Microsoft Extends XP For Low-Cost Laptops 388
Ian Lamont writes "Microsoft says it will extend the sales of Windows XP Home to OEMs by several years, but it's not in response to the SaveXP petition. Microsoft is supposedly making the move in part to ensure that Linux doesn't dominate the market for certain types of 'ultra-low-cost' laptops. XP will be available for OEMs until June 30, 2010, or one year after the availability of the next client version of Windows, whichever date comes later. This greatly extends the earlier XP deadline of June 30 of this year (which was an extension itself), and means XP will potentially be installed on new computers nearly a decade after its original release. The author of the article suggests that the post-June 2008 release of Atom-based laptops encouraged Microsoft to extend XP, even though Intel says Atom can support Vista. Intel also claims that 'Moblin' Linux will be available on Atom-equipped mobile devices starting this summer."
"can support vista" (Score:4, Insightful)
5 minutes? (Score:5, Funny)
Boot time does not count!
Re:5 minutes? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:5 minutes? (Score:5, Funny)
No, it's market distortion (Score:3, Interesting)
The way things are going, I'm hoping to leapfrog completely over Vista... If my employer makes it possible, I'll land in Linux Land and perhaps never have to use Microsoft products at all. (Dream on, Mr. Adequate.)
Re:No, it's market distortion (Score:4, Insightful)
You've got it backwards. The market exists, the devices already exist and are selling like hotcakes - Asus is seeling EeePCs as fast as it can make them, they're selling at above RRP everywhere and others are bringing similar devices to market in the coming weeks and months. Till this week they ran Linux out of the box. That scared Microsoft into extending the life of XP and offering Asus an extra-low price. Microsoft haven't created the market, they're reacting to it.
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Re:5 minutes? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:5 minutes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"can support vista" (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows Vista is the best thing to happen to Linux.
Now by Microsoft's own admission!
Re:"can support vista" (Score:5, Interesting)
And while yes, that's funny on the surface, it's no joke.
This shows Microsoft's priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This shows Microsoft's priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
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You reckon customers buying cheap mini laptops won't notice one option will require them to buy Office, antivirus, etc, and more memory to store it all in?
Especially since the other option includes a heap more free, is a lot easier on the hardware and doesn't break as often.
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Re:This shows Microsoft's priorities (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This shows Microsoft's priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft's customers are and always have been, developers. Why? No business goes out and puts in a Windows network because they think it's great - they do it because they need to run XYZ application that runs their business, and *IT* requires a Windows network.
Remember the monkey boy.
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Customers are people who buy Microsoft products. Hardware manufacturers are #1, followed by corporate purchasing departments.
Developers might be third.
That doesn't mean that they don't care about developers, that just means that developers are not Microsoft's customers, any more than authors are the customers of Random House.
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No one creates software because "Windows is such a great platform". The only reason why we can't afford to drop Windows support -- in most case, SOLE support, is that 100% of customers run Windows. It's a chicken and egg problem, with developers (the more technical people) wanting to get away from Windows the most.
Future Niche. (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows XP could become the new Windows CE ? (Score:4, Informative)
Haven't you heard of "Windows XP Embedded" [wikipedia.org] It's a componentized version of Win XP Pro and is based on the same binaries as XP Professional. It's is marketed towards developers for OEMs, ISVs and IHVs that want the full Win32 API support of Windows but without the overhead of Professional. It runs existing Windows applications and device drivers off-the-shelf on devices with at least 32MB Compact Flash, 32MB RAM and a P-200 microprocessor. "XPe" was released on November 28, 2001. As of February 2007, the newest release is Windows XP Embedded SP2 Feature Pack 2007.
XPe is not related to Windows CE. They target different devices and they each have their pros and cons which make them attractive to different OEMs for different types of devices. For instance, XPe will never get down to the small footprint that CE works in. However, CE does not have the Win32 APIs XPe has (although CE has an API that is similar to the Win32 API), nor can it run the tens of thousands of drivers and applications that already exist.
The devices targeted for XPe have included ATMs, arcade games, slot machines, cash registers, industrial robotics, thin clients, set-top boxes, network attached storage (NAS), time clocks, navigation devices, etc. Custom versions of the OS can be deployed onto anything but a full-fledged PC; even though XPe supports the same hardware that XP Professional supports (x86 architecture), licensing restrictions prevent it from being deployed on to standard PCs :-(
I was just thinking as I was reading this topic of how I would love to be able to load only the components I want. I'm a great fan of XP Pro and use it daily in my work. I hope I will never have to downgrade to Vista. These days I am developing software for Adobe Flex & Action Script 3. If I stay at this, I may just switch to Linux when full support for that comes out next year.
The above is directly quoted from Wikipedia.
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What it's about (Score:3, Interesting)
Is keeping their product in front of the customer.
This is going to make a lot of people unhappy. Lots of OEMs are going to have a little chat with Microsoft about this whole death-of-XP thing I think.
If Vista runs well on a MID I will be shocked. If it ran well, the things would ship with Vista and we wouldn't be having this 8-year-old OS discussion at all since these devices weren't even announced until Vista had been out for a year.
Self Deprication? (Score:3, Interesting)
cool... (Score:4, Informative)
wow. this is good news!
Good for my wallet. (Score:2)
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Market Presence (Score:4, Insightful)
Vista isn't going to do it and Windows Mobile is less than satisfying. XP is Microsofts only offering that can be squeezed onto machines that otherwise might have been exclusively Linux powered. I think this sucks for developers more than anything in that effectively Microsoft is asking them to support two platforms.
A shift in the market, not in MS. (Score:5, Insightful)
They didn't release it to the public because it wasn't as effective as a full desktop version of Windows (although if you've used it you'll see it's more user friendly than Starter Edition) and because not enough people were buying new computers that couldn't run what they saw as the current OS.
Now with a shift towards lower powered ultra mobiles, people are buying computers that aren't really suited to run what they see as the current OS.
They are already maintaining a way to run a supported version of Windows on PCs going back to P233 with 64MB RAM because they saw a market driven reason for it. Extending the availability of XP Home just means they are recognizing a similar market in consumer space now.
What's suprising here? (Score:3, Informative)
Will they extend Mainstream support further? (Score:3, Interesting)
IPv6? (Score:2)
seems like the kind of thing they've 'accidentally' messed up in the past..
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Some Clarity in the Post (Score:4, Informative)
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Shows how much MS cares about users (Score:2)
So if you're the average user petitioning MS to save XP, you basically get told to suck it. But if you're an OEM and threaten to carry low-cost Linux laptops, MS rolls over for them.
Gives you a warm fuzzy feeling as a user, doesn't it? A warm fuzzy feeling in your a--. If there was any residual doubt that MS prizes sales over users, now you know.
Even a blind pig finds an acorn from time to time (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a long way of setting some background; what I'm trying to say is that when a company that's enjoyed success for years decides that their success is due to some special insight or knowledge - the market corrects them. IBM thought they were the leaders in PC technology and made a turn and marched off into the distance. They didn't realize that nobody followed them until much later.
For IBM, this was the thing that changed them from being the leaders in PCs to an also-ran PC company in just a few short years. In their pride, they dictated how the future of PCs should be and ignored their market. Too bad for them; they're completely out of the PC business now.
For Microsoft, Vista is their "Microchannel" moment. They lost sight of the need to satisfy their customer's needs and decided to make some fundamental changes (baked in DRM) on their own. Now they're enjoying the result of that decision; sales of Vista are far, far lower than they expected. And those sales figures don't include all the new machines that came with Vista that have since been upgraded to XP. I know that Vista will never touch any PC I own or control.
Since there's a few smart people at Microsoft they've extended XP's life a few more years. A decent choice; better to sell the obsolete OS than lose more customers to Linux. This won't fix the real problem, though - Microsoft needs to decide which customers they're actually serving. If it's the end user then the next version of Windows is critical; another DRM infested release will spell the end. If they're actually serving corporate interests then it doesn't matter; they've failed already and we're just watching the death throes.
While Microsoft plays their games, Linux continues to evolve and improve. This is a golden opportunity for Linux on the desktop...
Microsoft stuck in the middle.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like their chess pieces are going to get taken whatever move they make.
This is why they are failing over and over (Score:3, Insightful)
get a load of that.
in which business school they teach students to ditch successful products and to only use them to prevent competitors from getting a slice of some low cost market ?
leave that aside, what kind of logic can justify this ? if you have something successful, you stick by it and make a pillar out of it.
no sir. ms doesnt do that. because they are much involved in their years long legacy of playing dirty, screwing customers AND partners alike and that. in recent years, they have also shifted much attention to 'preventing competitors from being successful' rather than trying to be successful themselves.
excuse me, microsoft lovers in slashdot, im no fanboy of anything, but this picture isnt a neat picture and there is nothing about it to even try defending against any criticism.
There goes my lab's purchases of Windows (Score:5, Interesting)
If they only do this for "low-cost" PCs, then we'll have to completely move away from the Office suite and go to OpenOffice instead. Be a shame, but if they don't want us to use Windows, that's their problem.
Too late for me (Score:5, Interesting)
The straw that broke the camel's back was the problems I had with formulas in Word for Mac on my brother-in-law's iBook. Nice machine but OO.o works much better for me - and since it runs on Linux, and I always wanted a LIGHT notebook... eee PC just won out as the logical option for my on-the-move needs. If I could run a Matlab equivalent on it (and I will definitely look into that) this little gem might replace one of my desktops as well.
By the way, this is my first experiment with Linux as a desktop OS. I have a router with CentOS at home, but as my WinXP-running desktops die out, I'll be replacing them with Linux. Sorry MS, no Vista for me.
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Check out GNU Octave [gnu.org], there are even books on both [amazon.com].
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I just found out there's a Linux version of Matlab. Problem solved.
Vista is a placeholder (Score:5, Insightful)
If we assume that business customers are where MS's real profits come from, then Vista is a fuck-up of epic proportions. I don't know of ANY business that plans to "upgrade" to Vista. Why would they? A five-year-old PC will run XP and basic office-type appliations at full-speed (especially if those machines have 1GB of RAM or more). What does Vista offer as an improvement? Yeah, the security is better, but in a corporate setting, those machines are (hopefully) locked down via Group Policies and permissions anyway.
It's just impossible to justify in a corporate setting. Upgrade all the machines, to get performance rougly equal to what you already have. Oh, and lets not forget that quite a few peripherals don't and WON'T have Vista drivers.
Now, the next version of Windows will come on a hardware-upgrade cycle for a lot of companies, so it will probably sell better. But even then, I imagine that many companies are planning to stick with XP until it's just no longer possible to run it on new machines. And that could be a long time.
rock and hard place for MS (Score:5, Interesting)
Eee Pc opened the floodgates - the future looks to be low power, SSD, minimal RAM long battery "laptop" style devices that will never run Vista in a million years.
This is about containment of Linux - as this is the OS of choice for this new breed.
I bet MS is shitting bricks over this, I have an Eee and the Linux flavor on it is very nice indeed. I still have not put Ubuntu on it.
I keep hearing that 70% of PCs in a year or so will be laptops, if 50% of them are low power devices then that 1/4 to 1/3 of PC in a few years that will not run Vista - you can kinda see why they are doing it.
However, when customers are told that they can only have Vista on their desktop or XP on their laptop they will be annoyed. Even more when XP is being phased out but new SPs are available for the "laptop" version of XP. I can understand what MS is doing, but I think it can (and will) go wrong for them in many ways. Interesting times ahead.
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Do you just not think, before posting, or are you genuinely delusional ?
Eee Pc opened the floodgates - the future looks to be low power, SSD, minimal RAM long battery "laptop" style devices that will never run Vista in a million years.
The Eee PC is one iteration of "Moore's Law" away from being a decent Vista machine. So, less than 12 months from now, given how long it's already been out.
I keep hearing that 70% of PCs in a year or so will be laptops, if 50% of them are low power devices then that 1/4
what would Microsoft do if UMP's went ARM or PPC (Score:5, Interesting)
IMO, it would shut Microsoft out of this market and give the hardware vendors the profit margins they can build a business on. Bulking up the devices so Windows XP will fit on them and taking money from Microsoft to put Windows on them is not a sustainable business. Microsoft will pull the plug when they've limited choice to Windows and Windows only and then pull the plug on the payola for being a Microsoft supporter.
Microsoft is not a hardware vendors friend and they should know this and be doing something about keeping control of their own destiny. IMO.
LoB
So, when will it actually be phased out? (Score:3, Funny)
Meaning... 2013 or 2014? Just an (un)educated guess based off what their previous initial "planned release dates" translate into on the real world calendar.
...one day I would love to see what sort of calendar MS uses for when they first announce a planned release date...
It's funny how reality can often be so humorous.
Re:It's really sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's really sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista is often criticized for its lack of killer features to justify its increased greediness. I personally think the UI's improvements are handy, but if I could have them in XP, I'd be just as happy. And I certainly couldn't justify spending $1000 more on a document handling laptop just so I can run Vista vs XP. Linux resource requirements seem to be relatively stable compared to MS operating systems. Really, only media-intensive work (eg transcoding) and "blockbuster" games are even capable of significantly loading a modern machine. For many tasks, people are now preferring to take their Moore's Law profits in money rather than performance.
Another factor might be that the GHz wall and relative difficulty of parallel programming means that there's just no perceived performance benefit to typical tasks from the newest hardware, and the benefits can be cancelled out by suboptimal software design (see again Vista benchmark results). Due to this lack of progress, people are choosing (for the first time since the eighties?) that cheaper hardware running less inefficient software is a better use of their resources.
Re:It's really sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's really sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
I used Vista for months before finally getting fed up and switching to Linux. The fact that Linux can do *more* eye candy than Vista and still run on more meagre hardware is one of hundreds of testaments to Linux's actual superiority to Windows. It infuriates me that the most we get out of Vista visual effects is a glass engine, a 3d switcher, and somewhat boring window open/close animations that requires ~ 2 GiB of RAM to do it with any measure of decent speed.
The obvious answer, of course, is that Windows is and always has been a bloated piece of shit. It becomes more apparent with each Windows release: Windows because more massive, memory intensive, and insecure, and only a minuscule amount of improved stability against a typical Linux distro, which is small, nimble, efficient, inherently secure, and extremely stable, and increases in this way on every upgrade curve.
Vista pretty much proves this. How massive is it? Did we just double the system requirements for Windows *again* like with XP? What about that whatyamacallit system: Lunix? Lanex? Linux? Whatever the hell it is. Doesn't that run on my computer with all them snazzy features Windows claims to have without being s bitch to run?
No wonder there's been a noticeable increase of Windows migration and Linux/Mac OS X adoption, even the not-so-much-technical users are starting to notice how crappy Windows is.
Re:It's really sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's really sad... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not as secure as Debian, but Debian has never been a Prime Target of every virus writer in the world, either.
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[...] a typical Linux distro, which is small, [...]
Most distro's I wouldn't exactly call small. When it doesn't fit on a single CD (700 MB) it is not small anymore. Most distro's come as multi-CD or these days maybe even multi-DVD releases.
Now of course that includes a lot of other software, to make it all usable, but still... I wouldn't call it small. Nor with any lack of bloat (three web browsers, five window managers, two windowing systems, three kernels, two desktop environments, a dozen text editors, etc).
Re:It's really sad... (Score:5, Informative)
An OS, a window manager, a desktop environment, tons of games, an office suite, an image editor, a DVD writer, a ton of 3D effects, a ton of screensavers, etc.
To compare, on the vista DVD, you get:
An OS+window manager+desktop environment (and you can't choose which ones), some games, a few screensavers, 3-4 3D effects, and that's pretty much it. And when installed it takes up what, like 10 gigs?
And as far as the 6 CDs or 1 DVD Linux downloads, these include ALL packages, so if you don't have internet access you can still install all your stuff. But Most of them you don't even need. I just set up a LAMP server today (no gui). I used CDs 1 and 2. That's it. And about 90% was from CD1. So yeah, I would say Linux is pretty damn small [damnsmalllinux.org] indeed.
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The Live CD aspect saved me a few times when mucking about on a computer where the installed OS was unstable and/or virus-ridden.
Kernel updates = more speed too (Score:3, Informative)
The re-release
Speak for Microsoft. I see great improvment. (Score:4, Insightful)
It might also be a recognition that the upgrade treadmill is no longer providing much in the way of new value for the end users, compared to the nineties and early this century.
Recognition? It's a downright admission to market failure. This is not something that can be said for free software though.
The last seven years have provided all sorts of great things for free software users that were stuffed into the same modest hardware requirements. Interfaces that were functional and stable have become beautiful without excessive bloat. There are all sorts of productivity increasing features. Printer support has gone from decent to phenomenal. Media playing and transcoding was very hard to come by seven years ago, now it's common and very good. Network integration in both KDE and Gnome is astonishing and this feature alone would make it impossible for me to consider running XP outside of Parallels or some other Virtual Box. Then there are all the specialty applications. The exponentially growing Debian tree has applications for just about any purpose you can think of and it reflects an even larger body of free code.
Free software is not standing still either. People have new itches and they are scratching them so things are not going to slow down anytime soon. Besides better interfaces and specialty applications there are basic communications and sharing needs that people have. I imagine greater speech recognition, better wireless communication in general, better automation of wireless file transfer and synchronization based on location and a host of other digital life uses. Better and cheaper displays will create all sorts of information surfaces and free computing will be the first to really fill the smart house. People have made a good start with X10 type stuff but the ease of porting to ever smaller and more powerful platforms finally will make these things common.
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The point being that the increase in hardware capability is not (very much) opening new areas of software capability, and the developments in software capability are not (as much) driving repeated short life-cycle sales of hardware.
Hopefully there will be some new breakthroughs in the next few yea
Re:Speak for Microsoft. I see great improvment. (Score:5, Informative)
in the years leading up to 2000 there were major advances in the windows/PC world every couple of years
* 1993 - windows NT, a proper 32 bit version of windows.
* 1995 - windows 95, introduced plug and play allowing users to easilly add devices. Unfortunately based on a rather crummy 16/32 bit hybrid codebase that gave better support for older apps but limited stability and security.
* 1998 - windows 98, introduced decent support for USB (there was some support in the last OEM service releases of 95 but USB seriously got going with 98) allowing much easier addition of arbitary external devices.
* 2000 - windows 2000, brought together the stability of the NT line with support for critical things like plug and play and USB.
Since then the windows world has really stagnated. MS is adding new features but by and large they just aren't that significant to most users particually when the performance cost is considered.
Meanwhile linux has as you say been really catching up and even surpassing windows in many areas. For people with no apps tying them to windows (or who are buying a machine they don't plan to run such apps on) linux is now a very viable choice.
It's funny how free software changes perspectives. (Score:3, Interesting)
Those were significant improvements for a single company back in the 90s, but free software has completely blown them away. Most people also associate the porting of browsers and other programs to Windows with the general progress of the 90s. Since 2000, besides UI, free software hardware abstraction and device support has finally caught up to the non free world for practical purposes.
Free software portability and architecture support had already eclipsed Microsoft's ability by 2000 and totally dominates
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But generally, you're right. With 2k, Windows was a "finished" product. It had everything. It was stable. Anything XP brought along could have been done in a service pack. And certainly everything Vista brought. Unless you really, really wanted to use one of the few features added in XP, you had no compelling reason to upgrade. This is even more true for Vista.
Now M
Re:Speak for Microsoft. I see great improvment. (Score:5, Insightful)
I would add one more release:
* Oct 2001 Windows XP - added the games compatability of the Win9X codebase with the stability of the Windows 2000 codebase. With SP2, XP added a number of much-needed security features.
I believe Windows XP is the last release of Windows that was written to directly answer the needs of end users. Windows Vista was about locking users in, and users are rejecting it en masse.
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Still: the (AUD) $1000 price comparison was more intended to contrast a "full fe
Re:It's really sad... (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's see. Athlon Slot-A 700MHz. Voodoo3 graphics. 64MB RAM (later upgraded to 128MB). 17GB 5400rpm hard drive. 1.44 floppy! 24x CDROM reader. 250W Athlon-approved powersupply.
Minor upgrades my ass, you'd be replacing everything but the case.
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All that lack of progress goes away if you turn off UAC all together.
That got rid of all my frustrations (well except that my Nvidia drivers are locking up the system about 1-2x per week, and that XP is still faster for gaming); and except for gaming, I don't spend any more time in XP.
Vista has vastly improved boot caching/defragging of some sort as well; I get to a usable desktop immediately after logging in, and clicking firefox as soon as I can opens a window within about 3-5 seconds, as opposed to in
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Re:It's really sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's really sad... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Anyway, this isn't a big deal for me, as even if I'm using Vista, I'm not using DRM protected HD videos. As little as I'm supporting iTunes.
I'm with you on this, but for a different reason. (Score:5, Insightful)
Be happy, Microsoft might be an evil entity or a tool of evil men, but at the very least, many of its users found Linux or BSD or even Darwin because of this. By the same token, competition has been good for the Linux geeks. If the arena full of evil tyrants wasn't there, they would've never received the same press they got now. Had it not been for gaming, some geeks might have never discovered they were geeks.
Microsoft was a stage in evolution, if one seeks to see it as such. They put lots of cheap computers into the homes of those who would've been too inept to make use of the various Unices. Be happy for it, is what I say. Competition has been great for Linux, and would you truly wish to have the OS that is the world's biggest target?
If those in the community decide to fight against Microsoft, they will become what they kill. Microsoft became what they killed (IBM in 87 anyone?). Don't strive to kill Microsoft's joy. Microsoft is sinking themselves. Just keep doing what we've all been doing. It works far more than aggressively fighting for ground. Remember Sun Tzu: "Any warrior can fight a battle and win, but a master wins the war before the battle is fought." Try it. Microsoft is doing admirably at shoving their own foot in their own mouth. All the rest of us have to do is just help the "lusers" in our lives learn to use something else, and make that transition less painful than it would've been for them when many of us got into Unix.
You don't have to be a "guru" or a "wizard" or "3l33t" to help someone less technically inclined. Who knows, they might be able to help elsewhere.
Re:I'm with you on this, but for a different reaso (Score:2)
In part true... (Score:3, Informative)
Linux has evolved a lot since the simple tools that it was once comprised off... but as many who tool around with Linux From scratch can tell you, it is still a relatively simple system, if only a sort of tank which is carrying a train's worth of bells and whistles.
Whereas Microsoft Windows is more like
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... to see a 7 years old OS making the news because it will be extended to 10 years! It's like saying Ford extending the life of their 1965 sedan into the 2010. I mean it works, but I wouldn't define it as an achievement of human progress.
Just because the model T was built for twenty years doesn't mean that all other innovation and progress came to a grinding halt.
People know how to use XP, and how to fix it when it's broken. Who needs an upgrade?
Re:It's really sad... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's really sad... (Score:4, Insightful)
In my opinion the only thing Vista was properly designed to do is strip money from customers.
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Re:It's really sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
On top of that it needs to be actually secure, table and reliable. It would also be nice that it be readily repairable and not self destruct at random intervals.
The only real difference between 2000 and 2008, it should have the latest drivers properly implemented.
So all I want is an OS that I will be able to use for the rest of my life, without being extorted for upgrades, without being forced to use applications I have no interest in, without being subjected to inconveniences due to ill conceived anti-piracy methods, without bugs the will never get repaired because you should buy the latest version that has those faults supposedly repaired, without having to pay more for detailed help files and, most importantly without wasting hardware performance on the OS that should be used for applications.
I gotta tell you that those 8 years have taught me one thing for sure and certain, M$ ain't the company to provide the required solution but the have certainly demonstrated time and again the problems caused when those 'withouts' are replaced by 'withs'.
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exploit the current multi-core CPUs as today's freshly minted operating systems.
These problems aren't exactly brand new. They've been around for a LONG time, even
on PC based systems.
If you OS from 2000 can't handle multiple processors then it's just crap.
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The 64-bit architecture seemed not to help very much. Most application run slower (the code itself is larger, and there's no compensating increase). The only substantive benefit to a 64-bit architecture is the ability to handle more than 4GB of memory. Apparantly 32-bit XP can do that if tweaked - any on
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Re:It's really sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really.
Software isn't hardware, and just because the public is groomed to accept drastic OS changes doesn't mean that we need to replace systems that work sufficiently well for their intended purpose. Refinement instead of replacement can avoid all sorts of problems such as, well, Vista. Given the MSFT market share, they could have gradually improved XP and made even more money than they have by dumping capital into Vista.
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For proof, look at the change list for XP-SP1 and SP2, and SP3 as well when that gets released later this year.
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to force gamers to go vista, and get newer faster hardware, true pc gaming is a small target audience, but they've always been the most obsessed with performance. they spend more on their computers and more often than any other demographic. so even if they're a small demographic (in the millions) loads of companies are trying to get the gaming
Re:It's really sad... (Score:4, Interesting)
Did Microsoft really think people would just stop using older, but perfectly functional hardware and buy new gear? Were they totally nuts? They could have had so much more success if Vista was designed to scale well with various grades of hardware. But it doesn't without a lot of work, and you could just as easily save yourself the trouble by slapping on XP (or Linux). Let's hope for their sake Windows 7 will have a readjustment in their perspective.
Re:It's really sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) The hardware manufacturers make more money. Then then repay MS by not supporting other OSes.
2) The cost of the software remains low in relation to the cost of the total system. People won't notice a $200 OS buried in $1000 of hardware. But in $200 of hardware another $200 stands out.
Big wake up for MS (Score:2)
Most people are more than happy with XP and have no desire for Vista.
Then there's also the emerging market of the Eee PC style lower end devices. XP can run on these, but not Vista.
If I was an MS shareholder I'd be asking HTF MS marketing got so out of step with the market.
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Re:NEW SERVICE PACK NOW? (Score:4, Informative)
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"Slipstream" is a somewhat noxiously overblown word for "updated installer image", don't you think? And all the while you scoff at those who don't care to complete the mind-bogglingly long number of steps needed to "slipstream" basic updates into an installer [winsupersite.com], Linux users have cast off that albatross entirely and simply install the right versions the first time around [debian.org].
Windows still needs some really remedial rehabilitation of its package management "capabilities", and what you lot call "slipstreaming" jus
Re: (Score:2)
Easy ...
You're looking at 2015.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
MS probablly knows they can't kill linux in this space but they really really don't want linux to be the only preinstalled option for such machines.