XP Deathwatch, T Minus 2 Weeks 597
CWmike writes "June 30 is Microsoft's deadline for mainstream computer makers to stop selling new PCs with the old operating system, and the date that it will stop shipping boxed copies to retailers. That's just two weeks away. Computerworld offers a FAQ about XP's approaching retirement after Microsoft's most recent relaxation of the retirement rules, with some details about which machines big-brand computer makers will be selling with XP after June 30. First FAQ: Any sign that Microsoft will reprieve Windows XP's retirement? Sort of."
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Informative)
Inaccurate ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Make people realise the benefit of OSS (Score:1, Informative)
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
The "Extended Support" phase is scheduled to end on 04-08-2014 for Windows XP SP3. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Windows-XP-SP3-Brings-the-Death-of-SP2-July-13-2010-85986.shtml [softpedia.com]
Yes, I too agree it must be *meant to be* confusing.... It is just the Microsoft Way. I think there are several amortization table calculations involved in the selection of the dates too... http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy [microsoft.com]
Re:I hope so (Score:5, Informative)
There's an explicit exception for the mini-notebook market, for the very reason that Microsoft is afraid that Linux will sweep it.
Re:T minus 2 weeks? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Make people realise the benefit of OSS (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I love OSS and make money on Windows (Score:5, Informative)
Look at the trends: all non-whitebox servers in the world (worth of mention) are sold linux certified and preinstalled. Dell has certified linux laptops. HP/CQ has a pretty nice list of linux certified laptops (they sell them to ya preinstalle as well).
Man... where do this people come from? Linux is already out there! Go buy a box with it on it and youll never, ever, look back.
Re:Today our labs discussed WinVista (Score:2, Informative)
How is a four minute boot time for a high-end dual core processor laptop "better"?
My son's Mac mini boots, sends email, has open chat, records a video, and shuts down before a WinVista machine finishes booting with the same raw processor power.
Re:I hope so (Score:5, Informative)
* it can't join a domain
* the file permissions and file sharing permissions sytems are crippled
* I don't think it can be a remote desktop server (but i'm pretty sure it can be a remote desktop client)
I don't see any of theese as showstoppers for an ultraportable.
BTW you will still be able to get XP pro though vista buisness or ultimate downgrade rights and the big brand OEMs are now allowed to supply downgrade media and even ship systems pre-downgraded.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:3, Informative)
Problem support can be provided by third parties, especially with an open source system like linux.
Security update support basically means someone has to monitor all the software in the distribution for secrity issues and then work out how to backport those fixes. While it would certainly be possible to do this for an indvidual customer I suspect few could afford it.
Of course not everyone cares about security updates. If the machines exposure can be kept to a minimum you may be able to live without them but for many users they are particularlly important.
Re:Make people realise the benefit of OSS (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Make people realise the benefit of OSS (Score:5, Informative)
What about all the various backup products, such as tape backups and seamless server redundancy? Are there alternatives for this for Linux?
Yes. And I would venture to suggest that linux probably has much better support for remote backups and failover clusters than Windows.
What assurances does a large company who absolutely can not afford significant downtime have that the software is well supported by professionals on call and that bugs are constantly being fixed?
This is Red Hat's entire business. If you need that kind of support, they would be more than happy to oblige. A number of other vendors also can provide that level of support.
There are thousands of tools that are necessary for full production environments
Yes, you are correct. And those thousands of tools are all available for linux as well...with the added bonus that they will play nicely with your Windows clients. Novell puts together a distribution that provides all of this out of the box. The only things that is really lacking is an Exchange replacement, but I see that coming in a couple of years from the various Mozilla projects. Thing is, Exchange is slowly dating itself. There are a few web services out there already, like Google Apps, that let you easily integrate email and shared calendars...and you don't need an expensive and massively proprietary application (along with the expensive and massive hardware to run it on). As these mature, Exchange is going to have to evolve or die out.
if you go to a business and tell them that they will likely say, "and what happens if it goes down?"
Hand them the business card of your local Red Hat or IBM sales representative. This is why these companies are in business, and they know how to talk to and reassure PHBs.
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
I think an example of a "non security hotfix" would be something like the Daylight Saving time fix for Windows 2000 [slashdot.org] (in "Extended Support" at the time), which was only provided for those that paid for extended hotfix support. I think an example of "design fixes and feature requests" would be a Service Pack.
So Windows XP should be secure and usable as long as software is written for it. Since so many people will continue to use Windows XP, this shouldn't be a problem.
Windows 2000 started its "Extended Support" phase 3 years ago [microsoft.com] and I'm starting to see a few new applications not support the OS (e.g. Foobar2000 0.9.5, Photoshop CS3, free Microsoft goodies). I think this will be less of a problem for Windows XP because XP is used by many more home users than Windows 2000 ever was.
Re:I hope so (Score:5, Informative)
I hope not. Keep pushing people to Mac & Linux (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Today our labs discussed WinVista (Score:3, Informative)
I have run Gentoo on my laptop and desktop for many years and love it - I still have it on my laptop. But I built a new watercooled desktop for two reasons - I missed my PC games and I wanted to build a watercooled computer for the hell of it. Now it's a bit high end - Q6600 processor, 8gb ram (why not?) and two 8800GT's in SLI. I installed Vista Ultimate because I wanted to run DX10 games and I wanted to see what Aero looks like. I also have a pirated copy of XP Pro, along with several legitimate copies of XP Home lying around somewhere.
Can I comment on performance issues? No I can't because everything runs smoothly on my PC - which I hope it would seeing as I spent so much on hardware. Although the comment in the grandparent makes me a bit suspicious - I wonder what video hardware the guy has.
In terms of drivers, I'm running the 64 bit version of Vista. Drivers were not too hard to find - sound came with the mobo, Nvidia supports Vista, and Logitech has 32 bit vista drivers, but the app that ships with them sucks. Known issues with Eclipse (yes, Logitech broke Eclipse) and stupid issues with the wireless mouse not working when the app runs. That's more Logitech's fault than Microsoft's IMO.
The biggest and most annoying issue that I ran into was on install - Vista64 breaks with more than 2gb RAM installed until you apply the Microsoft patch. That took me a few days to sort out, but I finally did. Since then, no problems.
Is Vista better than Linux? Eh. Most of my issues with Linux stems more from ATI then from Linux itself. The ATI drivers for Xorg and XFree86 sucked ass for many years, and only recently did they start to improve in quality (thank you AMD). I run E17 on my desktop which is still pretty sweet but now I'm thinking of switching to KDE because it looks like they have some sweet effects going into their next build.
Anywho, this huge rant really was a response to the lack of drivers quote - maybe for servers there's no drivers, but drivers and system stability was the one thing I had very little problem with. My major beef was with installation, but Joe Schmoe isn't going to install his own Vista on a Dell PC, so that won't be a problem.
Re:Why move? Because you have to, that's why. (Score:5, Informative)
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx [technet.com]
Re:I hope so (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wrong, bordering on deceptive (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it is bad. It's a royal pain, as everyone who supports even a handful of Windows systems knows.
What's really bad, though, is the pain of installing all your application software, one stupid package at a time, after the OS is up and running. If your users need anything much beyond Solitaire and WordPad, it can take an entire shift, sometimes more, just to bring a single workstation up to a usable state. And you can't just set it going and walk away. You have to hold its hand the whole time, because of all the stupid dialog boxes.
Honestly, even something like dselect would be a significant improvement.
Re:I love OSS and make money on Windows (Score:1, Informative)
I got it working with little trouble, but that's not the punchline... Just as I got it working, there's an Ubuntu update including, yep, a new kernel.
So I update, reboot, and wait for the error messages about the modem driver. Instead, the boot paused, the driver said "I see there's a new kernel - hang on while I rebuild..."
I sat amazed & watched the 45 second process of a new driver being compiled & installed with no human intervention or request.
The boot finished & everything including the modem worked fine.
Let's see Microsoft match that...
Re:I hope so (Score:3, Informative)
Which support nightmares are that? Vista accidentally came on about 30 laptops I ordered. I converted 10 of them to XP but left the rest and no one has complained at all. Of course our internal apps are all web-based and work just fine with Firefox so that has a lot to do with it.
The only issue I ran into was with the 64bit version of Vista but I have the same issue with 64bit XP in that the Sonicwall VPN client wasn't supported. There is now a functional beta for it and all is well.
It's not even that slow in our environment so I'm wondering why business users would be so afraid of it.
Home users I think would have the hardest time with it because its more geared towards business users. UAC is trivially easy to disable but it shouldn't be popping up on day to day activities.
Windows 7 will be based on Vista so I wouldn't expect it to be a whole lot different.
I'm comfortable and happy with XP although my work laptop is being converted to Ubuntu with VMWare for the Windows only stuff. The biggest problem I run into is the lack of enterprise level security for Linux. For instance I use currently a fingerprint scanner to turn on the laptop and decrypt the drive. Truecrypt works great for an individual laptop but I don't see a way at least to deploy it company wide. HP Embedded security on the other hand is trivially easy to deploy. I keep three USB thumb-drives with the restore keys, one goes in the safe, the other stays locked in my drawer, and the third is off-site. I rotate when I install a new batch of machines.
Re:I hope so (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I hope so (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why move? Because you have to, that's why. (Score:1, Informative)
SP1 (manual install) & File copying (Score:3, Informative)
If you want to bash Vista for something, bash it for removing the NTDVM and Win16 support from the 64-bit version, the weird versioning and language support, or maybe the lack of 100% backwards compatibility - bash it for something that's actually true, not pre-SP1 performance (which was abysmal, but HAS BEEN FIXED).
Re:Today our labs discussed WinVista (Score:3, Informative)
I tried Vista back when I had an Athlon XP 3200+ and a whole 768 megs of ram with a GeForce 5900. It ran ok, but it was obviously slower than XP. I liked the eye candy so I kept it around for a month or so, but eventually went back to XP. A few months ago I upgraded my server with parts from that box and got a Athlon 64 X2 4800+ with 2 gigs of ram and an NV 8800 GT (still nothing SCREAMING by today's standards, but it cost me all of $250.00 to upgrade with the vid card being most of that).
Don't sit here and tell people that "it run like dogs even with dual core high end processors.", because that is a load of bullshit since it runs just as fast as XP on even low end dual core processors.
As for ram -- I'm sorry, but that excuse just doesn't fly anymore. Anybody that doesn't have at least a couple of gigs of ram is just wasting their time.
Now, I will grant you that Vista runs slower than XP on EXTREMELY low end hardware, but once you reach a certain threshold, they run the same. I don't know what that threshold is -- but I do know it is somewhere between what I had and what I have now.