Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft To End Support For Windows Vista In Less Than a Month (pcworld.com)
In less than a month's time, Microsoft will put Windows Vista to rest once and for all. If you're one of the few people still using it, you have just a few weeks to find another option before time runs out. (I mean, nobody will uninstall it from your computer, but.) From a report on PCWorld: After April 11, 2017, Microsoft will no longer support Windows Vista: no new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options, or online technical content updates, Microsoft says. (Mainstream Vista support expired in 2012.) Like it did for Windows XP, Microsoft has moved on to better things after a decade of supporting Vista. As Microsoft notes, however, running an older operating system means taking risks -- and those risks will become far worse after the deadline. Vista's Internet Explorer 9 has long since expired, and the lack of any further updates means that any existing vulnerabilities will never be patched -- ever. Even if you have Microsoft's Security Essentials installed -- Vista's own antivirus program -- you'll only receive new signatures for a limited time.
... and nothing of value was lost.
It was more secure than Linux. Literally every time I tried anything on the standard Vista install on my brand new Dell, it froze or crash. No way an attacker could take that over.
Except that Vista market share is far below XP, even today. So no, there probably won't be many rants.
Windows 7's end will make the end of XP look like a formal tea party, however. The last decent desktop version of Windows ever.
I agree, your computer looks clean.
Though I would change that background image, every time I use it as a jump host to do my ... work I get kinda distracted by the babe.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hasta la Vista, Baby!
What you're ignoring is that everything is temporally relative. When you factor that in, there's perfect consistency between what people said when Windows XP was first released, and when support for it was terminated.
In the early days of Windows XP, it was being compared against Windows 98 and Windows 2000. Yes, it did have a childish and inferior default UI relative to what it was being compared against, and people disliked it for that reason. But when support for it was ended some years later, it wasn't being compared against its predecessors. It was being compared against its successor, Windows Vista. Compared to the debacle that Vista was, XP looked amazing.
Windows isn't the only software to exhibit this pattern. Look at Firefox. When Firefox 4 was released, there was almost universal displeasure with the UI changes that had been made relative to Firefox 3.6. But then a few years later the Australis changes to Firefox's UI were released, which were even more disliked. People wished for the return of the earlier UI, not because they liked it, but just because it wasn't as awful as the latest version.
It's a simple ordering, really. For example, Firefox 52's UI is worse than Firefox 4's UI, which in turn is worse than Firefox 3.6's UI. People hate Firefox 4's UI when compared to the much better Firefox 3.6 UI, but they love it when compared to the much worse Firefox 52 UI. The sentiment all depends on the two versions being compared.
It's the same for Windows. XP's UI is inferior compared to Windows 98's and Windows 2000's. But it's much better than Windows Vista's.
Not really I still think vista was a worthless POS.
XP had a lot of updates that significantly improved it and added features.
Vista at launch was slow as hell because microsoft didn't hike the minimum requirements enough for it to run decent this was never fixed they jumped to windows 7 and promptly gave up on trying to fix it.
IME windows 7 actually runs faster than Vista on the same hardware.
I noticed a lot of vendors actually dropped support for Vista long before they dropped support for XP I think that says something about how bad vista was considering the age difference between the two.
I still hate they dropped IP over firewire 400Mbps back when ethernet only did 100Mbps. Everythings usb3 now tho but you can't run an IP connection over that (well i've never found a way to do it in windows anyway no usb>ethernet>usb is ridiculously stupid)
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
This is actually going to be the real problem here.
Retiring Vista is no biggie. I don't know anyone who didn't immediately replace Vista with Seven as soon as it became available. On the other hand, I can also not name that many people who replaced 7 with 8 once that hit the market. Even with 8.1, the amount of people who made the switch is rather low. And I know a lot of people and companies, myself and my company included, that rely heavily on Win7 even today. On the other hand, I do not know any large companies that embraced Win8/8.1 in any way and the acceptance of Win10 so far is, at best, lukewarm, at worst hostile with a big "when hell freezes over" stamp from the CISO.
More recently our development department even started to look around for a replacement of VS15, with the Telemetry blunder in VS15SP2 the switch to VS17 is not a given as it was in the years before from 10 to 13 and to 15. And I dare say we're not alone. CISOs talk. And I'm not the only one who is very unhappy with the direction Microsoft is heading. A simple Win10 rollout as it had been in the past with MS systems where the main concern was whether the key applications will run on the new platform will certainly not happen. This will at the very least include a lengthy and probably quite costly security audit as well. And not even whether it's secure against someone breaking in, more concerning the data that leaves the machine towards Redmond.
You can see that reflected in changes in bidding catalogs as well. More and more you find demands that software development has to be "OS agnostic" or they demand outright that a client has to be provided for Windows and Linux. My guess is that quite a few companies that I have to deal with are at the very least pondering whether it might be possible to think about considering leaving the Windows platform.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I liked Vista *ducks*
Seriously, I liked it, where MS shot themselves in the foot was changing the driver model, most peoples biggest gripe about Vista was performance, and bad driver support. I was running it on a gaming rig, so I did not notice the performance issues, and I could understand about the lack of drivers due to the change in driver model, so I kept a VM with XP installed for the odd occasion I needed it, otherwise I made sure that any new hardware that I bought had Vista support BEFORE buying it. Actually now that I think about it, it's the only Windows OS I ever actually paid for. That being said, Windows 7 was/is much better and I doubt there are many Vista boxes around anymore (I'm sure there are some, but there can't be that many). People just like bashing shit that changes, I mean look at poor Windows 8.1, never had a chance once they changed the start menu.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Nice to have an SP3 or SP2 rollup ISO or installer. If just to have install for older systems that have a vista key.
Windows moved to the NT kernel with Windows 2000. Windows ME was the last version based on DOS.
Vista had the ignominy of being the first version where Microsoft tried to enforce the admin vs user privilege model that Unix had from its inception. Prior to Vista, Win32 app makers would just program assuming they had root privileges (as if they were writing a DOS program). This had the unfortunate side-effect that any bug in any program that was running became a potential root escalation vulnerability. The proper way to make programs is to run them with user privileges unless they need root privileges. Vista was the first time Microsoft required Windows programs to behave this way, resulting in a huge number of legacy Windows app breaking. That's why so many businesses stuck with XP - because apps specific to their business wouldn't run in Vista, and the programmer(s) they'd hired to write it were long gone and hadn't left source code, or said programmers wanted to charge thousands of dollars for an updated version that would run on Vista.
If you didn't run apps with this problem, Vista was actually fairly decent - very similar to Win 7. The main problem then was that XP's hardware requirements were very low. I'd say 400 MHz and 256 MB to run comfortably. Used to be 128 MB - the published minimum - but over the years anti-virus programs got big enough (about 50-60 MB by 2007) that you needed 256 MB. In order not to scare customers, Microsoft published Vista's minimum requirements as 800 MHz and 512 MB to trick people with newer XP boxes into upgrading. Vista would run on that hardware, but it would make for a miserable experience. A realistic minimum was around 1.6 GHz and 1 GB, with a comfortable minimum being 2 GHz 2 GB. Very close to Windows 7's minimum requirements.
Windows 2000 wasn't marketed as a Home Operating System. It was a business Workstation OS to Replace NT 4.0
XP was marketed to Replace Windows 98 and ME. When 2000 was released a lot of people did use it for their home PC. But that wasn't MS Intent. But seeing its popularity probably urged XP development toward the NT kernel.
But when 2000 was released when you got your standard Compaq, eMachine, Gateway 2000 or Dell PC. It came with 98 or ME standard. Unless you were going with a business account.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.