The Death of Windows XP

bsk_cw writes "Although many Windows users intend to hold onto their copies of XP until it is pried from their cold, dead fingers, Microsoft fully intends to phase out the OS in favor of Vista. If you're unwilling to move to one of the alternatives, and really don't like Vista, the least you can do is be aware of what's in store. David DeJean offers a rundown on Microsoft's timeline for Windows XP, why the company does things that way, and what you can do about it."

Satisfying

    This will be very satisfying. I've had so many people tell me they absolutely HATE Vista, but they're stuck with it when they bought their new computer. They frequently ask me to put XP on, no matter what it takes (buy it, hack it, put their mothers key on).

    Killing XP off finally, while I love the idea of killing Windows will really hurt Microsoft. Since people hate Vista so much, they'll start being more open to other options.

    Maybe it'll mean friends and family will be asking me to do more Linux installs. I like those better anyways, they go a lot faster and they don't involve 2 hours of install plus 2 days of Windows Updates.

Re:Satisfying

I agree, but we must prepare ourselves for the fact that the next version of windows will probably be much better; and I'm sure that Microsoft'intention is to push the last XP users directly to it.

When they started developing Vista, they could not imagine the rise of Ubuntu's success or the coming of the XO PC and, eeePC, which is why they thought they'd give a hand to their friends the computer vendors by making 2G of RAM a requirement. (I would check the dates if was not in a hurry).

It looks like they understood this now, and reacted by making that "minimal kernel" stuff on the next windows (even a non graphic server version), and by planning to release it one year early.

What I'm saying is: we (linux evangelists) have a huge opportunity right now, but it might not last. So let's make the most of it.

Re:Satisfying

This is already happening at my (tech) company. Our "LAN" department knows that XP's support with expire, and if they don't start replacing them now they will have a large userbase with no code-support.

Developers and sysadmins were always allowed to run linux. Now anyone else can via a supported corporate image.
if you don't want linux (Sales, Product Managers, etc) you now get a MacOSX laptop or desktop.

This has impacted other Software vendors, Our ticketing system with a windows client (dev/sysadmins rdesktopped in to use) got replaced with a cross platform solution.

I think in 2 years we will be windows free, previously 60-75% of the employees were windows users. The reasons for this was the LAN department hates MacOSX less than Vista, and people heard all the buzz about Macs and were willing to give it a shot.

A short play

31 June 2008, 8:00 AM EST: Nasdaq and NYSE both crash as the big three PC vendors and their suppliers discover nobody's willing to buy a PC any more.

Midmorning Bill and Steve get a call from Ben Bernanke.

Afternoon DHS executes warrants on One Microsoft Way. Attorney general reopens antitrust investigation. Steve gets a call from the IRS regarding the structure of financing for one of his sports teams.

Evening: XP gets a reprieve! We're all friends again.

Downgrade

I have Vista installed on my PC. When I bought a new hard drive, I found out that I could not simply activate Vista on my PC (with all the same hardware as before, except the drive itself). I reluctantly called Microsoft support, who asked me for a 25 character (from memory) code, and then read me out another 25 character code which I had to enter to activate Vista.

Wow. Just for changing my hard drive.

I fully intend to downgrade to XP in the near future.

-JB

Security Fixes until 2014

There's plenty of good reasons to bash microsoft; this isn't one of them.

---Dedicated Ubuntu user

Nature of an OS

This incipient consumer rebellion is a relatively new phenomenon, even in the short history of PCs. For most of the '90s, Microsoft couldn't bring out new products fast enough to satisfy customers.

This is sort of empirical proof, to me at least, for what I have long thought, and I'm sure a lot around here thought as well. The days of an OS revolutionizing or vastly enhancing the way someone, especially a consumer, computes are long behind us. The OS has suffered from feature bloat for forever, and for the most part, a successful new OS is one that just doesn't hinder the work to be done. For most people, their computing needs have been satisfied, but they are pushed into a perpetual cycle of upgrading for upgrades sake. This "rebellion" is a symptom of this. XP satisfied people, and some of them are starting to realize what the terms "lock-in" and "monopoly" actually mean.

We're coming to a point where freedom in software is gaining in market value. I know it's cliche, and people have been spouting it for a over a decade, but I suspect that the general populace has come to a point where they can see that dollars and cents are in favor of not being tied to a corporation that makes money by selling solutions for the same problems over and over again. I don't know what iteration of "free" software will fill this void, but this mess with XP is not good for them. It won't be the downfall of Windows, they are far to crafty and firmly positioned for that to happen. However, the old business model of theirs is losing its effectiveness.

I hope I'm right, but even more so I hope I'm not turning into a linux nut that shouts "It's the year..." every time MS slips up.

Re:Nature of an OS

I know it's cliche, and people have been spouting it for a over a decade, but I suspect that the general populace has come to a point where they can see that dollars and cents are in favor of not being tied to a corporation that makes money by selling solutions for the same problems over and over again.

I'm not sure the issue is that people with XP are unwilling to fund Microsoft. The issue from where I'm standing is two-fold: first, XP works. It's a fairly stable system, and one that people have been using for the past *seven* years. Second, everybody has "heard" that Vista is terrible. My dad, not a techie by any stretch of the imagination, simply refuses to use it. Why? Well, it's not because of first-hand experience -- it's because a few of his co-workers "heard" that it was a terrible OS. More tech-oriented people are more resistant because we don't really see the advantage of switching over to a new OS when the old one works just fine. The general populace is not as savvy as you might think. They're not as concerned about Microsoft's monopoly as they are about spending an extra couple of hundred dollars to upgrade to a new OS that they've "heard" is not so great.

Besides, their business model is just fine. The product that they're selling, on the other hand, has a terrible reputation - deserved or not. I've used Vista, but I haven't put any real time into it, and I'm completely unwilling to do so until... well, I suppose until I have a final-patched Windows XP SP3 system that's been hacked because of an unfixed security hole. Let's see what happens in two years.

What about activation servers?

Oddly enough, quite a few people still have Windows 98 running (I have a Win98 machine in my basement doing my CDEX ripping).
When Microsoft turns off the activation servers, that basically REALLY means the end of WinXP... or is there a chance, any chance, that Microsoft will release a super-secret "unlock all" patch in 2014 that will allow XP to be activated. I am pretty sure the answer is NO, but I can still hope.

Bend over, just not yet

A whole article, with very informative and concise information about support and sales cycles of XP, but in the end the conclusion is you can put it off but you will bend over and take it.

THIS is what's wrong with proprietary software. If Vista were better - more compatible with existing software, less buggy, less DRM crap, I would WANT to move. I don't, but in the long run I don't have a choice. If you'd told me 3 years ago I'd be fighting to keep XP, and buying older hardware to ensure support for it, I'd have laughed at you.

Unexpected Benefits

You know who benefits from this? Apple. Expect Apple to really crank up the "move to the Mac" ads.

Vista's reputation is justifiably bad, and I'm never buying a copy. If I suddenly need a new Wintel machine, there's always someone like tigerdirect that has overstocked machines with XP pre-installed, and they'll probably be selling them for a year after XP is pulled from the shelves. But I think MS is only going to cause customers to truly hate their guts for this. They'd be smarter to allow XP sales until Windows 7 is ready (assuming they don't fuck that up.... a big if).

Re:Well...

People I know who have it pre-loaded on their new laptops seem to be okay with it.

I doubt they know though if they would install XP or Linux on there the laptop would absolutely fly and that's why they don't seem to have problems with it, if they would install XP or Linux and compare it to Vista they would find Vista is a major slow down on their computer.

Re:Well...

I doubt they know though if they would install XP or Linux on there the laptop would absolutely fly and that's why they don't seem to have problems with it, if they would install XP or Linux and compare it to Vista they would find Vista is a major slow down on their computer.

Probably, but I don't know that speed is everything to the average user. They'll put up with a bit of slowdown for an OS that feels powerful, looks pretty and has lots of neat little toys. And Linux has certainly had issues with looking pretty, which is understandable as talented designers aren't as generous as programmers,

And yes, I could be talking about OS X here too; only in the last few years has it not been an OS that's slow as molasses.

Re:Well...

My laptop actually is slower with a standard Ubuntu install than with Vista

I don't really have a hard time believing this. Between video acceleration (non-restricted drivers) and things like networking support (ndiswrapper aka the spawn of satan) it might be easy to get a situation where some things are or just feel more speedy on Vista. I have Vista on a desktop at home just trying it out and performance (aside from file copying) has never been a problem. While I think there are some serious design issues with Vista I do not find any fault with response time or performance on moderately new hardware.

An extreme case is startup/shutdown/hibernate times. On XP/Vista it takes about 30-45 seconds goes from off to usable and about 8 seconds when in hibernation. I may as well shut down the Ubuntu partition since coming out of hibernation is no faster than just starting it up normally (which takes a lot longer than 30 seconds) and occasionally hibernation fails to resume correctly.

Re:Well...

Probably the video drivers. I know my XP runs quite a bit faster than ubuntu. I can't run you tube videos in full screen in ubuntu without major drops in frame rate. Not only that, I have to restart X when changing users or the radeon gl renderer changes to mesa.

Re:XP?

At least I can generate cryptographically secure pseudorandom numbers.. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/12/1528211 [slashdot.org]

Re:XP?

I was at Borders the other day and saw their computers booting up Windows 98 ;-)

I am too - seriously!

I was very slow to move from NT4, because Win2k was kinda half baked in its first release (though not as bad as Vista). But I've always had good results starting with Service Pack 2.

The key is to install FireFox, never use Internet Explorer or any of the apps that use it (like Outlook), and don't ever expose it directly to the Internet. (The one time I did, it only took an hour or so to get clobbered by the Welchia worm.)

My wife runs XP, but mainly because that's what came on her laptop. The only real advantage I see to XP is the fast user switching. But she's never going to be a Vista user: she just bought an iMac, to run Final Cut on for her video artwork.

Re:It's nice to share.

Nope, Windows 2000 native on Opterons and Athlon64s, with a variety of Nvidia video cards, works fine and runs plenty fast. There is no malware of any kind. Seriously, I've audited the crap out of everything, it's clean. (Auditing in this case means: Hard drives physically removed and attached to non-networked machines with fresh OS installs, run the latest malware scanners from the CDs. Always comes up clean.) The Windows machines are behind Linux firewalls and basically get nothing installed beyond a few commercial 2000-era applications, plus the latest Firefox.

Re:It's nice to share.

I bow before your perversity. Where do you get drivers?

Um... don't you mean, perseverance [answers.com]? Although that level of perseverance is still pretty perverse [answers.com]. Pedantic? Probably.

Re:It's nice to share.

Win2K drivers are more common than Vista drivers.

Unless, of course, you want to run shiny new things. I'll bet he's not running any games past D9 on it.

Re:It's nice to share.

I'll bet he's not running any games past D9 on it.

Since DX10 is only available for Vista, I'd say that's a pretty safe bet.

Re:Recognize the error and wait for Win7

Since there have been a number of reports of people using Windows Server 2008 as a workstation and getting better performance than Vista, it's clear that Vista's days are numbered.

I've never cared for XP's eye candy or Vista's eye candy... all I want in a Windows-compatible OS is a Windows 2000-like GUI, support for the latest hardware, updated security patches, and a minimum of bloat. XP can do it, Server 2008 can do it, and any future OS (or OS emulation like WINE) that can do it will be fine with me, too.

I don't use a computer to look at pretty transparent windows. I use a computer to run applications. Any OS "feature" that steals CPU cycles away from my applications does not give me warm fuzzy feelings. Such "features" send me on a search for the method to turn them off and get back to the stripped-down, efficient GUI of Windows 2000. My hardware and my apps are where it's at for me. If the OS wants to be the star, it can take a hike. That is where MS went wrong with Vista.

Re:for those of us old enough to remmeber...

I'm old enough to remember...

Here's what you're missing... Win95 did have a number of significant improvements over 3.11. Vista does not have significant improvements over XP. It's a few security fixes, lots of eye candy, and lots of DRM or similar protectionist practices that mean you have to contact MS every time you switch your hard drive.

There is no benefit whatsoever in switching to Vista. There are, however, consequences in terms of performance and in the freedom to change hardware etc. It might have been a different story if they'd delivered the Vista they initially promised -- the one with the new file system etc. The Vista they eventually delivered had none of that -- no significant improvements, no "must have" features whatsoever.

Re:vista's not really that bad..

Why not? Generally the reasons that people use Windows when they know there is Linux is because of legacy apps, if they don't work in Vista there is no need to move from XP and not move to Linux/OS X. On most other OSes unless there has been a major change (Like 9X to NT, major changes in scripting languages such as python, PPC to x86) you should expect backwards compatibility.

Absolutely. Backward compatibility is always blamed as the problem, but these legacy apps cost MONEY for new versions (if they are even available). This is one thing that always irritates me about Microsoft. Even on products they don't make any money on, like IE, they have to re-invent the wheel every time they release it.

With Linux you don't have that problem, most apps written 3 years ago for the first Ubuntu will work fine with 8.04 or any other distro. With OS X the OS had such a major change from PPC classic mac based to x86 Unix-based you can't make a claim of backwards compatibility but in general there's no reason to expect that NT X App shouldn't run on NT X+1. MS killing backwards compatibility is killing the entire MS monopoly and moving people to OS X or Linux.

Absolutely. The other great thing about Linux, if you are using FOSS, you can probably just download a version that works with your distro. A pain in terms of time, but at least it's not cash out of your pocket. If that doesn't work out for you, you next option is to modify the source code and recompile under the latest OS. Again, doesn't always work, and can be difficult for some apps, but in general a viable solution.

In general, Microsoft is an incredibly wasteful company. They spend millions of man-hours re-inventing products with minimal improvement. I have heard very little about Vista that is an improvement on XP, yet they spent a ton of work on it. Their whole business model is banking on the idea that software is continually obsolete, and that just isn't the case. A Word Processor is a Word Processor. An OS, as long as it's compatible with the hardware, is an OS. I can write a letter in Word 95 just as easily as I can in Word 2007, gets the same job done. Why would I spend thousands of dollars on all of the upgrades between now and then if Microsoft didn't periodically break all the backward compatibility.