Microsoft Pulling the Plug On Windows XP In Three Years 315
An anonymous reader wrote in with an article from myce. Microsoft will be discontinuing all support for Windows XP in Spring 2014. Coinciding with the announcement, Microsoft released a 1,000-day countdown gadget to help XP users pass the time until their IT departments get into gear. Maybe.
This is a dupe (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not a moment too soon! (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry buddy, your facts are wrong.
Nor does Canonical charge for upgrades (Score:3, Informative)
Ubuntu does not maintains Long Term releases that long.
Nor does Canonical charge for operating system upgrades. Nor does Canonical drop all support for older yet paid for and still working PC hardware as quickly; Ubuntu 11.04 needs less than half the RAM of Windows 7.
This is not news (Score:5, Informative)
This gadget was released months ago. I've had it on my Windows 7 desktop at work since May at least.
And before all the whargarbl about MS dropping support... Windows XP was released in 2001. No consumer OS has been supported that long, and few enterprise OSs are. Since Windows 7 was released (that was 2 years ago) netbooks and low end systems have shipped with Windows 7 Starter. XP has not been sold on systems for years, and a four years of security support is not bad at all.
Earlier the same year XP was released, Red Hat 7.1 came out. That's the first version of Red Hat to use the 2.4 kernel (7 had the 2.2 kernel). Later in 2001 they released 7.2, which as a new feature offered support for the ext3 file system. One of the major selling points of XP, you may remember, was the fact that it offered full native USB support. It's time to move on, people.
Plenty! (Score:5, Informative)
How many other companies are expected to maintain 10+ year old software, even after TWO new releases (Vista, Win7) are available?
Off the top of my head:
Just to name a few. There is software out there which demands support periods measured in decades. LOTS of companies are expected to maintain support for old software.
Re:"The ironing is delicious" -- new diet? (Score:4, Informative)
And the family cartoon you want to watch is The Simpsons [youtube.com].
Re:Not a moment too soon! (Score:4, Informative)
No, I bought it to do work. It served that purpose well for three years. By the end of that time, the 1.25GHz G4 CPU was starting to feel a bit slow, and it got relegated to being the spare machine, with a new MacBook Pro taking over as my main computer. It was used as a spare when the MBP's hard drive broke a couple of years later and I had to work on it for a few days while the MBP was being repaired, but since then it's been sitting connected to my living room speakers playing music or sleeping, and very occasionally playing YouTube videos or flash animations.
On eBay, similar models sell for about a hundred quid, so it's not worth selling it and buying some dedicated device. As a laptop, it uses very little power, and can suspend and resume well, so it's a competent device for this.