XP Reprieve, Downgrade May Continue After Win7 392
CWmike writes "Gregg Keizer reports that Microsoft acknowledged today it has 'broadened the options' for PC makers to continue offering Windows XP as a downgrade from Vista — and potentially even Windows 7. However, the company would not confirm specific reports that HP has been given the green light to sell new PCs with Windows XP Pro pre-installed through the end of April 2010. 'Windows XP went into semi-retirement in June 2008, when Microsoft stopped selling it at retail and withdrew Windows XP Home from use on all but netbooks, though it allowed XP Professional to be installed as a Vista downgrade. Since then, Microsoft has extended the final date it will sell XP Professional install media to large computer makers and smaller systems builders to July 31, 2009, and May 30, 2009, respectively. Today, Microsoft denied that it had extended the life span of Windows XP, and intimated that those rights were built into the newer operating system — in this case, Vista — and did not expire at some arbitrary date.'"
Update: 04/07 14:36 GMT by T : nandemoari adds "Not only will users be able to keep Windows Vista, but they'll be able to step back in time two generations, all the way to XP. "We will offer downgrade rights from Windows 7 to Windows XP in the same way we did with Windows Vista," a Microsoft rep said.
Insiders speculate that the right to use this time machine might be reserved for those purchasing licenses for only two versions of Windows 7 — Ultimate and Professional. However, that's not yet been confirmed."
If Windows 7 is as fast as they claim (Score:5, Insightful)
Even faster than Windows XP, most of the incentive to downgrade is gone and it'll just be a shrinking market.
The only thing I can think of is driver compatibility for that random device that they don't have Vista driver for yet or just something unsupported since then.
Putting MS in check. (Score:5, Insightful)
People are going to be allowed to buy the OS they prefer rather than the one that Microsoft prefers they buy? What a strange idea? Can American capitalism survive thinking like this?
Ah, whether you're buying a Cobalt or a Corvette, GM is just happy you're on their damn lot to begin with. In light of the economy and the amazing shrinking budget, Microsoft would be wise to put themselves in the same humble position.
This has little to do with what's "better" at this point vs. what business customers don't want to have to deal with (driver issues, software incompatibility, buying new hardware for the sake of software, etc.)
Re:Putting MS in check. (Score:5, Insightful)
I just bought an XP machine. (Score:2, Insightful)
Just bought a newly released Asus netbook pre-loaded with XP.
I don't know why they chose XP, it could have been
many reasons, but as a casual user the changes
from Vista to XP were substantial - but they
always will be - your options are always the same.
(a) Choose another, similar product from the [vendor]
(b) Choose another, similar product from another vendor
In the case of windows and its lack of ethics in ...
regards to inter-operability [or their past] this
has harmed their overall effectiveness in the market.
The consumer has been locked in, and more
importantly so has their data
Now to change means an entire platform shift, as
there is nothing that is fully compatible and as
"comfortable".
Get rid of platform dependance, version
dependance. I myself run several machines
on this little netbook, multiboot and vm,
and they all perform various functions.
Just use the latest Firefox, and you'll be fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
It was always obvious that if Microsoft delivered one good operating system, most users would not feel a need to have another. Windows XP SP3 is fine for most private users and businesses.
Run limited user accounts and use the latest version of Firefox available in 2015, and that should be sufficiently secure.
Re:I'm an XP lover but how about we make a deal,.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Something is wrong with your machine or you're living in the past.
PC's have stagnated for years upon years due to holding on compatibility of older operating systems and architecture.
The switch from 16bit CPU's to 32bit CPU's to true 32bit OS's was really, really far far too long.
A mandatory 64bit OS with 32bit emulation through a VM would be far smarter than damn well releasing two different copies.
Re:I'm an XP lover but how about we make a deal,.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you new to computers by any chance?
Do you even remember the 16bit to 32bit era, do you know what having multiple versions does for developers and segmenting the market?
Please, come back to this thread when you have a clue or you've been in IT for more than 2 years.
And still developing Win7? (Score:5, Insightful)
It really makes me wonder why Microsoft bothers with the continued development of Windows. The customers have spoken: they like XP, and find it so good that they do not even bother to upgrade nor switch to the much more modern Linux distributions that are available already for years. Vista flopped, and Win7 (or whatever it's going to be called upon release) is also not getting a too warm reception so far.
Just lay off >90% of the workers, keep a core of XP maintainers, and profit.
Re:Just use the latest Firefox, and you'll be fine (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting post indeed.
XP truely is a fairly slick and fast piece of operating system now.
With Firefox updates, locked down security permissions, a decent AV and firewall just how long could an XP box remain useful to a small business, perhaps a POS machine or email / web / printing / burning terminal?
This is what's causing Microsoft so much trouble, I don't know about the rest of you but the most myself, my friends and my family do on a machine is.
Browse
Email
IM
Video playback
Burning
Downloading
Printing
Collecting photos from cameras
Write documents etc.
That's 99% of the work done on 99% of the machines I support and help with, this is one of many reasons why Vista is having so much trouble.
If anything Vista is approaching things from the wrong angle, I don't believe any one of the above is significantly improved in Vista, if anything - due to the cluttered OS it's harder.
As an IT guy, I suspect I'm going to come across some really old but perfectly working XP installs over the coming 5 and maybe even 10 years, it's almost the DOS6.22 of OS's - just fire and forget.
Re:And still developing Win7? (Score:4, Insightful)
It really makes me wonder why Microsoft bothers with the continued development of Windows. The customers have spoken: they like XP, and find it so good that they do not even bother to upgrade nor switch to the much more modern Linux distributions that are available already for years. Vista flopped, and Win7 (or whatever it's going to be called upon release) is also not getting a too warm reception so far.
Just lay off >90% of the workers, keep a core of XP maintainers, and profit.
Exactly. I don't think it's customers saying they like XP, but it does what 95% of folks out there need to get done: email...sorry showing my age, I meant facebook, web, and some paperwork. And guess what there is little reason to upgrade hardware or the OS if your only concern is how fast your facebook page loads. That's up to your provider. Unless there is a "must have" in 7, there is little to no reason to upgrade.
Industry holds adoption back (Score:5, Insightful)
Industry has always lagged behind the consumer market.
Well into the 90s, in the right catalogs, you could still buy VESA cards and other legacy parts, to keep repairing the 286/386 boxes running DOS and your NC lathe/drill/w.e.. Why should a business upgrade to some shiny new box when the old one, completely amortized and producing pure profit, was still working just fine, thank you very much.
Likewise with the new OS and Office suite. Gartner said when Vista/Office 2K7 came out "no compelling reason to upgrade [google.com]". Any bean counter worth his salt could see that the new software combination would require a considerable cash outlay in new hardware just to keep productivity at current levels. Non-adoption became a no-brainer.
What MS did was ignore the market and attempt to make too clean a break from their previous policy of the greatest backwards compatibility for hardware and software. They miscalculated and are now reaping the results of that decision.
Re:If Windows 7 is as fast as they claim (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't believe I have to make this post, it's insane.
(I was banned for 20 days on a VERY stupid and pedantic Aussie forum for arguing the same thing with someone who insisted 7 is faster than XP)
NO VERSION OF WINDOWS HAS EVER BEEN FASTER THAN THE PREVIOUS ONE, IT'S SIMPLY FUCKING BULLSHIT.
PERIOD!
If you get new hardware then duh! of course it's going to be faster
Get yourself a single core, 1gb machine with a medium speed hard disk.
Put on Windows XP.
Now put on Windows Vista or Windows 7.
It WILL be slower, period.
Now, get yourself a quad core 12gb machine with a 15,000rpm hard disk.
Put on Windows XP
Now put on Windows Vista or Windows 7.
It WILL be slower, period.
It does more, it may be sloppy code, it may be better code! but it's still, always always doing more, this rule of thumb has been since the dawn of man.
Perhaps ONE operation or two might work faster or be streamlined but essentially under the hood the services always increase, the background tasks increase, it IS slower.
I can't believe anyone with any actual, genuine IT knowledge would question otherwise.
I'll put my only disclaimer here.
It's possible, just possible that Windows 7 may break this rule and be faster than Vista, this is a possibiliy but I haven't tested enough to be sure.
However besides this, 7 is slower than XP as Vista is slower than XP, XP is slower than 2K
98SE is slower than 95.... and so on and so forth.
This isn't opinion, this is fact, easily backed by a stopwatch or half an ounce of brain.
Mark this post +500 and for god sakes link to it when some idiot claims otherwise, he's been reading too many marketing brochures or he's drinking the cool aid (or trying to defend a purchase he just made and wants to feel warm and fuzzy)
Windows 7 failing before it's even released? (Score:2, Insightful)
So they're saying Windows 7 will be such a failure before it's even released, that customers may want to just stick with XP until Microsoft straightens things out?
I'll stick with Linux myself.
Re:XP support (Score:5, Insightful)
People have to realize Microsoft can't code their way out of the windows hell to a decent os.
People don't care. They just want it to run their favorite game and accounting software. BSD doesn't do that.
Re:If Windows 7 is as fast as they claim (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean I generally agree with you but it sounds like you're on a rant from whatever happened on that other forum.
What if (and this is, of course, an if - I've only started getting into Windows 7 after looking at my options for an HTPC, so outside of Media Center, I don't know much about it) Windows 7 handles things like gobs of RAM or multi-core processors better than XP? Then 7 will be faster on the same hardware than XP.
What you're generally saying is true, sometimes technology (dual channel memory for example?) can level the playing field.
Re:I'm an XP lover but how about we make a deal,.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is the developers.
Imagine for a second you're a developer of software. Now, of course you want to sell to the biggest market. So you're developing for Windows. Yeah, you might even prefer doing stuff for Linux, but... bigger market, ok?
32 or 64 bit? Well, 64bit machines can run 32bit code. 32bit machines can't run 64bit code. So you're developing yet another 32bit application.
Why should this be bad? Does it really matter at all?
It matters because it slows down the transition to 64bit. Which means we're facing a bottleneck, or more precisely, we're already in it. You may or may not remember the days of 640k ram and "some above that". The hoops we jumped through and the ways we bent to make those 640k "last" when it was plain obvious that about 25 times that amount of ram was in order is ridiculous. Yet it had to be done, because programs were written for those 640k "and some above that" ram, systems that were stuck in offset/segment ram addressing because you couldn't really sensibly change it or break compatibility...
And we're heading there again. As long as there is a large 32 bit market, and there will be as long as there are new 32bit system, application programmers will create 32bit software which will be bought and used, and which will create quite a bit of headaches when the time comes that we HAVE to move on to 64bit.
Maybe you remember the headaches you had when you went from DOS to Win95. And not because 95 bluescreened every other minute.
Re:If Windows 7 is as fast as they claim (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's wait until Win7 hits the shelves before taking speculation as gospel.
If win7 will end up being faster than Vista, I'll drink to you. Otherwise I'll drink to me. Either way, it seems I win!
A comparison of models (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the differences between closed and open source software is obvious here and should be a sales pitch for FOSS in it's own right.
With closed source, only the software developers can update it, fix it, add features etc so if they choose not to (or are not able to due to bankruptcy) the product dies, regardless of how many customers use it. It can also be cut off for commercial reasons, like a new version on sale and the company wanting even more money from their customers, regardless of the customers need for the new version.
By contrast, open sourced applications live on while there are people willing to use it and develop for it. If Windows XP was open source Microsoft would REALLY be struggling as the people hooked on Windows WANT XP. They don't want the newer versions Vista & Win7. They are paying a premium to avoid Vista. They are flooding online forums and blogs telling Microsoft they don't want Vista. They are demanding to be able to buy a new PC with XP installed, not Vista. If XP was open source it would NOT die, regardless of Microsoft's commercial intentions. Then again, if XP was open source it'd be a much better product in the first place.
With closed source applications, they can be bought (slandered or sued into bankruptcy) by competitors and closed down. As several super-corps have done over the years, when you can't compete on merit, crush or buy the competition (and their market share). An open source application can be bought and closed down, but that only affects the brand name / trademark. It will be forked by the developers / users who want it to remain open source. It will live under a different brand name, most of the developers and users will switch and the buyout will only have caused a temporary blip in the market at a huge cost. This is one of the reasons why Microsoft foam at the mouth trying to stop the concept of "open source" (specially GPL which explicitly insists on sharing the improved code) from taking off in people's minds.
It's a sad state of affairs when you have to resort to pulling the old product off the shelves, refusing your customers the product they want to buy, because you need to force them to buy the new product you want to sell them. If that's not bad enough, some people genuinely still respect Microsoft's policy of contempt for their customers. Many Microsoft apologists are paid shills, but many more have genuinely swallowed the pill, in spite of all the evidence.
Re:XP support (Score:5, Insightful)
rect - if it runs in Wine, it'll run in FreeBSD (a supported platform).
And you can churn your own butter at home instead of going to that fancy supermarket. The original post should have read like this:
People don't care. They just want it to run their favorite game and accounting software simply and without having to undertake compatiblility testing or perform major settings changes. BSD doesn't do that.
Re:Just use the latest Firefox, and you'll be fine (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This can't continue indefinitely (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows XP is fine and does what people need it to do - why should they have to switch just because you and Microsoft say they should? Vista won't run on a lot of PCs running XP and a lot of XP software won't run on Win2k. There is no emotional attachment - it's purely a practical one.
Re:I'm an XP lover but how about we make a deal,.. (Score:2, Insightful)
This is not an acceptable way to make your point. Use reason rather rather than derison, no matter what you are feeling.
Re:I'm an XP lover but how about we make a deal,.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft, I'll give up my obsession with XP, skip Vista and widely support Windows 7, if you guys have the testicles to release Windows 7 as a 64bit only operating system.
To what end ?
I dare you, I double dare you - do the right thing for a change.
Why is it "the right thing" ? There are (and will be) plenty of Windows 7 capable machines out there that are not 64-bit.
Re:XP support (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup. We juyst bought a raft of new laptops and PC's here. after testing for the past 2 months we are downgrading all of them to XP. Vista is too unstable for our important vertical apps that our business uses to make money.
Honestly Business apps are NOT READY for vista or vista64. Most vertical apps have no other option and are written by retarded monkeys locked in closets... (Filemaker based sales applications, I look directly at those abortions with hatred) and VB6... yes a LOT of Vertical market apps are written in VB6 and STILL IN VB6! When you ask when they will be compatible with Vista and Vista64... I get the ambigous "we are working on it...." They have been working on it for 3 years now!
So we are downgrading to eliminate problems. Even running the problematic software in a VM is not a workable solution. I am getting networking problems and one of the apps actually needs decent 2d graphics speed which you do not get from a VM. USB devices that work with that special software has problems going through the VM wall, etc....
So Vista get's wiped and we use the downgrade licenses we got to install XP on everything to get rid of the productivity time vampire that Vista is to our company.
Re:If Windows 7 is as fast as they claim (Score:2, Insightful)
and how many average users you know who really multitask or use any kind of application which really could gain an advantage from multithreading performance?
The market is pushing for things that people don't need, which is very common for the market, but has absolutely no technical merits.
Re:XP support (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:If Windows 7 is as fast as they claim (Score:3, Insightful)
I've used Vista about 4 times for periods ranging from a week to 2 months and each time I couldn't deal with it - most recently about 2 months back (well after SP1)
I've never encountered it being faster so I find that link very surprising although I trust PC Mark very, very little it's still indicative of some kind of performance gain (assuming there's no Vista optomisations but I'm not going to clutch at straws to prove my point)
I'd like to see a disk to disk copy benchmark, network to network copy
different disk to different disk, same disk to same, application opening and general use./
I'd be absoloutely extremely surprised if Vista held up, very very surprised.
This isn't me blindly spouting "I THINK blah blah durrr ker durrr" I've been using these things since DOS 5.0 and I'm nothing short of a performance nazi.
Let's put it this way, a good geek friend of mine and I shared the same hobby (piracy) for many years.
All we ever did was download files, extract, copy, move, delete, open, encode and burn - (not for money mind you, just hobbyist fools collecting crap)
I've spent likely thousands upon thousands of hours in Windows Explorer, Winzip, Winrar, Winace and god knows what else.
We were such performance nazi's that we both deliberately stuck out with FAT32 longer than most people because you could feel the performance difference to NTFS - it wasn't much but we could notice it and feel the sluggishness, that's pedantic but I could notice it.
I'm a pedantic ass and I know when stuff is slower.
I'll have to accept your link I suppose but I will continue to question anything claiming Vista or Win 7 is faster than XP, because XP is very, very simple and damned snappy, consistently.
Re:Just use the latest Firefox, and you'll be fine (Score:2, Insightful)
OS's are becoming less relevant as computing becomes more browser-centric.
This sounds like a Netscape marketiod from the 90s...
The OS is, and will always be, relevant.
Many people, especially non-technical people, think of the OS as the visual presentation of the GUI.
It's the guts of the OS that is important. Even if all you needed was a browser, something has to be responsible for the filesystem, device drivers, process and thread scheduling, locks and semaphores, etc.
With multi-core processors clearly the future of hardware, the ability to accurately and efficiently manage multiple processes and threads becomes even more critical.
If anything, OS design is going to become more critical in the future.
Re:Just use the latest Firefox, and you'll be fine (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh, I wish people would stop implying that XP is better than vista, and definitely stop implying that it's better than 7. 7 isn't even out for God's sake.
XP is pretty decent, but Vista is a better OS in pretty much every way imaginable. The number of times that my parents have bothered me about either or their computers over the last 6 months is less than the number of times that they bothered me in an average month with any of the predecessors.
I'm not suggesting that my experience alone is sufficient, but let's be a tad honest here, the vast majority of the people have no issues with Vista this is basically just pound on MS for the sake of it.
And this is coming from somebody that has a distinct dislike for MS software.
Re:Just use the latest Firefox, and you'll be fine (Score:2, Insightful)
Was your two year old computer really old when you got it? We have vista running on a P4 1.6 gig with 1gig of that rambus RIM RAM. That machine is a lot older then 2 years. Also have it running on an old dell GX240 (that came out in 2002). We did add RAM to the GX240 and we used some old AGP video cards we had. A 128MB gforce 5200 is not a screaming video card and it was old in 2002. You most likely installed vista on a desktop with integrated graphics card. In other words, you either never looked at the min specs or installed it on a machine that was lower since that is what you had. Which on older hardware is no where in the range of what aero wants. Why did microsoft want a 3d graphics card for an os I have no clue that is a bone head decision.
If you had looked the compatibility mode is still there in vista. It also goes back to win 95, win NT 4.0, win 2000, and win XP. Did you look? I haven't tried running old apps in compatibility mode. I haven't had need to plus I try to use 64 bit OSes not 32 bit. Apple got their development team out? Photoshop is an Adobe product not an Apple product. Software manufacturers are not creating vista software. There is a change that many coders do not want to do on windows. They want to run as root/administrator. They do not want to code their software to run in user mode. So lazy 3rd party software writers are microsoft's fault? Also if product ABC is still selling. Why would company start selling product ABCD to compete with itself on a new platform that isn't selling well? Some companies (Nero, Roxio) had vista products fairly quickly. Others did not. Now we have this issue: Companies will not release vista software until XP is gone. People are still buying XP since they have a hard time finding software for vista.
Drivers who is to blame? The OS vendor or he manufacturer who makes the hardware? Last I checked microsoft is a software company. They do not sell motherboards, video cards, network cards, printers, or scanners. The manufacturers did not release drivers for their products. That is microsoft's fault?
Microsoft screws up a lot. But the hardware drivers and 3rd part software is not microsoft's fault. It is their problem, but not their fault. Remember that Apple can tell a 3rd party vender to jump and how high to work on Apple software. This is not the case with microsoft. If microsoft did that, everyone cries anti-trust! You are not letting us compete fairly.
Re:Just use the latest Firefox, and you'll be fine (Score:5, Insightful)
People aren't saying or implying that XP is better. They are just saying that it's good enough.
Re:Just use the latest Firefox, and you'll be fine (Score:3, Insightful)
This may be true now with Vista SP1 but the GA version of Vista was an abomination. Slow as a dog with a huge memory footprint (but you can speed it up with a USB key /boggle), poor driver support, and multiple permission popups to do the most trivial things.
On top of that a few apps and games I had just failed completely when UAC was running and no setting I could find would allow them to run so I had to turn UAC off. What did MS expect me to do, wait for fixes for all the apps I need? At least I was able to get everything I needed running that way... I have no doubt many people couldn't get that far which is why you hear about so many people downgrading (upgrading) to XP.
Yes SP1 is getting better but they shot themselves in the foot with a terrible launch and they have been playing catch up ever since. I believe we would be seeing a lot fewer complaints today if they had delayed for a year or so and launched SP1.
Re:Just use the latest Firefox, and you'll be fine (Score:3, Insightful)
Many people, especially non-technical people, think of the OS as the visual presentation of the GUI.
Exactly. Consider that an increasing amount of people's daily business is conducted through the browser. Nobody cares what's under the hood. Could be windows, linux, OSX, you name it - it's increasingly irrelevant. If you integrated media file handling I'd never run any other app than a browser on my netbook. This reduces the OS to what is should be - nuts and bolts. MS started the fiction that the OS IS the computer. OS's need to fade from view and do less, not more. Who really gives a shit what file system is used?
Re:Just use the latest Firefox, and you'll be fine (Score:3, Insightful)
This argument depends strongly on what you consider "better".
For my mom, the biggest reason to uninstall Vista on her brand new machine was because Vista was a full order of magnitude slower on her new machine than XP was on the old one. Once Vista was replaced with XP, she loved the new machine.
For me, the biggest reason to avoid Vista (and run Linux, or XP when I have to run a Windows app) is because of all the DRM that's built into the core of the OS. Vista places artificial restrictions on what I do with my own media and hardware.
On the other hand, I have a friend who bought a really expensive laptop and ran Vista on it because he liked all the slick animations and updated Microsoft applications. (Although, now that I think about it, he later replaced it with a Macbook Pro.)