No XP Reprieve; Windows 7 Release Set 609
CWmike writes "Microsoft has laid to rest rumors that it might reconsider pulling Windows XP from retail shelves and from most PC makers next Monday. Microsoft's Bill Veghte wrote to customers reiterating that June 30 would be the deadline when Microsoft halts shipments of boxed copies to retailers and stops licensing the operating system directly to OEMs. However, Veghte did leave the door open to all computer makers, even the largest, who want to continue selling new PCs with XP pre-installed. 'Additionally, Systems Builders (sometimes referred to as "local OEMs"), may continue to purchase Windows XP through Authorized Distributors [such as Ingram Micro] through January 31, 2009,' he wrote in the letter. 'All OEMs, including major OEMs, have this option,' said Veghte. At the same time, Microsoft confirmed Windows 7 would ship in January 2010. Who, if they have not already, would install Vista now?" Microsoft has said they will post the letter, but it's not up yet.
Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Who, if they have not already, would install Vista now?"
I heard Mac OS X 10.6 is supposed to come out next year. Who, if they have not already, would install 10.5 now?
Geekcentric Cosmology (Score:5, Insightful)
Typical, clueless geek-centric comment. We geeks install a new OS every other month, but almost everybody else just uses whatever came with their system. When they begin to feel out of date, they don't upgrade the OS, they get a whole new system.
So nobody's outside geekworld is saying "Should I install Vista". If they think about OS issues at all, they're thinking, "Hey, I hear Vista really sucks. Maybe I should get an XP system while I still can."
Re:Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because their next set of software updates will require it.
Their major applications now require Tiger, so the next ones will require Leopard. You're pretty much forced into OSX upgrades if you like them or not.
People put up a HUGE stink when DirectX 10 was Vista only. But this is par for the course with OSX releases and libraries. So people will have to upgrade.
Reminds me of Novell (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't remember the exact version but I think it was Netware 3 that was solid as a rock. Then the next version was total crap upon release use users didn't upgrade. Even the following update were flaky so users stayed on the old version. The Novell was in getting into deep sneakers without upgrade revenue coming in. They finally started getting the problems worked out, but users were content with the old version and still had little interest in new version. After another major upgrade users started updating slowly.
MS seems to be in the same situation the got XP patched up to be a solid Windows OS and what problems there are are well known so not a big deal. Vista price and stability isn't a attractive enough move the masses. MS has far deeper pockets than Novell so it hurts, but isn't lethal.
Personally I wish MS would grow a pair like Apple has over the years and build a new OS from scratch and not worry about backward compatibility. Apple has done it what three times since the beginning. They give developers and users a couple years of warning and move forward. MS talks about it but never does it, they definitely have the deep pockets to do it.
Re:You know... (Score:2, Insightful)
January 2010? Naw! (Score:5, Insightful)
When does SP1 appear? That's the date that matters. You figure 2011 and it starts to seem like a decade with XP.
Vista (Score:3, Insightful)
I wish XP would be around for longer. Vista sucks donkey balls. I bought a Dell XPS M1530. It has some awesome specs, 4G RAM, beautiful display, wonderful keyboard... But Vista sucks. Even with the service pack it has bizarre problems. It freezes for 30 to 40 seconds every so often (the mouse won't even move), every day it goes into this weird mode where the hard drive thrashes for hours, it doesn't go to sleep properly when I close the lid, it blue-screened when I plugged in my AT&T USB Sigmatel 881 card, it keeps on bouncing between access points, etc., etc... XP works great on the machine however. I want to buy another laptop like it soon, but not with Vista. I hope this is still an option..
Re:As a proud supporter of open source: (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows is only $200 if your time is worth nothing.
Thank you Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
By reducing the ability of its own customers to choose their operating environment, Microsoft drives them toward Linux and Apple.
I was just musing ... Microsoft have now effectively dictated that you can't run XP on a new computer (ignore the matter of "downgrade" rights for the time being). I guess they won't allow a customer to get a new license for XP for an existing computer (say they wanted to switch away from Linux and don't have any current Windows license). So they're effectively saying that if you want to run Windows, you have to run Vista. It's really a matter of denying choice, given how different XP and Vista are. How long can it be until Microsoft says that you're not allowed to _continue_ to run XP?
Looking at the parallels with Linux ... who would want to run a Linux distro from 2001? (That's how old XP is). Answer is nobody, unless your hardware is so old that you can't run anything newer. No linux folks will support a distro dated 2001. Isn't this a forced upgrade? I don't think so, because with linux, upgrading is a continuous process ... when you upgrade from 2001 versions of software through to 2008 what you are getting is basically the same thing, just better. Your kernel gets faster (and bigger), your devices work better, your window manager gains more features (and sometimes changes entirely, but you can choose your window manager). So, barring old/slow/small hardware, there's no reason not to upgrade linux.
Contrast with Windows - upgrade is a discontinuous process. You have to pay them for the later version, of course. And a lot of things change (for Microsoft's reasons), and you don't really get to choose much.
Re:As a proud supporter of open source: (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what sucks? I hate microsoft a LOT. More than most people possibly, but it doesn't matter how screwed up their OS's get, I will never switch to Linux which I love dearly (in its use and philosophy). That's because Linux will most probably NEVER:
-Let me run my old PC games
-Let me run current PC games (without great hassle)
-Let me run applications specific to my line of work (3d studio max, maya, premiere, photoshop, and various game engines)
I've a relatively good idea that a large number of people are stuck at the same problem. There's just no way, no matter how good Linux gets, that it can make up for years of an MS-owned market. They've clinched two decades of my life and PC usage, and my investigations have shown me that I need to do a great deal of tweaking to get a linux install to the level of a crippled windows OS. :(
It totally. Fucking. Blows. The open source Windows OS project someone pointed out a few months back was the only sign of a real, working alternative I've ever seen.
Re:Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
OS-X upgrades are perceived to be much more painless than Windows upgrades. For one thing, less changes in one upgrade. For another, since they control the hardware better, there are fewer device surprises. And there was never such a bloat discrepency between 2 releases as there is between XP and Vista.
This is getting ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reminds me of Novell (Score:5, Insightful)
your daft if you compare microsoft's installed base to apple's. corporate users would not be able to tolerate such a dictatorial switch.
if microsoft were to enforce such switch (require everything to be re-written? lol), business users would be forced to stay on their old platforms... but wait, businesses require a supported platform to ensure that when there is a disaster, someone will be around to fix it.
no reasonable business would tolerate that situation. it's a huge deal moving an entire business from one platform to another, I think you seriously underestimate the scope of the task you flippantly suggest.
Re:Reminds me of Novell (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You know... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you hit the nail on the head. Vista has a bad name in the marketplace. So W7 is just going to be a fixed up version of Vista sold under another name.
My guess is the main thrust will be to speed the thing up and get it to use less memory. And then at the end they will attach some eye candy to try and entice people to buy it.
I'm suspecting that it won't work. They had 6 years to come up with a compelling reason to upgrade to their latest OS and they failed.
Re:January 2010 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Reminds me of Novell (Score:4, Insightful)
If only all it took to develop a good OS was deep pockets.
Microsoft has lost the fight to prevent brain drain: Vista and Office 2007 have shown that they no longer know how to do innovation any more. They can't even put a new shine on the old shoes. It's sadly pathetic, really. Watching Microsoft attempt to do anything that requires corporate smarts is like watching a Dean of World History with Alzheimers try to hold up his end of the conversation at a dinner party. He's still the Dean, until he can be shuffled into retirement, so you kind of have to pay attention to him. But as to the future of the Department, well, he's just not that relevant any more.
All the bright young programmers are now seeking opportunities at Google, IBM, and even Yahoo, where there are new horizons and cutting edge stuff happening. All those armies of developers developers developers are now doing gee-whiz things with Javascript (!), the DOM, PHP, and MySQL. The state of affairs at Microsoft has gotten so bad and depressed that it's hardly worth the effort to toss a chair.
Re:Who? (Score:2, Insightful)
For one thing, OSX has much more frequent releases (including the occasional 10.x.x release that actually changes things around) which spread the risk of large changes out over a period of time.
Whereas Microsoft seems to want to make each version of Windows a radical re-invention that takes 8 years to brew (and then mostly excludes much talked about features anyway).
Re:Who? (Score:1, Insightful)
I suppose the same could be said for Vista as well.
Re:As a proud supporter of open source: (Score:5, Insightful)
DOSBox takes care of basically every vintage game I've ever played and even though VirtualBox needs Windows installed in the virtual machine, it has a 'seamless' mode that allows you to have the Windows apps running 'outside' of the virtual machine. That's a sucky explanation and it'd be easier to explain if I had a pencil and paper.
Wine recently reached version 1.0 and, as I believe a sibling post pointed out, it should be able to run Photoshop perfectly well. The open source Windows project you mentioned, ReactOS, shares some of its code with Wine (which is how the two projects have managed to make some great advances in certain areas), so there's a nice little tie-in.
ReactOS is currently at about version 0.3.5, so we'll probably have to wait a while for a fully stable version to come out. The day it does will be a good day. A very good day.
Re:Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft (at least with Windows) takes what was broken and adds cruft.
Kudos to Apple. I love that they are willing to leave what is old and invent something new. I wish that Microsoft would scrap Windows and Office and build something new from the ground up.
Re:This is getting ridiculous (Score:2, Insightful)
Educate yourself on what Vista was supposed to be, then you'll understand.
Re:As someone who has Vista Ultimate (Score:4, Insightful)
I've see this kind of comment more and more on Slashdot over the last few years. When did the average Slash user stop being able to do geeky stuff on his/her computer?
Why would you read Slashdot unless you were a hardcore geek?
Re:Who? (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the only reasons the MS market is so large is the fact that 90% of all computer manufacturers since the late '80's shipped their PC's with Windows pre-installed - and first time users 'learn' to use the first thing they see. Already indoctrinated, most MS users won't change to another OS because a) they never tried it and/or b) they fear/loathe change, or c) they are tied into a network relying on years of accumulated soft/hard-ware and can't afford to change. But it's MS's targeting of the 'first-time-user' that gets all the credit for the present situation.
Re:Geekcentric Cosmology (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of real people are really trying to implement Vista and finding it does not work for them. Trying hard. A lot of people who know their stuff. People who believe in their "Windows shop".
They're buying new equipment that is supposed to work. They're tasking teams to test their apps. They're downloading patches and searching Google for workarounds. In every case they're finding their enterprise has some people who just can't migrate, some apps that just don't work. People and stuff that have to work in order for the organization to fulfill its mission. In many cases these are apps built on Microsoft's own recent application development technologies. If your "critical" apps won't run you have no choice - it's downgrade to XP or migrate. When downgrading to XP ceases to be an option, migrating is the only choice. Microsoft thinks they're forcing people to adopt Vista and nothing could be further divorced from what's happening on the ground.
Thankfully, wine runs those apps just fine. Even Microsoft technologies that Microsoft wants to deprecate run great under wine now. More and more people are discovering that Linux is the cure to their Vista Virus. Just wait until they discover how easy it is to port to open architectures - how nice it is to use an IDE like Eclipse, how easy it is to maintain projects not written in the proprietary platform of the week. They won't be back.
Vista does not fit. Vista is bad. If W7 is Vista II, we need not even try it.
Re:Who? (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple doesn't have to deal with hardware issues. Windows and Linux have to try and handle any piece of hardware thrown at them. The hardware Mac OS X has to handle could be counted on one hand, almost.
Re:Who? (Score:4, Insightful)
They did reinvent Office with 2007.
I personally love the new Office. Most people saw the new "ribbon" interface and just dismissed it. I did as well until I started to use it. I'm not an Office power user, so I never knew what options were under three deep menus, a popup box, and an advanced tab. It puts most of the options right in front of me. You can do similar with older versions of Office or Open Office--if you want to have a bunch of confusing toolbars on the top. Office 2007 simplified all of that.
I'm no Microsoft fan, but I'll give them credit where credit is due. Office 2007 is a pretty nice piece of software.
Re:Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
Especially with a laptop, if the OS that shipped with it works, why ever change? Chances are, any new OS will add "features," aka "be slower," and since it's "new" it will also be buggy and worse. Modern OSes already do too much, you don't need every shareware utility ever made to autoload thanks to MS or Apple.
Frankly, if I could get ProDOS to boot on this MacBook, I'm sure I'd be better off...
Windows 7 (Score:3, Insightful)
It's easy to forget that MS followed up Windows ME, possibly their worst ever OS with XP, their best ever OS. At least Vista doesn't BSOD unless you've major hardware/driver issues.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:As someone who has Vista Ultimate (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm unhappy with anyone trying to tell me what defines a once hurtful, and since reclaimed label, and I can't agree with the elitism proffered, I'm a fairly hardcore computer graphics geek, but I come to
Enthusiasm is in short supply, and should be encouraged, and I think that Wicko had it right. While in the smaller picture, there is a great deal of fiddling, delving and experimentation ( see romance ) the larger urge is to make something better, often meaning 'to have things done for us with as little effort as possible.'
What are you writing these excellent 'geek' scripts to do ?
IMHO, and with my brand of geek, I like to explore the intricacies of doing math at the graphics card, with the expectation of an emotional response from the human viewing the output, and I have no knowledge, or desire to compile and build my own OS.
Please look at what you're contributing to the site, I'd rather read honest, infectious enthusiasm than another random person getting angry because someone dares to affront their ego.
Re:Reminds me of Novell (Score:3, Insightful)
The equivalents of drive letters in Linux are partition device names, for example /dev/hda1. There's this idea of being user friendly so that users don't have to worry about individual drives. The admin will have set things up properly in the single unix filesystem tree, so that users can access descriptive directories like /home/wicko.
So the Windows way is a confusing mixture of low-level and high-level concepts. One aspect of this confusion is that C: is both the partition and the filesystem. It's not obvious, for example, how to deal with the raw partition. In unix the difference is clear.
Re:January 2010 (Score:4, Insightful)
Technically Vista may even be a little bit better, than XP was, but it's not the technical issue here, it's the design issue. Vista is just terribly uncomfortable. I have to research everything AGAIN, because somebody has only the job at MS to rename "Install Software", "Software", "Add or Remove Software", whatever it is called in every language to something new. Sometimes I forget to execute an installer as Administrative User, even if my logged in user account is an administrative user. Some stuff crashes for no apparent reason. And they made i18n again something unavailable - in the basic versions.
Having a 98->XP transition may have been worlds back then. however there was win2000 between that, and ME. so basically 98->XP is nonewhatever comparable to XP->Vista, I would say, Vista is simply just the new ME. Fancy, buggy crap.
Re:Windows 7 (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes there are alternatives for popular applications but frankly, they're not as good. Open Office simply isn't up to MS Office, I don't like VLC and it's handling of things like subtitled MKVs are sketchy at best, I can't use CoreAVC which is pretty much the only way low powered laptops are going to handle HD videos for at least a couple of years if not longer.
Other than reasons of cost, there'd be no reason for me to want to use linux for a low powered system if MS optimises the next windows version to use fewer resources. I don't want to have to look up and learn command line functions , get used to interfaces that change from one distro to the next just so I can run software that's "almost as good as" the stuff I'm currently using.
Re:Who? (Score:1, Insightful)
I would hardly call slapping a new toolbar on it "reinventing" it. They still have lots of annoying old dialogs kicking about like the defined names and show/hide worksheet windows that are awful to use.
Try finding the stuff that isn't on the ribbon as well, after lots of messing about you eventually find all of the old menus hidden away somewhere. If they'd have kept the menus it would have worked out a lot better. They could hide them by default but make the button to turn them back on really obvious.
Re:January 2010 (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista already does work well, the "funny" jokes around here notwithstanding.
Maybe you shouldn't get your information on operating systems from zealots who emotionally defend some one true way.
Re:January 2010 (Score:3, Insightful)
>>As far as Aero goes, Isn't it obvious? Its a hard sell when you mention to an average consumer they should updrade because Vista has a new TCP/IP stack, or a Kernel Transaction Manager.
Funny Apple is setting Snow Leopard to be nothing more than a new software stack, removing old features, and a general code clean up. Apple will sell snow leopard for full price and people will pay for stabilty that the new system will bring. You can do under the hood changes and get people to buy.
you don't need glitz and glamour if your selling a quality product. putting makeup on pigs never makes sense.
Re:January 2010 (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? That's pretty stupid. The machines that are going to give the most obviously poorest performance with Vista and they aren't offering XP? Seems like they should be focusing on keeping XP available on those machines. Can't look good on Dell everyone someone buys a cheap machine and gets it home only to find it crawls along with pathetic performance. Odd.
Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
All of the I/O functions work properly? Copying files, renaming folders, etc. All that works perfectly?
If you say yes, you lie. We already know of documented issues with file operations. It is pretty much proven that the I/O performance of Vista is substandard compared with even XP, much less Linux or some *nix flavor. We may not know why that is the case but we can definitely see it in the benchmarks. No doubt about that.
I may be out of line here but any OS that doesn't work with files/folders "perfectly" is a lemon in my mind. That might have been acceptable back in '88 but not in 2008. It's like asking whether your car comes with tires included. Of course it does! ALL cars come with the tires on the car. If one doesn't, it should stand out like a sore thumb. That is called a minimum requirement. And Vista doesn't meet the minimum requirement for the file system.
Pretending the issue isn't there doesn't make it go away. I challenge you to find a single (non-MSFT) study that shows file system performance on Vista meets what IT nerds expect in 2008. I think, if you do the research, you will find lots of evidence to the contrary.
THIS is why
Re:January 2010 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As someone who has Vista Ultimate (Score:3, Insightful)
You're joking, right? I watched a friend tuning a 4-barrel carb a little while ago, and I guarantee you've never seen an overclocker hover over their water cooling system more than my friend was glued to the valves on that thing.
Did you know that there's a thriving market for car geeks who replace their engine's ROMs with programmable versions so that they can tweak fuel flow and air mixtures throughout the power curve? It's not uncommon to see someone pecking away at a laptop jacked into their engine.
The people who don't aren't computer geeks. Geeks are more about a general aptitude, and their focuses narrow from there. They may not have a particular skill today, but point them at some docs and give them a little while and they'll be progressing in that direction.
By analogy, all doctors get the same core curriculum from med school, then specialize. The difference between a family practice guy and a general surgeon is in what they chose to learn about afterward, but either one could pick up the other's textbooks and figure out the basics.
And thus are geeks. A web geek is a database geek who got derailed. The ones who aren't capable of switching from one field to the other? Those are just nerds.
Re:January 2010 (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not simply buy the Mac now. Why wait and hope for two years when you can have something that just works now?