Microsoft Office 2013 Not Compatible With Windows XP, Vista 711
hypnosec writes "The newly unveiled productivity suite from Microsoft, Office 2013, won't be running on older operating systems like Windows XP and Vista it has been revealed. Office 2013 is said to be only compatible with PCs, laptops or tablets that are running on the latest version of Windows i.e. either Windows 7 or not yet released Windows 8. According to a systems requirements page for Microsoft for Office 2013 customer preview, the Office 2010 successor is only compatible with Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012. This was confirmed by a Microsoft spokesperson. Further the minimum requirements states that systems need to be equipped with at least a 1 GHz processor and should have 1 GB of RAM for 32-bit systems or 2 GB for 64-bit hardware. The minimum storage space that should be available is 3 GB along with a DirectX 10-compatible graphics card for users wanting hardware acceleration."
Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Good. XP needs to be wiped out.
Re:Lol (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I just had to make sure here on that one. Open office... 27.3MB of ram in use with my largest technical letter open, which is 173 pages long. Okay there MS, you guys are insane.
Re:Lol (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, my wife has been using OpenOffice every day, now, for about six years, and she's convinced anyone who pays money for office software is crazy. She's a grant writer for non-profit organizations, so she has to exchange documents with people all the time, and she has no issues at all. OpenOffice does everything she needs.
The thing that really amazes her is that OpenOffice is actually better at reading old Microsoft Office formats than more recent versions of Microsoft Office.
Re:Let me get this straight (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody complains that the new Chevy Volt isn't compatible with their set of tools they bought just last year to work on cars.
Nobody complains that the HE dishwasher they bought wont except regular dishwashing crystals.
Nobody complains that the new bike they bought can't use all the old tires they have from the last bike.
Nobody complains that the HD TV they bought doesn't have RCA cable inputs.
Why is that? Face it people, progress happens and sometimes you've got to let go of the old and invest in the new.
Luckily there is eBay and Craigslist where you can sell your old stuff to someone who can't afford the new shiny yet. Give them a break and sell it to them.
Re:Looks like a version to skip anyway. (Score:5, Interesting)
Makes you wonder if there isn't a strategy in there somewhere.
Windows 7: Corporate
Windows 8: Beta testing new stuff on Home users
Windows 9: Corporate
Re:DirectX? (Score:4, Interesting)
A graphics processor helps increase the performance of certain features, such as drawing tables in Excel 2013 Preview or transitions, animations, and video integration in PowerPoint 2013 Preview. Use of a graphics processor with Office 2013 Preview requires a Microsoft DirectX 10-compliant graphics processor that has 64 MB of video memory. These processors were widely available in 2007. Most computers that are available today include a graphics processor that meets or exceeds this standard. However, if you or your users do not have a graphics processor, you can still run Office 2013 Preview.
Also it would seem the requirements are rounded to the nearest 0.5gb and probably are for extremely heavy usage cases.
Re:Lol (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Let me get this straight (Score:3, Interesting)
They have no business reason to support people who do not purchase the new operating system.
Actually, they do. Microsoft might wish to avoid being prosecuted for a Clayton Act Violation [thefreedictionary.com]. (Tying.)
Re:Let me get this straight (Score:5, Interesting)
Many,
Pivot Tables to name one. One click charting. HUGE spreadsheets.
I am not even an MS apologist, but even I can see that.
Re:Lol (Score:2, Interesting)
LaTex or something that allows you to separate the content from the presentation. It's something that tends to make things a lot easier if you decide later that you want different formatting or if you need a copy for two different audiences, but where the audiences can't for one reason or another use the same formatting. Like say if you're sending one copy to somebody that always uses a mobile phone.
All modern WYSIWYG text processors have styles, which let you do the same.
still using Office 2000... no point in newer... (Score:3, Interesting)
Honestly, although I have access to newer versions of Office, I don't see the point. Not a single thing I want from a newer version of Office, and the bloating hardware requirements makes it that much easier to just say NO...
most folks still sending out .DOC files as well, only those with no clue are saving Word files as .DOCX.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Lol (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, LaTeX has one enormous advantage for collaborative work - you can put the document under source control and have multiple people editing it.
LaTeX has a a horrible learning curve, but I now wouldn't use anything else for anything serious - particularly if there is math included.
Word Processing at 1GB of RAM (Score:3, Interesting)
Who would have thought that word processing needs 1GB of RAM?
Especially from the "640k ought to be enough for anybody" company !
Re:Word Processing at 1GB of RAM (Score:5, Interesting)
And (optionally I think) a DirectX 10 graphics card. I think that's even more implausible than the 1GB RAM. Did they port Office to WPF or something?
Yeahyeah I know, Direct 2D, fancy hardware accelerated text, etc. It's still kind of funny needing a GPU for documents.
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not about weather or not they can make the DX10 API work with XP, it's weather or not they want to spend the time to do so and deal with the steaming shit it will become- there could be things like the way memory is allocated or cpu-gpu tasks are scheduled in extensions to the kernel - though they could work around them them them have made XP DX10 not as compatible or efficient if it were a seperate addon without kernel changes. Sure, maybe they could have made those kernel changes and included in a service pack. And with no profit on a decade old OS. Then again the FreeBSD guys could have made UFS completely backwards compatible between BSD4 and 5 or Linux could still allow you to run the 2.2 kernel with the latest GLIBC compiled userland.
Your points about DirectX vs. OpenGL being multi platform are valid, but I have noticed not all OpenGL graphics drivers are compatible with all OpenGL applications. As for the DirectX lock in - the sad truth is many windows developers is they often need the handholding of the IDE and Microsoft environment to be any sort of sucessful. Without them, there would be far fewer. That lock-in is lower start-up cost to see a project through to its release.
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
There is no technical reason why you can't get DX11 effects on WinXP provided your video hardware supports it.
There are technical reasons for it not being easy to support though. The driver model for the graphics sub-system in XP is quite different, and there are differences in low-level memory management that mighh be significant too. Because DX is quite tightly coupled with those areas (whether this is a good thing is another discussion) it will be affected by such differences and may need different code paths to handle them and that extra jiggery-pokery would need aggressive testing. The time (and therefore cost) of supporting DX10+ on XP would most definitely not be trivial.
Re:Wait a second! (Score:2, Interesting)
I saw a Windows tablet at Staples the other day when I was picking up my Nexus 7. It's about twice as thick as any other tablet on display. I wonder why that is.
Maybe it's got a proper battery inside?