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XP's End Will Do More For PC Sales Than Win 8, Says HP Exec
dcblogs writes "Hewlett-Packard executives say that the coming demise of Windows XP next year may do what Windows 8 could not, and that's boost PC sales significantly. 'We think this will bring a big opportunity for HP,' said Enrique Lore, senior vice president and general manager of HP's business PCs. Lore was asked, in a later interview, whether the demand for XP replacement systems could help sales more than Windows 8. His response was unequivocal: 'Yes, significantly more, especially on the commercial side,' he said. Lore said 40% to 50% of business users remain on XP systems."
..with XP look-alikes. Yeah, OK, I can dream, can't I?
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
This claim is a pretty safe/sad bet, considering!
For the business users still running XP, I don't see them flocking to buy new Windows 8 hardware. They are still on XP because either the software they run won't run on anything else, or they are small businesses that don't have an IT budget. As long as the hardware and software works, they aren't going to go out and buy new systems.
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Hippie Logger Jock
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"Pulling the rug out from under 40-50% of our clients should really shake things up and boost sales"
This signature is false.
I used Win2k for years after it was ended.
Maybe Hewlett-Packard executives should chew on that for a while.
http://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/to?iso=20140407T115959&p0=1244&msg=Windows+XP+End+Of+Life
i wonder how many websites and programs are now NOT supporting XP??
in 300 days i bet a lot of them won't
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
XP is that thing a lot of productivity software and hardware drivers still work on.
There is Windows 7, but shh shh is Legend.
Tales tell of other Microsoft operating systems that basically restrict your computer to phone level functionality, but it's a bitch to hold a tower with one hand while using a 22" touch screen in the other.
When your best source of revenue is from holding an e-gun to your customers' heads, you know you've jumped the corporate shark.
Table-ized A.I.
If it isn't broken, only a fool will buy a replacement.
Just because XP reaches its official "end of life" doesn't mean that people will throw out their computer and go buy a new one. For most people- and businesses too - as long as existing units still get the job done there is no compelling reason to buy a new computer. The fact that Win 8 is crap is also a factor.
Win7 is the new XP.
The better question is how many people did not buy a new PC precisely because Windows 8?
Be honest. Linux is holding you back from using linux. Hewlett-Packard executive already knows this.
All those hanger-ons will feel pushed into Windows 8's fun new UI and that's a good thing?
I'm confused.. Are you guys trying to kill the PC market?
but it's a bitch to hold a tower with one hand while using a 22" touch screen in the other.
Just think of it as MS encouraging you to lift, bro.
Given the XP holdouts clearly don't like Microsoft's current offerings, and Mac is growing faster in percentage terms, and Linux appears to be finally getting somewhere - i don't think these XP holdouts will be migrating to another Windows box any time soon.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
to Windows 7 this year.
Windows 8 was just too much of a learning curve for them even if it were the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Windows 7 is similar enough to XP that I can sit them down at it and not have to reteach them everything. I can even make it look
like XP If I really need to. I cant do that with 8 unless I buy add-ons.
Also Windows 7 pro includes an XP virtual machine...so why bother with 8?
Windows 7 is barely 3 years old its not like its going anywhere anytime soon.
Businesses continue to use XP for a variety of reasons, and in a variety of environments. In some cases, they will be willing to upgrade their systems. I will suggest that does not hold true in most cases.
These businesses have invested a lot into their existing systems: hardware, software, and training. They are aware of the strengths and weaknesses of what they have, which reduces the burden of supporting them. Their systems are also in production, fulfilling roles within their operations.
Depending upon the state of their existing systems: replacing XP would involve reinvesting in hardware, software, and training. They will be unable to make effective use of the strengths of their new systems, and will also fall prey to the weaknesses of them. It will take a considerable amount of time to document those changes. Changes also involve pulling systems out of production, meaning that they are unable to fulfill their roles in their operations. All of this represents a liability.
I'm predicting that a most of those businesses will continue to use XP. They will mostly depend upon their strengths internally in order to maintain them. They will also contract out to third parties when they need to. New policies may pop up when it comes down to maintaining systems that are no longer receiving security updates, but they will justify them by claiming that those policies should be in place either way.
I think that HP would do a lot better by servicing those businesses.
still get the job done without being an unacceptable security risk to their employees, their data, or the rest of their network there is no compelling reason to buy a new computer.
There, fixed that for you.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Must be incredibly popular with chiropractors.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As long as Google Chrome supports XP ,it can use a modern secure browser....
So unless MS relents and lets people get some boxes with Win7
"Pro" versions of Windows 8 come with downgrade rights. Many businesses have been "buying" Windows 8 Pro but installing Windows 7.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I have already helped several people to migrate from XP to Linux, because they din't feel like going to W7 or W8. None of them has had any serious problems and the few problems they had would have been far worse and harder to solve after going to W8.
I used Ubuntu with XFCE or KDE on top.
They all found it easier then Windows.
somebody asks me, I would say, go get a Win 7 PC, stay away from Win 8.
Looks like things aren't just straight up bleak anymore. Death to the single tasking OS Tablet abominations! Death to the cloud! (anyone remember that having to be connected to a mainframe is why we went to PCs?) May PCs rise again, may smartphones not be touted as a f****** replacement!
I don't know if this is any sort of indication about the popularity of Windows 8, but I got my daughter a new Acer laptop with Windows 8 for a graduation present. She asked my to put Ubuntu on instead. Interestingly, she prefers Mate to the default Unity desktop. Aside: boots in seconds because I put /boot and /usr on the SSD drive. Very nice.
In a band? Use WheresTheGig for free.
especially on this PC that'll be 12 years old by then.
ok, so i am a neebie, and may not know as much as others in here, but...what your saying is, that when they discontinue offering support for XP, that everyone will rush out and buy new ? I highly doubt that, maybe the larger companies will, and governmental agencies, but the mom and pop type business, won't. I co-own one, and if it isn't broke, we aren't going to fix it period, even if it is broke, we prob won't fix it either, there is no perceived threat of anything different happening
...because of Windows 8. Without the preposition, your sentence is incomplete.
The only ones using XP are businesses, and they are buying hardware as usual on the scheduled cycle, they are just wiping the drive and imaging XP when they get them...as they transition to 7 they will just be wiped and reloaded after a data backup - I automate this for a living, been there and done it 2 times since Win 7 came out.
All those Windows 8 licenses Microsoft says they are selling. how many are Windows 8 new machines being upgraded to Windows 7 by enterprise IT departments?
There is no salvaging Windows 8. Even Classic Shell doesn't fix a lot of Windows 8 problems - it just makes Win8 tolerable for a home user.
I see this more as an opportunity for improvement of heuristic engines in anti-malware programs, and the selling of more security-related licenses.
Or, possibly, big corps finally embracing either Linux or Macs.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Maybe Microsoft could just give all those XP users what they seem to want and release SP4?! Maybe we could get another decade out of it.
Would you use a circa 2001 ver of linux or macos?
I'm assuming you are talking about "PCs" as we normally thing of them, not special-purpose boxes, embedded systems, etc.
The answer is yes, if either
1) I had to, because my applications wouldn't run on the newer versions (think PPC-only binaries that I don't have the source for - okay, that's mid-2000s-era, but still).
or
2) it got the job done without any negative downsides and the cost to upgrade (license fees, new hardware, training, etc.) was too high. Think isolated (no Internet) systems OR the mythical (?) 2001 version of Linux or MacOS that was still vendor-supported and which had a supported security package available.
Heck, if Windows 2000 was still supported and it ran the software I needed to run (modern security software, modern web browsers with modern plug-ins, etc.) I would recommend it over XP to anyone with a sub-512MB computer.
Ditto Windows NT for computers in the 16-128MB range, provided I plugged all the security holes (disable LMHash, etc.) and my users were okay with a user interface that is as alien as Windows 8 is from Windows 2000/xp/7.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If you are a business owner that is not taking advantage of free money, you're a dope. If you are the head of an IT department that locked your company into a WinXP only solution, you are a dope. The world will continue to spin without you.
Microsoft will sell support contracts for XP and older OSes to those willing and able to ante up.
However, your point is well taken for cash-strapped large enterprises (think governments, charities, companies with cash-flow problems, etc.) and for smaller companies who contract with other entities and who may have contractual obligations to upgrade away from XP by a certain date.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
.
The looming retirement of Windows XP won't stem the dramatic drop in PC sales this year, but it may help bolster Microsoft's revenue, analysts said today. Although experts expect some business laggards to buy new hardware as they try to replace the 12-year-old XP before it's retired in April 2014, the quantities won't be enough to move the PC shipment needle to the positive side of the meter. "Replacements for Windows XP won't be enough to offset the declines on the consumer side," said David Daoud, an analyst with IDC.
I work at a bank in the US. We've been on XP, but as soon as its ongoing security updates end, we would be out of compliance, so we're doing an organization-wide OS upgrade. Otherwise, we (management and employees both, I would guess) would have been happy to stay. We're definitely not the only ones in the same situation.
It would be pretty hard to do worse than Win8.
Any many people have been stuck with XP for a long time, but still care about security vulnerabilities. Eventually, all of these people will have to update, and XPs end of life is a significant push towards that.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
What utter nonsense spoken by someone that obviously doesn't have any level of enterprise experience. The fact that support is ending is critical, and to be frank the only reason for the overwhelming majority of businesses to take on the significant cost burden of migrating systems. The fact of the matter is that XP is well known, deployed and just plain works. It has just plain worked for so many years that at this point many XP machines have been deployed for so many years that they are out of warranty. The net result is that you replace the hardware at the same time you migrate the computer to the new OS for cost reasons. When Microsoft ends support for an OS many vendors likewise end their support for their applications.
The fact that Win 8 is crap means jack as the enterprise will simply buy Windows 8 and use downgrade rights to deploy Windows 7. The crap your spewing will only hold sway for some small businesses and the proverbial Grandma Nellie that only uses her computer to look at pictures of her Grand-kids.
You're forgetting WINE.
I'm starting to suspect that Windows 8 has doomed the future of Microsoft's near-monopoly on the business desktop. This, combined with the sheer number of services provided via web browser, seems to be a serious threat to Microsoft's future. Where I work, almost all my users could get by with any desktop OS and the web interface they use all day every day would work no differently from what they are used to. Even on Linux, since the services we are using support Firefox independent of the underlying operating system.
With the exception of a handful of users who need Office for interop with vendors and services outside our office, the only thing that keeps me from seriously considering changing systems is the ever-present possibility that we may have to deal with vendors who require their own special software that only runs on Windows.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Despite the fact that there's a huge number of XP users motivated to switch OSs, I predict that 2014 STILL won't be the year of the Linux desktop.
I actually do use it as my desktop at home and at work. But can KDE please make things like adding icons to the desktop and task bar something you don't have to call your sysadmin for. Win8 was a mistake, but KDE (still 2nd only to icwm) is equally bad.
I have no intention of moving people to Windows 8 at all. In fact, I plan on upgrading everyone to Windows 7 pro prior to XP losing support. Will never go to Windows 8, and am hoping they learned from their crappy Win 8 OS and will come out with something akin to Windows 7 as their next release.
See subject.
XP or Snow Leopard or Windows 7. People prefer to continue using something that they know instead of learning something new unless there's a damn good reason to change. Going from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion is like going from Windows 3 to Windows 3.1 but she still won't do it as long as Apple supports Snow Leopard and her laptop still works.
CEOs would't screw you over a buck!
... I don't know of any that aren't broken as designed.
A well-designed motherboard will be able to be reset to factory conditions by anyone with physical access, assuming there hasn't been physical damage.
A key component of such a motherboard is the ability for someone with physical access to reset the BIOS and volatile RAM to factory-default conditions. In other words, it should be impossible to "brick" the system using software alone.
I don't know of any well-designed motherboards that support Windows 7.
In other words, as far as I know, all modern PC motherboards ship broken.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The impending end of support for XP has done quite a bit for the small business I work for already. For most residential customers that still have a working XP era system, Linux Mint has been an easy transition. The difficulties have been few (support for older Brother and Lexmark printers, out of box suspend not working with some hardware configurations, multi-monitor support although improved still needs more work, lack of easy options for iTunes pruchasing/updates, and Netflix subscription). Things have looked better in each of the standard releases, but we're sticking with the Mint 13 (Maya) long-term service release for ease of support. I have introduced customers to some of the other options (Redhat, Ubuntu, and in a few cases ArtistX) but most customers have opted for Mint.
With the nature of driver support, older, pre-Vista era, systems have required fewer tweaks (Broadcom firmware for wireless for one example, although searching in synaptic for b43 makes that easy enough to fix). Even learning when to use nomodeset or the various ACPI options for finicky hardware has been easy compared hunting for drivers when they either aren't present (I'm looking at you Lenovo and Toshiba) or haven't been updated since the machine stopped being under extended warranty (*cough* Dell *cough*), or the driver is listed under the wrong operating system more than a few times (HP/Compaq and Dell again).
Reinstalling XP on 10 to 20 machines a month, I've gotten a glimpse of why the companies wouldn't want to put the time and effort propping it up any more. Much like Vista, XP still works fine until something requires you to reinstall (such as hard disk failure) or to move on (oh, you wanted to transfer your existing licensed software onto that brand new system? *snicker*). Transitioning from one version of a software program voluntarily makes for happier customers than if they find out there's a looming need to switch.
I think XP will probably be fondly remembered as one of the better operating systems overall, but enough technology has continued to happen since it was released that it's time for some other contenders to enter the ring.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
If they bought it and it still works, why the HELL is still using it wrong?
Did you know they're using THE SAME BUILDING as they were using 20 YEARS AGO?!?!?!?! They need to knock that thing down and build a new one! Pronto!
You can't just slide from XP to 8.
You'll have to rethink your app layers.
You'll have to retrain staff.
Many won't. Many will simply look around and choose a different way.
Microsoft's shipping of WinH8, and a massive dose of arrogance in the same dose, has done enormous damage. It wasn't required, and they could have taken a better view and estimation on things and simply underlined 7.
And better yet, they decided in utter crass stupidity to bet the farm on an ARM based incomplete porting effort, and dragged the worst parts on the most undesirable places. Now the ARM based RT versions can't be hooked up to AD, and the Windows clients are fubar. There was no need to do this. They could have run RT as a light weight ARM based Win client - and not damaged X86/64.
On the flip side. PC vendors ship business units that are $300 - have a crappy spec, and have to be replaced on a cycle because they are baseline nasty units. This model is so broken its not even funny. People are rightly looking at $99 tablets and doing the same workloads on something 1/3 price. Mr HP here probably thinks he can sell some business notebooks with 2GB ram. At an inflated price, and inbuilt 'obselete'. These people need firing.
Ultrabooks are just reheated junk, with downclocked parts, shitty performance, a lack of storage, and an inability to do anything really PC level interesting. Oh, and 4 times the price of the other garbage. I can understand why some people might like them, but for me, I can't do chunky computing, I can't play games, I can't adaquatly virtualise on them. They are just thin light office machines, and are worth only a tenth of the price. HP and other vendors persist in building PC's that people simply don't really want. *Thats really why the sales slide has started*.
Hopefully someone will wake up and start shipping real PCs again, with 4 mem slots as a basic standard in lappies, and 8 on the more expensive homeboards.
We`re all equal
Windows 7 is barely 3 years old its not like its going anywhere anytime soon.
False, if "soon" is more than about 2408 days.
Windows 7 death watch
Time left until 00:00:00 January 14, 2020, Redmond Standard Time: 2407 days, 13 hours, 14 minutes, 19 seconds, no 18, no 17, no arrrg, it won't stop going down.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Microsoft released Windows 8 because novice computer user purchased tablets and cellphones over real computers.
Windows 8 simplified the interface with icons that can be used to open selected programs.
The end result of tablets is giving the worthless pseudo-computer to kids to be used as toys.
Meanwhile Windows XP and Windows 7 users are suffering when buying a new computer because Microsoft is forcing them to use the defunct operating system.
Windows 8 does not support business owners need for a replacement operating system, so they are sticking to Windows XP or Windows 7.
If a big virus hits that exploits a security hole that's unpatched, SOMEONE will offer a patch. I'm 99.999% certain. Why? Because regardless of Microsoft's wishes for XP to just go away, there are still too many people using it every single day (many of whom aren't even computer savvy enough to be able to tell you for sure which version of Windows they're actually using). A serious virus infection would #1, make Microsoft look really bad if they take a stance of "Too bad... we can't fix it.", and #2 would likely put entire networks at risk with the infected files getting copied onto shared drives on servers, uploaded to cloud shared storage locations, and more. It's quite possible such an infection would need an unpatched XP machine to secretly get installed in the first place, but newer OS's would have problems too if the users open attached files sent from the originally infected XP boxes.
If Microsoft stubbornly refused, some 3rd. party computer security firm would seize on the opportunity to get 15 minutes of fame with a free patch they'd circulate.
XP will still work. If people haven't upgraded yet I don't see why they wouldn't just keep using it if it does what they need.
corporate use is moving windows 7 now or has been done (some software is still stuck on xp)
Windows 8 added a lot stuff that is not needed and then they just had to mess up the UI and make it into a big 1 app at a time touch screen setup that fails on big screens and with lot's of work flows and to top that they killed the start menu in the old desktop as well.
Now all MS needs to do is to make this part of the base os https://store.stardock.com/product/ESD-SDS-W1225. I don't corporate people going this a way as windows updates can mess it up.
I don't know of any well-designed motherboards that support Windows 7.
Anything from Giga-byte with Dual BIOS(tm).
In other words, as far as I know, all modern PC motherboards ship broken.
Well, you're wrong. From a quick search of the gigabyte product line, it looks like DualBIOS (between my first and second paragraphs, I did a little research and they seem to have made this a one-word feature since I noticed it) is a standard feature for them these days. My GA-MA770-UD3P 1.0 has it, and it's a pretty old AM3+ board. It's also operating system indepdendent, and you can flash from a BIOS menu.
I guess I should see if I can get coreboot working on this system; if I'm a good boy and don't overwrite my primary BIOS, then the system should automatically boot the failsafe BIOS on failure.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Speaking as someone who evaluates and recommends IT solutions, I wholeheartedly agree with you. I hope someone from Microsoft is paying attention, but I doubt they are.
The ribbon was a mistake. It may be nice for novice users who like big icons and pictures. However, for experienced users who were very familiar the existing menus it sucks efficiency to provide a constantly changing palette of controls. Itsimply goes against good UI design to move controls around. Yes, I realize the keyboard shortcuts are still available and the ribbon has driven me to memorize even more of them than I knew before. And no--I'm not a Mac fanboy because the Mac launch bar suffers from a similar problem.
Pushing Metro on the desktop was a disaster of epic proportions. I will never work the way metro wants me to work, and quite frankly if I had employees who work the way metro wants them to work then I'd fire them because they are inefficient and can't multitask.
I'll stick with Windows 7, thank you very much...and when that gets long in the tooth I will seriously explore what other alternatives are available. I have a Mac for testing purposes, and from what I can tell it's more or less equivalent to Win7. It's been a while since I've had any Linux builds, but I've heard some pretty good things lately so I'm encouraged.
For many medium-sized to large organizations, switching to Linux and re-tooling any Windows dependent software would probably be a cheaper than spending(in some cases) thousands of dollars per seat to (unnecessarily) upgrade to Windows 8 machines, (re)license the necessary extra software and then retrain everybody on the new operating system.
Somebody could probably make big money building and selling Windows -> Linux conversion kits for companies like that.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Making s/w a commodity doesn't work.
Constantly upgrading, cheap s/w compared to good 'ol designed [properly for modularity], tested, bug fixed s/w lives longer compared to s/w with just plenty of features.
MacOSX and Linux--you've been warned.
Linux 2.4???
You might as well say "they're still finding vulnerabilities in the TRS80 after all these years".
Cripes man, if you can't keep up, quit pretending you know how to play the game.
I use Windows XP to download and (alas!) custom-encrypt epubs.
I have no interest in buying a new machine just for this purpose.
I might try going to emulation, keepng a clean copy oof the entire system from which to start every time.
If that doesn't work I might decide to buy only DRM-free books from the likes of TOR or Baen.
100% of the computers we bought in the last 2 years including up to last week were Windows 7 pro at my business. At my other part time custom builds and repair shop, 100% of the last 100 systems I built had Windows 7 on them (which I'm allowed to do because I'm not an MS partner and neither is my OEM builder license vendor). So no, it won't boost Windows 8 sales. It will help crush Best Buy and Officemax and Office Depot and Walmart in favor of builders like me though because we offer Windows 7.
I've got a 7 year old core2duo 2.2GHz laptop (3GB DDR2, 250GB HDD) stuck on XP. It has a FireGL M V5200 that (Even though it's less than a year older than Vista) only ever had buggy and incomplete beta drivers for Vista and is officially unsupported on Vista/Win7. It mostly gets used from its dock's DVI output as a nice silent HTPC.
So when they kill off XP, Win Server 2003 R2 will get the XP partition for another year of supported updates and a working (I hope) XP legacy videocard driver.
After that, It'll probably get Mint or something similar rather than pay to lose functionality.
MS no longer supporting XP doesn't mean that it suddenly wont boot up any more.
Anyway, anybody that needs retraining to just go from XP to Windows 7 is a retard.
If it ain't broke don't fix it, is a mantra spoken by many IT organizations in large companies. The complexities of migrating WinXP to Win7 are enormous. There are a ton of legacy applications that won't work on 64bit Win7 so 32bit will be used for the majority of users. This even though all the computers are coming with 8GB's of RAM. IT became complacent with WinXP because there was no good reason to change it. In fact, the only reason we are upgrading to Win7 is because we have to as Microsoft is killing support and security updates. We are not even considering Win8 because it's just as bad as Vista and we don't want to have to retrain tens of thousands of users in a schizophrenic user interface (half tablet / half traditional GUI). Office 2010 was bad enough. i.e. not much in the way of real world improvements, just move all the menus and buttons around to confuse experienced end users and give it a face lift. We had to deploy Microsoft's transition Silverlight quick reference tools (formerly Flash for Office 2007) that helped users find where their buttons and menu options moved! In fact, we'd probably be happy if we didn't change from Office XP! We have legacy applications and platforms that are 20 years old, some without source code and whose creators long ago went out of business.
Take a look at what your local Department of Motor Vehicles uses for their computer system and I wouldn't be surprised if it's still dumb terminals running on an AS400 mini computer! Oh sure it might be a Windows variant with an AS400 terminal emulator so they can have MS Office and Outlook for email but the main systems are ancient. Thankfully, most enterprises are not THAT backwards but they certainly have a lot of old systems.
Finally, we are rolling out enterprise Ultrabook laptops with SSD's to the executives running Win7. The only reason for this is happening is because they are demanding the new shiny. They wanted MacBook Air's but virtually no one knows Mac OS X or those in power refuse to deal with it. Still have bad feelings about iPads I suppose (i.e. being forced to deal with them against their will). These are Ultrabooks which would never have existed were it not for Apple raising the bar. All Ultrabooks are copies of MacBook Pro or MacBook Air designs. Big touch pads, beautiful screens, light up keyboards and super fast yet lightweight. I just wish the OS was better. Holding out hope for Windows Blue...
Thankfully, HPAQ will squander this opportunity just like they squandered every other opportunity in recent memory with the exception of illegal printer ink tying.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
This little XP laptop I'm using to post this message is:
-running only 13 processes and 8 Services
-startup takes 20 seconds, initial memory use 60Mb, shutdown in 6 seconds
-has DeepFreeze and thus no security protection, fuck updates!
-outperforms Ubuntu, Windows 8 and Windows 7 bloated from running 100s of unnecessary processes and services.
-outperforms a brand new HP Windows 8 Laptop fresh out of the box, infected with Norton, Office and eBay promos.
-been running fine now for years.
What exactly do I need Microsoft's help for anyway?
Users and businesses only THINK they need their support.
and mac os X is good and people hack it on to the hardware they want to use apple is missing a gold mine.
At the very least have a bigger mini with at least room for 1 full size HDD + sdd card and good video (can be a on board chip or laptop like card) with a desktop cpu. price it at $800-$1500. also give it 4 desktop ram slots.
I'm starting to suspect that Windows 8 has doomed the future of Microsoft's near-monopoly on the business desktop. This, combined with the sheer number of services provided via web browser, seems to be a serious threat to Microsoft's future.
These two claims contradict one another. If the PC market has stopped growing, because you don't need a fullsized PC to use a browser-based application (and it has), then no one is ever going to start a business to compete.
This is much like the mainframe market. IBM dominates, Hitachi is small but there, and while the market stopped growing decades ago it's still there and still profitable - but no new companies have entered that market since it stopped growing. That's the future of the PC.
Windows 8 was clearly written with tablets in mind and not so much concern for PCs - just like the recent changes in Ubuntu, etc. It's all about the tablets now.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm not sure you understood my statement if you are claiming my statements contradict each other. The web-interfaced services take away the longstanding requirement that one be able to install a specific program on the system itself. Instead, now they can simply interact with a server via a browser, which means that not only do you not need Microsoft's OS, but you also don't need anything but a username and password to hop on another computer and work. Meanwhile, for business use, Metro introduced a system that nobody wants to develop business software specifically for it. Where, again, was the contradiction?
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
We were doing 3 year leases where we got a new computer every 3 years. They extended the current leases to save money...
Aww, how cute! Another clueless company that thinks that long-term renting is cheaper than owning. I bet they also lease the company cars and hang on to them for > 5 years. Amirite?
The last company I worked for had several thousand supported XP Pro boxes some of which were "free" upgrades from Vista as they had Vista BE licence tags, but most came from HP and Dell with XP Pro preinstalled. I never saw a Vista box in service the whole time I was there, but by the end of my time there almost everything was newer hardware on Win7.
"Downgrading" from OEM Win8Pro is a little more annoying this time around. PITA timesink. And there's no guarantee all the drivers for the machine you're installing will work if the hardware wasn't tested with Win7.
Currently, everything I'm supplying is coming preinstalled with Win7 and hopefully will be for another year and a half (the current cutoff date is fall of 2014). Between now and then I'll work out PE and WAIK to get Win8.1 to install with a look/feel of Win7 in case MS doesn't relent and extend the cutoff date.
You also don't need a PC at all is the point. Microsoft will continue to dominate Desktops and Laptops, because new software will no longer require a desktop or laptop. PCs are quickly becoming a niche for precisely the reason you mentioned, which means no one will step up to compete with MS for that niche.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Updates might be done, but it won't drive sales until all the computers stop working. That will be accelerated by the lack of security updates, but not as quickly as one might think; people suffer through malware a lot.
Win 7 is not the new XP. Maybe sys-admins like it.
But Windows 7, TO THE END USER, is a buggy, poorly designed piece of crap and a step down from XP.
More accurately, Windows 7 should be dubbed, as techrights.org's Roy Schestowitz calls it, "Vista 7."
PROTIP: If you're going to pass off a GNU/Linux distribution as a Microsoft product, make sure to sudo apt-get install wine so that the odd Windows-only application keeps working.
I don't want my desktop turning into a smartphone that can't make calls.
Of course you can make calls. Just open the Skype app from the Start Screen and put on your headset.
i wonder how many websites and programs are now NOT supporting XP??
https://pineight.com/ loads in Firefox on Windows XP and Chrome on Windows XP, but it gives a certificate error in IE on Windows XP because IE on Windows XP doesn't support Server Name Indication, a feature required to use SSL with name-based virtual hosting.
In that case, they didn't buy a PC because they didn't know that Classic Shell exists. In my experience setting up a PC at my aunt's house, Windows 8 with Classic Shell is close enough to Windows 7 for it not to matter.
"You're forgetting about that whole Windows software compatibility thing."
My fathers businesses continue to use XP precisely because of software compatibility.
The business systems in place have business logic built in Visual BASIC which glues together a bunch of (mostly Microsoft) components. Change a component, and the component breaks; change the OS, and the glue breaks, and EVERYTHING dies.
HP is looking at a cash cow of significant reinvestment in hardware; Microsoft, by EOLing XP in the first place, is looking at a cash cow not only new OSs, but new component sales. SMB (small and medium business) is looking at astronomical costs to keep their workflows running. I have no idea why Microsoft, HP, et. al. think that SMB is the cow from which they are going to be able to get milk, given that larger businesses have established a regulatory environment in which most SMB is barely scraping by as it is.
Personally, I can think of at least three companies where my father will just close the doors, rather than facing a significant reinvestment. At best, he will not grow them or hire new employees to run the XP machines which he can no longer purchase in order to incrementally add the next new employee. In fact, thinking of it that way, as hardware slowly fails, it's more likely he will just lay off one employee per one dead XP machine, at least in the most marginal of these businesses.
HP may not be smiling as brightly as they think.
Tales tell of other Microsoft operating systems that basically restrict your computer to phone level functionality, but it's a bitch to hold a tower with one hand while using a 22" touch screen in the other.
Let me Bing that for you: Skype headset
We're still using XP and Office 2003. I've heard rumblings from IT that we're going to go to Win7 via remote upgrade, but haven't seen anything happening out in the branch offices where I work. XP isn't suddenly going to stop working. It's just the end of updates/MS support.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
The end of XP will not mean everyone has to go out an buy new hardware. Windows 8 runs great on XP-era hardware.
So assuming that your home computer runs XP, is connected to the internet, and MS stops issuing security updates. You continue using the computer.
If you have a decent anti-virus and are careful about downloading suspicious files from strange sites, chances are you will never get infected with a virus/trojan.
Worst case scenario, you get infected with a virus/trojan. Most of them today are not interested in harming your computer/data, instead they harvest your personal information, especially financial information. If you have been reasonably careful about putting your financial information online (and you should be, regardless of how secured you may think your computer is), again, not much fallout there. You could be embarassed if your email is hijacked to send out spam, but theres no lasting harm from that.
Or, you could be hit with something that turns your computer into a bot. So what? Most people don't even notice it.
Then again, if your computer carries sensitive information or financial data, you should really have started taking steps long ago to protect it.
Your father has some slipshod Visual BASIC scripts in place instead of a real application. His business deserves its failure for being run so stupidly.
HP is wrong. I'm not buying a PC if XP dies. I'm downgrading to Windows 3.1.
Please, please, please sell me a decent main-stream linux distro, offer paid tech support, offer free updates, and virtualize my old XP machine inside my new Linux box.
Dell could make a billion dollars, if they could do it.
He's not the only one. I used to work for a major bank that was merging with two other banks at the time. They had three different banking systems, 12 document preparation systems, and literally thousands of different document templates, most of which used some amount of VB code.
Over the course of two years I re-wrote about 3,500 of those document templates, moving them from early defunct versions of VB to VB5 (IIRC). Most of them I was able to switch to a generic document template. I then used a tool I hacked together to rip bookmarks from the original and create new .doc files that used functions in the template to gather data and place it correctly inside the document - ready for printing.
Finally, a document preparation system was written that could communicate with the back-end banking systems, pull the data it needed, and prepare the document without user intervention. It was a network node based system - which was cool for the 90's, but somewhat more common these days.
My point being, don't under-estimate the amount of crappy glue that might be out there running a given business. It kept myself and my trainee two years and we still hadn't replaced it all by the time I moved to the UK. Hell, there was even a Lotus spreadsheet in there with millions of dollars worth of errors in it's reporting figures. It's now an Excel spreadsheet, and no doubt some clown has gone and added a bunch of errors back in again ^.^
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
WHy dont you just get a PC?
I got mine for ~$500-600. 8 core AMD, 32GB Ram, 4 removeable drive bays, and all the expansion room I could ask for. Youre dreaming if you think this Mac Pro is gonna cost you any less than 4x what I paid.
We all know that for some years to come there will be a lively XP 'refusenik' ecology. I for one will not be going out to replace the six computers that work perfectly well here now (and each have Mint as backup). Will that ecology become a grey market? Will Microsoft conspire to sabotage it? Will it be killed by some huge penetration? Will some clone finally work properly?
Your father has some slipshod Visual BASIC scripts in place instead of a real application. His business deserves its failure for being run so stupidly.
If by "stupidly", you mean it as a synonym for "using Microsoft products in such a way that Microsoft could yank the rug out from under them in the first place", then yes. If by "slipshod", you mean "thrown together by idiots", then no. It was the best available component technology of its day.
It's also why so many companies don't want to give up using XP, and are giving the finger to Microsoft, HP, and so on, for as long as they can get away with giving them the finger.
Most of the businesses with these attributes were acquired with the business systems in place as charity to keep them afloat, and the people who work there employed. So it's not like my father personally made the decision to use the Microsoft products.
The only people who profit from building the same vertical market business practice solution over and over and over are the assholes of the world, like Oracle, EDS, and IBM Global Services, whose business model is predicated on giving the customer exactly what they ask for, as opposed to solving their business practice problem for them. Then they iteratively charge them a fortune to make changes until they get to a successive approximation that's still mediocre but "good enough" for the business to limp along. Both the accounting and moving industries are famous for having systems like this.
Frankly, I'd rather see the SMBs use commercial components and glue code than tithe to those assholes.
Also you should realize that the VB involved is compiled VB, in as much that Java or Dalvic or Go or C# apps can be said to have been compiled: interpreted bytecode is interpreted bytecode, so if you were going to do something dumbass and suggest Java as an alternative, VB is no worse than Java, and is in many ways better, since there's no Larry Ellison involved with doing things like dropping timezone patching to keep the license fees for new runtimes flowing in.
Finally, you should know that Google, Twitter, Facebook, and so on are all using JavaScript and Python and, yes, occasionally ActionScript interpreted bytecode (read: Flash) to run their businesses, because it allows them to make changes to business logic quickly. Only when *they* do it, you'd probably call it "being agile", right?
So those "stupid" people using VB are in pretty damn good company.
Bottom line is that these SMBs have no fucking way of affording updating all their systems at once just so they can hire a new employee, and anyone who says otherwise, including an asshole who thinks they should be exposed to second system syndrome in the process, is a pretentious prick.
Have a nice day.
You will have to prize my XP from my cold dead hands
There is a pretty obvious solution which nobody seems to have thought of yet.
You take your old apps which will only run on Windows XP and you put them inside a Windows XP virtual machine.
You get to run this VM inside any host OS you want. If you want to use Windows 7 then fine. If you don't want to spend any money then you can use Linux. If you want to spend some money to look trendy then you can host it on OS X.
Security considerations are not super relevant. Any external access can be sandboxed in the host environment. If you somehow manage to trash the VM you restore it from a known good backup.
Nobody has to buy new hardware.
Why do you continually act as if there is no available competition as it is? For the purposes that remain, both Mac and the various free *nix systems are already there. There is no need to create a new product when several exist and aren't going away. People won't run XP and 7 forever, and they're certainly not adopting 8 voluntarily, particularly in business.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
About 10 years ago, I used both email and pdf resumes as proxys for how techie the companies were; I'd send my resume in pdf, by email; if they required word or printed copies, then *I* didn't want to work there :)
We still use *286 cpu machines in production. Do job, why change?
If they fail, then we will switch control functions to a Raspbery Pi.
Regret modern MS Windows notin running for any change of machines
Regards Eion MacDonald
To simplify, there are two reasons people and businesses stick to MS Windows.
First, they're used to it. There are alternatives, like Linux distros, but that would require retraining. Microsoft destroyed that advantage with Windows 8, which is less familiar than user-friendly Linux distros.
Second, they need to run Windows-only software. The move to running more and more applications as HTML5 that only needs a good web browser means that an increasingly large number of Windows-only applications will run just fine on a Linux machine with Chrome or Firefox. Microsoft's been pushing this also.
This means that more and more people and enterprises will find themselves interested in some sort of Linux desktop distro, as long as somebody's going to provide support (Canonical?), or maybe ChromeOS or a version of Android. The biggest advantage, from a business point of view, is breaking the monopoly, so no company can come along, do something that spites the user base, and count on their continuing business.
The desktop business is hardly going away, since tablets have their limits, but a fraction of that diminishing OS market is still worth pursuing.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
No, it won't. My mother (in her 70s) can click the bookmark to the 5-10 web sites she goes to, send & read e-mail & play solitaire just fine. She probably won't notice (or has a clue) that xp support will end in 2014. What will happen is either me or my brother will get a call from her when her computer dies or otherwise has an issue. I can bet if either of us suggest a new computer especially with Win8 she will have a fit because it "doesn't look like my old computer" and neither of us is in the mood to hand-hold her for weeks until she finds solitaire, her e-mail & bookmark her websites again. I'll probably buy a second hand xp machine locally and hopefully be able to pull whatever programs she uses over on the used machine.
"If stupid things work...then they are not stupid."
My parents come up on Saturday. Mom has mentioned that it is Dad's birthday and father's day coming up. She wants me to help pick out a laptop for him. The problem is that neither of them are particularly tech savvy. Dad can follow explicit instructions that he usually writes on a piece of paper. They got a new desktop a few years back, and it was Windows 7. He is used to XP at his office and even that transition was painful. From what I have head of Windows 8 it is going to blow his mind (and not in a good way). However 99% of all laptops I can find at the usual suspects (Best Buy, Future Shop, etc...) are ALL Windows 8. I would love to get him a Windows 7 machine, but they are very hard to find and usually regulated to expensive old tech that didn't sell, like some Ultrabooks seem the only ones these days... So I am not sure what the recommendation is going to be. They are going to want to physically go out and buy it so I am around (I live 2000km away) to do whatever setup or advice they might need. Should be interesting. I suspect they are going to be forced to adjust to Windows 8 which no doubt will confuse the shit out of them, simply because consumers have pretty much zero choice.