made by labs like mine or ATS or similar, who support, maintain, and reverse engineer legacy equipment.

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[Bill_the_Engineer]

That is the fallacy it is broke. Will it read photoshop CS 7 files? Nope. Will it get security updates? Nope. Is the architecture not secure. Yep. Will it read Office 2k13 files with office 2k3? Nope. Will it read PDF files make in Adobe 12? Nope, Will its IE read HTML 5 sites? Nope. Will FF and Chrome still support it after 2014?Nope.

I think you've completely misunderstand what is going on. The companies that refuse to update from XP probably have lots of workstations that work fine as is or have vertical market software that will not run on the newest Windows. Their ability to run the latest and greatest of photoshop is far removed from their requirements.

Not all businesses are web based, so don't be surprised that Windows XP's inability to run FF or Chrome after 2014 is high on their priority list either. Nor will they care that that some webmaster is worried about keeping their site compatible with IE6. The only things they care about are that the current software works, the workstations can be replaced and re-imaged with the working software, and they don't have to make a large investment in IT to support Microsoft's wishes.

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[Billly Gates]

Most businesses surely do care.

I do not give a damn about robotics and specialized equipment. I do care about trying to make an HTML 5 website work with IE 7 for free with CSSPIE javascript hacks. Newer PDF files with advanced features can't be read in older versions which are major security risks. Adobe 12 does not exist yet but will in a few years. XP will not be usable for an average office worker or person for these reasons.

If you work for military hardware I would be worried about getting hacked and someone stealing your secrets. China would love you if you work any contracts. That is a niche use case.

Sadly many who do care about these things use XP and fear change. They expect Office 2k3 to support newer versions of OpenXML in Office 2013, still expect websites to work in IE 7, and will whine when their hardware wont work. There comes a time where enough is enough and we wont support your platforms anymore as they externalize cost savings on to us.

Re:Why is a microscope online in the first place?

[hairyfeet]

Uhhhh...isn't that what VLANs are for? so you can have it ONLY on the LAN and not on the WAN? I'll admit its been awhile since I had to support a large corp as I prefer dealing with home user and SMBs, but I thought that was networking 101, don't risk the expensive specialized gear by just sticking it on the net, am I wrong?

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[Billly Gates]

So what happens if the marketing department at your employer receives a Photoshop CS 7 file? What if a vendor emails a word or excel 2013 file?

Me I am trying to start a business on the side catering to the corporate market. I just dumped IE 6 support and I am about to dump IE 7 and maybe 8 next year. That is another lost opportunity if you use my network, I wont support you. I may do a crappy craigslist like UI for IE 8. I am undecided on what to do in that regard.

We are networked and as a result we have catered to your needs for years and MS even neutered .NET 4 to support some of XPs limited feature set in final release. Those who do upgrade will expect you to do the same. Infact the reason people upgraded Office often in the 1990s was because the staff didn't want to look like asses asking to resend in word 95 format etc.

With salesforce and clouds using an up to date browser is going to be an increasing requirement too for office workers. The world is changing and leaving your platform behind. In the next coming years this will be a problem.

Warning

[viperidaenz]

Warning users of XP. Upgrade now or it will effect our bottom line. Here are some reasons we dreamt up to convince you to upgrade, even if you can do anything you need to on XP and Windows 7/8 holds no tangible benefit for you.

Re:Farewell XP

[CanHasDIY]

What I'm imagining will happen here is that the software will have the capability long before the hardware does. There was a long period of time where a mouse was an optional item for a desktop computer. Economy of scale may make the same true of the touchscreen. Only time will tell, of course.

IMO, Laptops should already come with touchscreens at this point... not really sure why they don't. Paraphrasing the intro to The Six Million Dollar Man, we have the technology...

If you've got an iPad, try Splashtop's Windowns 8 remote access app. It hooks into Windows 8 through a HID driver, and gives an excellent idea of what the interface is supposed to be like.

I don't, but I will readily admit how useful that would be... to the handful of people developing Metro Apps, anyway. Oh, and MS salespeople (although giving a Win8 usage demo on an Android/Apple tablet might not be the best way to go...)

Re:Farewell XP

[viperidaenz]

If the engine in your '57 Chevy blows up, Chevrolet will not fix it for free. They probably won't even fix it if you pay them more than you paid for the entire car. Someone else not affiliated with Chevrolet will fix it for you though.

Already trying hard

[bill_mcgonigle]

I happened to be fortunate enough this past weekened to try to reinstall an XP system from a SP2 CD (OEM). Upon installation the first thing to do was to run an update, right? (OK after ftp ftp.mozilla.org)

I found:
  Windows update failed to update anything. (404 errors that blew up the engine).
  MSN's default page segfaulted the stock IE.
  To install Security Essentials I had to first download Microsoft Installer 3.1 from the KB.
  To actually get the machine to run automatic updates, I had to download the 300-ish MB SP3 network installer from the KB, and then tip-toe though several iterations. (Dial-up users need not apply).

And this they call 'supported until April 2014'. Yeah, I imagine they're working hard on fixing these...

Re:Farewell XP

[BeanThere]

XP also took at least two service packs to become "good".

And it still looks Fisher-Pricey --- people who say XP is "good" do not mean that they've somehow come to like how it looks ... what they mean is that it overall offers reasonable performance on slightly older hardware, and that they have begrudgingly gotten used to the fact that it is so ugly.

Which happens to be the same reason businesses are slow to adopt Win7. In our small business we have multiple somewhat older laptops and desktops that are still perfectly usable computers with XP, and they are actively in use for various tasks ... but they are too slow for Win7, and there is no reason to buy new computers purely for the sake of buying new computers, that's stupid enough in boom times let alone in a recession.

XP SP2 or SP3

[manaway]

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.

Exactly. Typically, XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) was the last usable update for 1 gigabyte machines. SP3 is as reliable as it is bulky, and uses the hard drive as memory a lot unless you have 1.5 gigs or more.

Re:XP SP2 or SP3

[TaoPhoenix]

I am quite content with SP3, I have 2 Gigs of Ram and can't recall that many times when that felt like a limitation.

A buddy of mine did a pretty good build back in '06 and we added a chuck of dollars here and there for good parts, and except the hard drive might be struggling soon, it's pretty good. So except repair side, I haven't ever needed more, so I'm in the "quit pushing revenue-driven updates" crowd. I don't trust Win8. So I am trying to hold out to Win 9 to see where it all shakes out.

Re:Farewell XP

[couchslug]

"Well, yes, but Chevy's not currently making engines for it or offering warranty support. "

GM in fact DOES produce "crate motors" brand new which will bolt in with relatively little fuss, and they have warranty support.

"The heads have the conventional 12-bolt intake manifold attaching design used from 1955 through late 1980."

http://www.gmpartsdirect.com/results.cfm?singlepart=1&partnumber=12499529

Autos were a highly refined product by the 1950s, and the design of the small block is still quite sound. It powers millions of vehicles.

Re:Farewell XP

[BeanThere]

To be fair, Metro is really ugly, but one of the most useful new features of Win8 is that you can click through to the 'desktop' and get the Metro crap out the way. And the broken Start menu can be restored with some free toolbar-ware (just be careful when installing it to uncheck the toolbar crap). So to me what really matters is how it will perform compared to Win7 once the rubbish is out the way and you're back in the desktop.

Re:Farewell XP

[BeanThere]

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Re:Farewell XP

[ruemere]

Win7 does not support certain older hardware. Your fax, your trusty scanner, ye olde printer...

Regards,
Ruemere

Large company still using XP.

[the_rajah]

I work for a company with 30,000 employees world wide. I got a nice new HP i5 laptop about a year ago. It came with XP Pro and Office 2003. I'm seeing no move to "upgrade", but I'll admit that I'm not in IT so I am not privy to plans before they are announced to the world. Friends are asking me if they should be upgrading to a Win 7 machine while they still can. I tell them, Yes. I'll take a look at 8 in a couple of years when the dust has settled.

Windows XP and Office 2003 Here

[Cruxus]

Where I work, we're a Microsoft Windows XP Professional (32-bit) and Office 2003 shop; about a year or two ago, we moved from IE 6 to IE 7 and more recently IE 8. Fortunately, we also have Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome as options since we are devs. When it comes to an upgrade, there's always the question of what's the value to the Business? The newer machines fortunately have more than 2 GB RAM, but I hear there are plans to upgrade to 32-bit Windows 7 eventually, which is quite frustrating since I already run out of heap space.

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[TheSpoom]

They don't have to support it; people don't have to upgrade. Everybody's happy!

Re:Farewell XP

[Will.Woodhull]

What is wrong with putting a low overhead Linux distro on all the boxes, and continuing to run WinXP in a virtual machine? That looks like a low cost and highly secure way to go forward.

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[jbolden]

Netbook XP was specifically sold by Microsoft at the time as an obsolete OS designed to run on underpowered hardware and was a not recommended configuration that they reluctantly offered.

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[jbolden]

Windows 7 is the current OS they sell. How is that an argument for staying with XP?

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Okay maybe your not ready for the enterprise just yet.

You keep making assumptions that do not align with reality at most businesses. The marketing department is not going to send a Photoshop CS 7 file to the nurses station in a hospital. Most employees will not deal with outside vendors much. They will use a specialized program designed to work with their corporate data system.

Not everyone is in sales.

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[interval1066]

I told you. Money.

Re:Microsoft is out of their mind...

[jbolden]

Why will they need to? Lots of business deal with vendors that set terms that business don't like. I'm sure business would prefer to not have to keep paying their electric vendor month after month and just get electricity for free. I'm sure business would prefer to not have to keep paying their facilities rent. So what? Microsoft sells a product and sets the terms.

Microsoft has been unequivocal that their operating systems were limited life from the time they founded the company. During the time XP was being sold they were advising companies to get on a support plan and rent not own all their Microsoft software.

Microsoft's customers will pay their bills just like they pay everyone else's.

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[Billly Gates]

Where I work I have to deal with clients, users, vendors, and a hospital does not have a marketing department. That was just one example. Real enterprise interacts with other people who most likely at this point run newer software. It is a mild problem now but after 2014 it will be major. People use newer software and if you can't interact they will think something is wrong with the company.

You can only go so far by staying behind the competition. Eventually you need to actually spend/invest costs, not just label everything as a cost center until your assets turn to crap.

uncommon?

[multi io]

it's not uncommon to hear about people still running XP at work.

WTH? In my experience it's just starting to become not so uncommon to see people running something other than Windows XP (mostly, Windows 7) at work.

Re:Farewell XP

[Zordak]

what they mean is that it overall offers reasonable performance on slightly older hardware, and that they finally figured out that they could dump the Fisher Price interface and make it look and work like Win2K with a service pack, which is pretty much what it was, and they were okay with that because that's all they really wanted.

FTFY and so forth.

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[Bill_the_Engineer]

If we were in a tall office building and terrorist crashed our christmas party, you'd probably be that coked up salesman that gets shot because even the terrorists aren't buying your bullshit.

Do it now or ...

[iive]

Dear Business,
Please upgrade your WindowsXP to Windows7 now. You may not have that option once we release Windows8.

To People Still Running Windows XP

[beerdragoon]

Obligatory Penny Arcade comic: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/11

Re:Corporations going to Windows 8 on PC's? Dream

[jbolden]

When XP was released they tried that. Though it wasn't $5/yr but I think 3% of software costs per month, so it might have been something like $1.20 / mo for XP, and you never had to "buy" software. Companies decided they would rather save the money and upgrade when they had to.

Old gear that still works...

[the_rajah]

I've got a Collins 75A-2 receiver that was made in 1952. It still works fine.

Re:Mod parent up

[Billly Gates]

a) it is fast even on old hardware,
No it isn't. If you upgrade XP it runs slow. Slow Hardware runs slow.

b) it is supported by at least one good, secure Web browser (hint: not MSIE),
For business? Businesses use IE, and the smart people break the policy and install other Browsers. Business use IT, because there are still too many stupid companies who think Active X was a good idea.

c) it supports about 15 years worth of professional applications (some of which are not available anymore), and
If your application isn't available anymore. You are putting your company as risk.

d) upgrading == (pain + time) && (upgrading != c)
Lazy ass IT.

This is not a -1 flamebait just because you disagree with him.

a. It is documentated that the SATA driver for XP is crippled to make Vista look faster with disk access. It only does synchronous I/O due to no command queing. OUCH. Ligher=! faster for newer hardware. I can vounch for this on my hex core system that runs much better under Windows 7 and is sluggish under XP

b. IE is standard. Love it or hate it, it is integrated with both active directory and policies. IE 9 is a decent browser and IE 10 is a great one! No you did not misread that if you do any benchmarks with IE 10. Night and day compared to an ancient Xp version of IE. It is certainly usable for corporate drones now and is standards compliant.

c. You are putting your company at risk. Yeah no shit! Security threats due to bad design are huge. Saying it is secure is like saying IE 6 is secure because it still gets updates. Using a modern browser is a much better idea. Same with the OS.

d. IT supposed to look into the future. Not only put out fires and care about making the cost accountants their bonus! It is irresponsible to wait until people start sending files in Office2k13 formats and Photoshop CS 7 formats that you cant support, or wait until XP goes EOL and then find out you can't upgrade and get 0wned, or your executives all buy Windows 8 tablets/IPADs and your ancient intranet software wont work.

You do not have to migrate but you should be prepared before these events happen. Not after someone many ranks above goes to an HTML 5 contract with salesforce in 2 years and are still running IE 7. Ooops.

You can disagree and see no reason to blow money but they are valid concerns. In the 1990s anyone still running Windows 3.0, netscape 2.0, Wordperfect 5.1 by 1999 would be fired! Not given a pat on the head for cost cutting and fearing all so scary Windows 9x. But sadly in this decade we are doing just that. It is silly.

Microsoft is making the wrong argument

[arglebargle_xiv]

Microsoft argues that it's time to 'start planning' the move to Windows 8.

And therein lies the problem. If they told people to start planning to move to Windows 7 they'd get a lot more takers.

Re:Farewell XP

[Anne Thwacks]

If you are over 40, just reading the keys is a problem.

New features are missing

[Meeni]

I have a newer computer with windows 7. It works well. I also have an older computer with windows XP. It works equally well, and delivers 95% of the windows 7 experience. Actually, the differences are so minor that its barely noticeable you're running one or the other, as soon as you set both in "legacy look".

Moral of the story, nobody wanted to upgrade to windows Vista, as it was a downgrade from something that worked to something that doesnt. Nobody cares about upgrading to 7, because just whatever. Windows 8 tries to part with that issue by introducing real change, but that might come back bitting, if people don't like "novelty".

We're no longer refreshing hardware

[gelfling]

So who cares? We're already a year behind schedule for replacing 4 year old laptops. We're not really refreshing hardware unless it's some exec or some drone who managed to get an exec to sign off on it. We could run XP for another 10 years. The only downside is the inevitable embarrassment with customers over our inability to open their Office 2010 and later docs on our MS Office 2002 machines but we're slowly abandoning that for Open Office anyway which is even less MSO 2010/2013 compatible so again, who cares?

XP 4 Eva! Save your way to prosperity!!!

Re:Farewell XP

[gomiam]

While I can't really comment on the search bars because I don't know it you are complaining about the extra bars in the browser (which are not Microsoft's responsibility AFAIK), I can comment on the activation problems, and I fear it's a case of PEBKAC: I have had no problems activating Windows 7 Home or Pro when using legit keys. Were you doing that? On the file saving from, I have never had any of the browsers I use put those files anywhere but where they are supposed to be put by configuration options, i.e., at some predefined directory like Downloads or where they ask me to.

Re:Farewell XP

[swillden]

...If the engine in your '57 Chevy blows up, you can still get it repaired and replaced...

Well, yes, but Chevy's not currently making engines for it or offering warranty support. Are you saying I should be able to take my 56 year old automobile back to the manufacturer and have them replace the carb with a fuel injection system?

No, what he's saying is that Chevy shouldn't be able to prevent you from installing a new engine in your '57 just because they no longer support the platform. Which is why car analogies often turn goofy when talking about software and licenses - cars are treated as tangible, durable goods, whereas software (which, if you have a CD, is a tangible, durable good) is not treated in the same manner.

But... WHY is it different? Why is it that I (well, someone who knows their way around a machine shop) can manufacture replacement parts, or even modify and improve that '57 Chevy engine, but we're all reliant on MS to fix problems or make enhancements to Windows XP?

I assert that it's because the way we've applied copyright law to software is insane.

The purpose of copyright is to encourage publication, not so that the publisher can make money, but so that the new ideas and, eventually, the actual content can flow into the public domain. The reason society cares to expend the effort to enforce copyright laws is, ultimately, to enrich the public domain.

Applying that concept to software in the way we have, however, is utterly broken. First it's broken because the bulk of the interesting ideas in software are hidden due to binary-only distribution. Imagine if an author could write and sell a book but somehow keep secret his innovations in plot, characterization, imagery, style, sentence structure and word choice, thereby preventing other authors from gleaning any good ideas.

Second, it's broken because copyright is insanely long. It's crazy long for books, music and movies, but given the pace of change in the world of software it's downright ridiculous. How relevant is a 100 year-old piece of software? Well, we don't know because there isn't any software that old, but it's pretty clear that except to some sort of future software historians it will be utterly worthless.

If both of those problems were fixed, if software could only obtain copyright protection if the source were published (or at least escrowed with the Library of Congress or similar until expiration), and if copyright terms were of reasonable duration (say, 10 years, and that's being generous), then in fact you could maintain Windows XP yourself, just like you can that old Chevy.

In both cases, it's likely that for most people it will be cheaper and better to buy and use new stuff, but those who really felt the need, or the desire, to stay with the old could do that if they wanted.

Re:Farewell XP

[lennier]

If it isn't broken, don't fix it. XP isn't broken

... until the first Patch Tuesday after security updates expire, then it will be open season for script kiddies.

It would be nice if we could sue companies for releasing software with zero-day root vulnerabilities. In fact, if we're going to classify cyberattacks as "warfare", then it should really be treason. Call in the drones! er, but first do a proper code audit on the flight software.

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[Billly Gates]

The catch is they do not lose money by making older parts. If anything they still make money. MS fixes Windows for free. Same with crappy insecure browsers like IE 6. Website makers have to put ancient IE hacks to accommodate these corporate users for free. Developers have to use tools like VB 6 and ignore .NET to make these users happy.

Meanwhile they get hackers over and over and help desk has to work overtime for free. Enough is enough. costs are rise on older vehicles and outdated software. The difference is the driver does not get a financial incentive to externalize the cost to repair shops. Corporate America is getting this as well as middle aged users who fear change.

Kill it already!

Win 7 and Linux

[CoolSilver]

Sorry Microsoft. I refuse to pay for another operating system. My next desktop will be built as before by hand and will have Linux. My current laptop has Win 7 but I have Fedora as well. As soon as Steam jumps to Fedora I have less reason to care. Any new laptops will be built by System 76 or some other linux based OEM. Really between smartphone and my Galaxy Tab I am good for now or netbook with Fedora as well

 

Re:Because it's not an investment.

[cheesybagel]

Next time the IT systems go down or someone steals all the patient records because of an XP security hole don't complain then.

Re:Farewell XP

[V-similitude]

Leaving aside the horrendous problem of "search bars", and activation, it is particularly maddening the way you get all the popups, and files you download/save "magically" go somewhere other than where you put them.

Perhaps you don't understand the difference between an "Operating System" and an "Internet Browser"... What problem exactly in the OS has anything to do with search bars? Popups? Are you talking about the completely configurable security exception dialogs? As for files going "magically" anywhere... if you are, in fact, talking about the OS (rather than the browser download manager, say), maybe you didn't take 5 minutes to read about libraries, but they're not that complicated and easy to ignore if you don't like them (and a lot of people do like them). Overall, sounds more like PEBKAC to me.

Re:Farewell XP

[maz2331]

Windows 7 is a viable upgrade path, but 8 is just absolutely awful and has too steep of a learning curve.

Get off XP?

[Cute and Cuddly]

It is the only operating system (And I use the term in a rather loose way) that M$ has produced that is not well below average. If you want to stay with them, why go to anything else?

XP will live on for many years unfortunately

[xQuarkDS9x]

I live here in regina saskatchewan (Canada) and the most scary thing is on pretty much every computer screen you see that has kicked in with a screensaver in the Regina Qu'Appelle Health Region which is hospitals clinics offices etc attached to them they are all running Windows XP.

I find that kind of scary considering its hospital and patient information being accessed by an eleven year old operating system that likely has not been fully updated and will still be in use after 2014.

Re:Farewell XP

[chrismcb]

What is the "horrendous" problem with "search bars?" When you say 'files you download/save 'magically'" are you talking about linux or windows? Sounds like you are complaining about IE, Firefox, Chrome, and not windows.

Re:Farewell XP

[chrismcb]

And it still looks Fisher-Pricey ---

And what OS looks good?

Re:Because it's not an investment.

[udachny]

Next time somebody breaks the door and steals a bunch of patient paper records or there is a flood, don't complain then.

It's the same nonsense argument.

Re:Farewell XP

[RaceProUK]

You're a retard if you think Microsoft has an armada of employees who sit on /. all day ready to comment on new posts instantly. Either that or you're with the FSF.

Not an armada, but they probably do have a handful. So will Apple, Samsung, Sony, Nintendo, Oracle, Google, et al. It's called marketing.

Re:Why is a microscope online in the first place?

[Tridus]

Nope, you're not wrong. But that's different then being off the network entirely. :)

Re:Poor serial driver support

[Bob the Super Hamste]

For a general user or most office users RS232 could go die in a gutter but it seems there are functions that it provides that USB doesn't. The one I am most familiar with is NTP PPS for accurate timing. USB does not support this so for applications that need accurate timing from a clock device they need to have an old fashion serial port. I am sure there are others but I am unaware of those. Also how much legacy stuff needs to come along with it, its not like we are talking about HP-IB here.

Re:Farewell XP

[mcgrew]

Nice, mod down when you disagree. Looks like metamoderation isn't working too good.

6 reasons to upgrade before 2020

[walterbyrd]

Seriouisly. I used Win2K for years after it was no longer supported.

Software will continue to run on XP for a long time. Arguably, device support is still better on XP than on anything newer. IT staff not familar with XP? Were they litterally born yesterday?

Re:Ya, how dare they only support an OS for 13 yea

[jbolden]

Reread your post. Your argument was the interface of Windows 8 was such a radical departure that the cost... Which isn't an argument against upgrading to Windows 7.

If you are saying the licensing costs of Windows are the issue, then you are a customer who isn't spending very much on IT. In which case why would Microsoft care.

Not an argument to ditch XP

[walterbyrd]

Another appeal to emotion argument. Whatever Apple, or Ubuntu, are doing does not change the fact that win8 is not needed, or even an improvement.

Re:Not an argument to ditch XP

[gman003]

Where in there did I say anything about Windows 8?

All I'm saying is that Microsoft is shockingly being the best vendor at supporting their old products. I'm arguing against the people saying "deprecating XP is just a blatant money-grab by Microsoft".

Honestly, I haven't touched W8, so I'm not in a position to really judge it. I've heard both good and bad things about it. But I vastly preferred Vista to XP, and mildly prefer W7 to Vista. If you really can't stomach W8, but want to stick with Windows, don't stick to XP, just get W7.

Today: MS upgrades are met with groans

[walterbyrd]

People used to wait in line to buy the newest MS upgrade. Today, people have to have upgrades forced on them.

We are leaving XP, Just going to UBUNTU

[davidorourke]

Screw windows and their greedy coders. There is a Linux system based on XP and it works for FREE. Wine allows us to run almost any windows program we want in it. But tell you the truth, I would rather tell Windows Sayounara. Its all Linux from now on. Free operating system, free office program, free printing software. everything freeeeeeeeee....Take your Greed somewhere else Windows. Ubuntu beats windows Hands down. Oh.....and we dont have to worry about having an anti-virus program since that junk is produced for Windows systems......Windows. What a joke. Super Dave IT Tech

Re:Farewell XP

[mcgrew]

Let XP die already. It's "unsafe at any speed", to piggy-back on your metaphor.

What about the computers it's running on that won't support anything newer? And if it's unsafe, that's not my fault, it's MS's for releasing a buggy OS made from Swiss cheese. If any vulns are found in any MS OS since W95, by God they should fix THEIR FUCKING MISTAKES.

I'll tell you what's "unsafe", throwing a perfectly good computer in a landfill. You won't suffer personal damage from a virus, you will from toxic waste.

Re:Farewell XP

[mcgrew]

Maybe you should actually try Windows 8 before ranting about it.

Why? I have yet to see any compelling reason to try it.

There is a lot more to it then just the metro stuff.

Such as?

Re:Farewell XP

[mcgrew]

Why would we want to create a situation where software has to be so expensive as to fund a development team indefinitely for sale?

It's already insanely expensive. I paid $125 for an XP home upgrade from W98. You can buy a computer for twice that much now. And they sell millions of copies every single year. Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, MS is one of the richest companies in the world. Why can't they devote some of the profits to making an OS that doesn't need to be patched every month?

The only support I need is what an auto manufacturer would do a recall for. My car is ten years old, if a defect in the braking system crops up five years from now, they'll fix it for free -- and it will cost them a bundle. They only stopped selling XP what, a year or two ago?

If there's a security vulnerability in the OS MS wrote, they fucked up. Why should I pay for Microsoft's mistakes?

Re:Farewell XP

[mcgrew]

Someone else not affiliated with Chevrolet will fix it for you though.

Only MS can fix Windows; that's a big difference. Another big difference is that if your '57 Chevy's engine blows up, it's because of wear or lack of maintenance. Software doesn't wear out, if Windows blows up it's because of a design defect.

My car is an '02, I bought a copy of XP in '04. If a design defect makes my engine blow up, the manufacturer will fix it for free. If XP blows up, tough tittie, you're SOL.

Re:Farewell XP

[mcgrew]

The box with XP is an old one, and I would run Linux on it, but I need a box that will run EAC. EAC won't run in Linux, and my W7 notebook has no quaint optical drives, so EAC won't work on that, either.

Re:Farewell XP

[viperidaenz]

My car is an '02, I bought a copy of XP in '04. If a design defect makes my engine blow up, the manufacturer will fix it for free. If XP blows up, tough tittie, you're SOL.

That depends on the consumer protection laws in your country, unless your car came with a 10+ year warranty.

Re:Why is a microscope online in the first place?

[hairyfeet]

It just amazed me that the whole thread broke into 2 camps, one saying "use sneakernet" and the other saying "have it hooked to the net so they can get their work done" when the solution is networking 101, just keep it isolated to the LAN without access to the WAN.

I guess they just ain't teaching these kids networking 101 anymore...so tell 'em to get off my lawn!

Re:Farewell XP

[jbolden]

They stopped considering XP their current OS in January 2007.

As for insanely expensive. The cost of unifying the NT kernel with the features of ME and working through all the bugs on all known applications was $8b. The ongoing support provided for years to increase security and usability I imagine was several billion on top of that. The ongoing hardware support till late 2007 was many tens of millions a year. The developer support in terms of new libraries was billions. $125 was a steal only made possible by the tremendous scale of success of Microsoft's sales.

If there's a security vulnerability in the OS MS wrote, they fucked up. Why should I pay for Microsoft's mistakes?

Because you didn't buy a high security operating system. They were for sale and you choose XP instead.

Ok, Microsoft, if you insist.

[Physix]

At Microsofts request I went ahead and upgraded my machine... to Ubuntu Server, then went out and got a MacBook Pro. It was a good decision!

Even billionaires like Microsoft...

[iq145]

...Want to force the sales of new products!

Re:Why is a microscope online in the first place?

[The Finn]

Why put a microscope online? How else are you going to do deep packet inspection?

What happens when you have long OS lifecycles...

[technologypot]

If MS had shorter OS life cycles, software developers and IT Managers would be less lazy about keeping their applications up to date. Ten years is a long time to write code and support a system. No wonder it's so hard to upgrade when hardware, software and code and hell even management techniques are totally different after that length of time. If everyone knew they only had two years to work with, they would keep things fresh, there would be budget available for constant upgrades as part of an ingrained IT strategy (strategy!!!!! I wish), the upgrade market would be cheaper since it's a more frequent ongoing cost with regular and constant guaranteed demand. We wouldn't need £10 million refresh programmes in organisations with a mere 4000 users. My organisation is on XP desktops and Office 2002. Exchange 2003. Somewhere they found the cash to implement VDI, and are now suffering the pain of trying to package applications that work on XP on a VMWare environment. And yet no one can come up with a Business Case to upgrade anything. This thread has been a pretty good way to compile a list of pro's and con's actually, so thanks /. ! Of course I forgot that it's all about reducing ongoing costs, because that makes your books look like you're being efficient, while wasting £8 million a year with your "capital" money on failed projects goes unnoticed. (Public Sector, for context)

Re:Farewell XP

[mcgrew]

They were for sale and you choose XP instead.

Not just for sale, FREE. It wasn't long after I upgraded to XP before I upgraded again to Mandrake. Eight billion? How much has been spent on Linux development? Yet Linux (most distros anyway) is more secure, freer of bugs, far more hardware fault-tolerant, and has more features. Windows is a ripoff.

I wouldn't have upgraded to XP were it not for Sony's XCP trojan that my daughter innocently installed. When I reinstalled 98 I discovered I'd lost the driver disks for sound and video, and the only ones I could find on the net were for XP.

The day after I installed XP the internet stopped working. A Microsoft update had replaced my perfectly good NIC driver with one that didn't work at all. That's when I started realizing how incompetent (or lazy?) MS was and started looking at Linux in earnest.

W7's good enough that I haven't bothered installing Linux on the notebook. Yep, it's laziness that keeps Linux off of that box.

Re:Farewell XP

[jbolden]

How much has been spent on Linux development?

Linux has an expert user model. That is the end user is expected to be interested in resolving issues and aware. That hugely decreases development costs. The same way that WinNT to Windows2000 which also had an expert user model was much cheaper than Win95 -> Win98.

Also even if someone had all the data its hard to figure out what would count as Linux development. For example in the late 1990s a lot of the improvements to XFree86 were written by the Hummingbird guys to get X11 on Windows to work better. Those improvement filter through though to Linux and got XFree86 close enough to Sun's X11 so that XFree86 could become a standard, even though it was nowhere near SGI's X11. Does that count as Linux development?

That being said the LAMP stack Linux kernel, Apache, MySQL and PHP is way over $8b in terms of development just by itself.

As for Linux as a high security OS. UNIXes aren't really good high security OSes since the permissions model is so rich. Certainly you can build a rather secure Linux on top of ACL's and Plash. Coyotos is a high security OS that runs Linux software. Cisco-IOS, IBM/38 or IBM/400, KeyKOS, EROS / CapROS, Amoeba (now defunct) but great when XP when around, etc... Those sorts of OSes don't need frequent patches.

Re:Farewell XP

[Will.Woodhull]

The box with XP is an old one, and I would run Linux on it, but I need a box that will run EAC. EAC won't run in Linux...

I have puzzled over this response for about a day, and I still do not understand it. It seems to be from when the world was younger, like maybe ten years ago.

If the limitation is EAC, there is no limitation as it runs under the latest versions of Wine. You would not even need a Windows virtual machine; you could do it all in a basic Linux distro like one of the *buntus. But an even better solution would be to use a native Linux ripper like Audacity (Link is to the Wikipedia article which is an unbiased review of the software).

The only reason to stick with EAC as far as I can tell is the magical belief that if you do not spend big bucks on the software, it cannot be any good. That's a fallacy. It would be much more accurate to say that successful companies that charge big bucks for their software have very good marketing departments.

UbuntuStudio is a spinoff of Ubuntu designed specifically for high demand audio and visual work. It includes a very low latency kernel so that capture from microphones and other analog sources is extremely accurate. Worth looking into.

Re:Farewell XP

[mcgrew]

I have Audacity on the Linux box, but EAC has some features that Audacity lacks. I still have a whole lot of analog media I've been digitizing for years -- cassettes and LPs. With EAC I can simply record the entire album, mark where tracks start and end, and burn it to CD. After recording the album it's about a five minute or less operation. If Audacity had this I'd just use audacity.

Thanks for the tip on UbuntuStudio, I'll have to give it a try.

Re:Farewell XP

[fluffy99]

If you're upgrading from XP, upgrade to W7. That is, if the hardware is powerful enough to run it.

Win7 actually uses fewer resources than XP and generally runs better on limited resources than XP.

Totally opposite experience here. Try running either on a P4 1.6-gig with 512-meg ram. XP is definitely faster. XP was also easier to trim down and speed up. I've got a n-lited version that boots in VirtualBox in about 8 seconds. Win7 has a few more layers of complexity but it can be trimmed down a bit as well.

Part of the upgrade problem is that Win7 64-bit driver support is rather lacking for older hardware.

By the way

[jfdavis668]

IBM urges you to get off OS/2, too.