Microsoft Ending Mainstream Support For XP 580
Slatterz writes "Come next week, Microsoft will be in the unusual position of no longer offering mainstream support for its most widely used product. Windows XP will pass another milestone next week on the road to retirement when mainstream support ends on 14 April 2009, over seven years after the OS originally shipped. While the company said that it will continue to provide free security fixes for XP until 2014, any future bugs found in the platform will not be fixed unless customers pay. Windows XP accounts for about 63 percent of all Internet-connected computers, according to March 2009 statistics from Hitslink, while Windows Vista makes up about 24 percent."
Re:XP Sucks, Vista is Better (Score:4, Informative)
Funny. I just bought a laptop and it came with Windwos XP installed. If Vista is the "current version of Windows" why are they still shipping new PC's with XP?
Re:Windows XP support (Score:1, Informative)
The majority of Windows XP users are using an OEM license anyway, which are supported by the respective OEMs. The only difference between a product in mainstream and extended support, is that products in extended support don't get free PID support. Considering that OEM licenses also don't get free support from Microsoft, this change is very minor.
Some companies stop supporting versions of Windows when Microsoft does, or shortly after. When you can't call your computer manufacturer, ISP, etc. for support because XP is "unsupported", it'll be a change - or, at least it will be for the average Joe.
Re:Why not open it up (Score:5, Informative)
Because while Vista may have changed quite a bit, I'm sure there's still a lot of XP code in there.
Re:Why not open it up (Score:3, Informative)
Re:XP Sucks, Vista is Better (Score:4, Informative)
I would try linux again if they applications were there but they just arent. You can browse, IM etc... but I do more than that.
I have pretty good experience at running Windows as VM guest on Linux. Linux as host for VMs is quite good. But of course it depends for what purposes you use your Windows...
Value of Linux becomes apparent only after you are once forced to buy batch of Windows licenses. But as private buyer concerned - who generally get "Windows [whatever]" from OEMs - there are not much reasons to even try.
Re:not really.. (Score:2, Informative)
No more new graphics drivers updates?
That's up to graphics card vendors.
no chance to upgrade to IE8 (i don't believe in that though.)
Good thing, as IE8 was already released for XP.
No new silverlight updates?
Not necessarly.
No new service pack updates for office and similar programs?
I would think that depends on when Office is no longer supported.. bugs won't be fixed in XP, but I don't think it means bugs won't be fixed for 2007 Office on XP.
Oh. But i can name you two bugs that really DO bug people.
- processes that require you to force terminate after auto shutdown
Huh? What are you talking about?
Windows update doesn't work on XP, it only works on IE.
Huh? Windows update will continue to work, and has nothing to do with IE.
Re:XP Sucks, Vista is Better (Score:4, Informative)
You might want to take a look at Wine [winehq.org]. It does not support all applications 100% (Adobe products being notorious for not working as they should), but it's getting there. Take a look through their appdb page, maybe your applications and all you need is already quite Linux-Ready.
Re:Why not open it up (Score:2, Informative)
Technically Darwin is part of OS X. OS X = Darwin + Aqua. Either way, it's more than MS does.
Re:Why not open it up (Score:5, Informative)
Re:XP Sucks, Vista is Better (Score:4, Informative)
Umm. Netbooks are shipping with XP and only XP right now. Not downgraded...
Microsoft is still selling XP as a current OS for that class of machine.
Re:Why not open it up (Score:5, Informative)
I remember something about headers for the kernel being no longer available, but I just logged into my Apple Developer account and was able to download all the publically available source for the kernel for OS X 10.5.6 just fine: http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.5.6/ [apple.com]
Re:Why not open it up (Score:3, Informative)
Technically Darwin includes the kernel, which Apple closed down when they started releasing an x86 edition, in the name of preventing people from running OSX on non-Apple computers. This of course failed.
Really? Because when I go to the Apple OpenSource [apple.com] page, the XNU kernel is there and under the APSL [apple.com], which is an OSI approved license.
I think there was a kind of long delay after they released the first x86 Macs before they released the source, but it's there.
Re:Not enough time until Windows 7 (Score:3, Informative)
Vista sales, per Microsfot's counts, have been pretty high. Those numbers don't include, however, the business customers who opted to exercise their downgrade rights and run XP. The stats presented here appear to reflect what people are running moreso than that which was purchased.
Re:Why not open it up (Score:5, Informative)
They do already. It's called the "Upgrade Edtition" which, contrary to popular belief *CAN* be used to perform a clean install of the OS, rather than requiring an older version to be installed first.
As can be seen on Microsoft's own website [microsoft.com], the upgrade editions are all discounted $100 from the price of the full (new license) version.
Re:Time to move on. (Score:3, Informative)
"When you run Vista on the hardware that it was designed for (two cores and two gigs of RAM is about the minimum), it's easily the best released Windows yet, and you would be a fool to run XP on such a machine."
1. Why does it need so much?!?
2. Err, that pretty much describes my laptop. Vista does not behave well and Sony eventually released free XP downgrade disks due to demand. Not that I used them, I don't boot windows often enough for it to be an annoyance.
I disagree that it can be described as "best". I'm not going to label it a "failure", but I have yet to meet anyone IRL, geek or not, that actually wanted vista on their machine or had a good word to say about it.
Re:Why not open it up (Score:3, Informative)
But.. What about people who bought XP yesterday?
Anyway the support lifecycle of linux distros is way less of a nightmare because under linux it is
Easy to try out new iterations before deploying.
Easy to switch to a different distro.
Easy to work with your old hardware, usually making it faster.
Easy to keep the applications that were working on the previous iteration, and keeping them updated.
Easy to keep the old peripherals since drivers are not binary blobs depending on a vendor which obsoletes stuff intentionally.
Easy to keep using old filesystems and data.
Besides, some excellent distros like debian switch OS version by simple upgrades. Remote, even.
Re:Went with Linux (Score:1, Informative)
Actually I was going to start this with "in Linux" but hesitated because don't know anything out of Gnome windows manager.
Lets start again, atleast in gnome (which is the Ubuntus default window manager) you can move any window just by ALT-dragging it. You don't need to press to the titlebar, any part of the window can be used.
Re:Went with Linux (Score:1, Informative)
If you're using Ubuntu with more or less default settings, you can Alt-Drag anywhere in any window and it'll move it around.
I'm not sure if this is a GNOME specific thing, so if you're using KDE may not work.
So, no terminal-fu necesssary. Although I agree that the situation (which has happened to me on Windows and Linux) is frustratingly annoying.
Re:Why not open it up (Score:3, Informative)
This post may sound zealoty but it is to illustrate that once Linux was brought into the comparison, it became apple and oranges.
It sounds like Zealotry because it is. You don't need to spend 300 quid on Vista, because you'll get it with your new PC. Alternatively, you don't need to buy a new PC because you can just buy a Vista upgrade (or OEM) for your existing machine.
You don't need to spend 150 quid on new software, because it's almost certain that it will work fine on Vista.
So an honest comparison would have the cost of the Vista upgrade at something like £65 - £75 (Vista Home Premium Upgrade/OEM), or around an order of magnitude less than your FUD.
Re:Went with Linux (Score:1, Informative)
In most versions of Linux (including Ubuntu) holding alt, and then click-dragging ANY part of a window or dialog will cause it to move where you need to. Windows doesn't have basic features like this to the best of my knowledge.
Re:Went with Linux (Score:2, Informative)
Re:ok.. so where is it? (Score:3, Informative)
Migrating to a different distro is typically much easier, and cheaper. I worked on a machine in 2008 that was a version of RHEL from 1999. I made a full system backup to a separate partition on the same disk, migrated it to CentOS, cleaned up dependencies, rebooted into a new kernel, then ran yum to update CentOS. After that, it was just a matter of time taken to download updates for each release up.
It really involves a bit of research, I spent about 2 hours reading release notes before actually starting the operation. Then spent another 2 hours downloading and installing updates (carefully watching for conflicts). I am not a kernel hacker and was able to accomplish this. Now that this is done, the updates and upgrades are much easier!
Re:Why not open it up (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Only ONE good year of Windows XP (Score:5, Informative)
And Microsoft thinks it is OK to discontinue support?
Microsoft is still providing support; security updates will be available until sometime in 2014. There is right now one, and only one Linux distribution available today guaranteed to still be supported in 2014: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its knock-offs like CentOS)
The things Microsoft is not support is updates Microsoft has been giving XP over the years like giving XP Clear type support, support for WPA2 networks, support for SDHC cards, etc.
New drivers will continue to be available for Microsoft Windows XP for the foreseeable future, it's up to hardware makers to decide when to stop supporting XP.
This, should I point out, is better than the situation with RHEL 5 where new hardware doesn't work since the Linux driver model isn't stable; I tried to install CentOS 5 last week and gave up when I couldn't get drivers for my touchpad (Windows XP, of course, has drivers) nor current stable drivers for my WiFi card (supposedly there are drivers, but the last time I was able to use WiFi with my laptop in CentOS 5, the driver would crash unless I pinged the router every second).