Windows Vista Enters Extended Support 330
yuhong writes "On April 10, the second Tuesday of April, Windows Vista will exit Mainstream Support and enter Extended Support. This means that no-charge (free) support will end, no further service packs will be created, nor will future IE versions (such as IE10) be available for Vista. Also, no new non-security hotfixes will be created or be available without an Extended Hotfix Support Agreement (EHSA). This will last for 5 years before support for Vista completely ends in 2017."
Re:Does this mean even more pown'd windows boxes? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I still have an Win 2000 Pro (Score:5, Informative)
I believe slashdot.org was around back when this was pretty much a bunch of nerds in their basement. I.E before the corporate acquisition :)
And to be slightly on topic, I still have a windows 2k disk set, I have both pro and advanced server, windows 98, and windows 95 (including 95b) as well as XP and a Vista beta disk. I don't know why I still keep them (nostalgia??) and I have them installed in VM's, which I've not turned on for years, but I guess it is good to keep them there just in case I need them in future.
Re:Euthanize XP (Score:5, Informative)
Lots of things don't work on Windows XP. Just off the top of my head I can think of:
* Windows 2008 R2 RSAT Tools -- you can RDP to a server instead, but that's not always possible or recommended.
* PowerShell Active Directory module -- very handy, but doesn't work on XP at all.
* You mentioned DX11
* Internet Explorer 9 or later
* Location APIs for HTML5 apps
* Proper IPv6 support (XP has some experimental support, but in practice it's not very usable)
* Any 64-bit only software like the SharePoint 2010 design tools -- I know there's a 64-bit XP edition, I used to use it myself, but few others did, and support for it by hardware vendors was never good and even less these days.
Sure, these are all small things, but they add up. To get an XP machine to "work" you need about a bazillion hotfixes, add-ons, extras, drivers, and even some scripts. On top of that, these days it's getting hard to buy a machine with "only" 4GB of memory, but that's the most XP supports, unless you're a masochist and want to run an unsupported decade-old 64-bit OS instead of just going straight to Windows 7 64-bit like a normal person.
Sure, its leg might not be broken, but it's limping pretty badly.
Re:Euthanize XP (Score:4, Informative)
It's now Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications and it appears to be deprecated as of Windows 8 [brianreiter.org].
You're not the only one still on XP .... (Score:5, Informative)
At my workplace, our systems still predominantly run XP Professional, with maybe 3 or 4 running Windows 7 Pro.
Due to a budget crunch in 2009 through last year, we couldn't afford the planned upgrades, so we decided to make do with what we had. (EG. If a power supply died, we spent the $35 for another one and got the PC going again, vs. using it as a reason to upgrade to a whole new PC with a new OS on it.)
Now, we're slowly rolling out some upgraded hardware and software (just finished upgrading all of our Microsoft Office 2003 installations to Office 2010 -- which we were basically forced against a wall to do, so we could retire our old Exchange Server 2003 and utilize a cloud hosted Exchange Server 2010). But Windows 7 deployment has, quite frankly, created more negatives for us than the positives it brings.
Lack of driver support is a big issue. For example, the classic Adaptec 2940 series SCSI controller cards are no longer supported at all in 64-bit Windows 7. That's a problem for us, since we use a document management system with a group of dedicated "scan stations" people go to to scan in their documents each day. The scanners are old Ricoh SCSI based models that cost us many thousands of dollars each when we first bought them. They're still good workhorse scanners for our purposes and I can't really cost justify replacing them, at least until they fail on us. The only way I've found to make these work in Win 7 is to install the whole XP mode thing and run them in a virtualized XP session. That's ridiculous if you can just keep XP Pro on the computer instead!
Our old HP plotters aren't supported in Windows 7 either, but again -- why replace an "ancient" but still good, working plotter with a new one that costs $14,000 or more, just because you'd like to have the latest $200 or so operating system on the PC it's attached to?
From the systems administration side of things? Windows 7 annoys me because I can no longer browse the network and see the comments entered for each workstation. Under XP, I can double click the "Network Neighborhood" and look at all the PCs in the domain, and if they had description fields entered such as the name of the employee using the PC, they'd show up in the list. With 7, they decided that info was irrelevant, apparently, and no longer display it?!