Microsoft Squeezes Win2000 Users 404
darkonc writes "InformationWeek has a story on how Microsoft is squeezing Windows 2000 users as Vista and Office 2007 are being released. While some new software is legitimately unable to run on Windows 2000, other software (like MS's anti-spyware product) will install and run flawlessly — but only if you remove an explicit check for Windows 2000 in the installer." The article notes that other vendors, for example Sun, have more liberal and flexible support policies for legacy products.
Win2000 rules (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Win2000 rules (Score:4, Interesting)
Every recent MS product has just felt *slow*.
Its like outlook and office in general, the interface looks nice and logical, but it has lost its snappiness.
Actions involving a full page refresh appear like a web page.
Clicking between folders in Outlook leaves the old mail on screen briefly and things just aren't better.
I was evaluating visual studio
My colleagues think I should live on oldversion.com, but I just don't like the direction MS has taken.
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I actually find the opposite in the case of Outlook. Going from Outlook 2k3 to 2k7 (RTM - which version were you talking about?) on XP actually seemed to be about the same if not snappier. I don't use most of the other Office apps extensively, though, so I can't really comment on them.
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If you believe some unfair tricks are played by Microsoft, bad Eula etc. and you have some factual evidence just report it to your Competition authority. Europeans please take this form [europa.eu]. Competition authorities have to be triggered and do not work without triggering. They are curious to know consumer complaints.
They make trouble for you. You make trouble for them.
How Al Capone got jailed? "Capone's downfall occurred in 1931 wh
It makes perfect business sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It makes perfect business sense (Score:4, Interesting)
Not a troll, I only run linux and hate windows, but I dont see the logic in your statement.
Re:It makes perfect business sense (Score:5, Informative)
Linux can use any number of GUIs, or no GUI at all. If you want something significantly faster than Windows, don't use Gnome or KDE, as these are a bit bloated (or "fully-featured", if you want to put it nicely). Use XFCE or IceWM or Fluxbox, instead.
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Re:It makes perfect business sense (Score:4, Interesting)
It is. This 4-year-old P3 (Fedora Core 6) box is easily keeping up with my dad's brand-new Dell/XP setup. Both boxes are fully loaded with *everything*, both hardware and software. If I want to make it really snappy, I can do some re-compiling and just install only the stuff I use. I doubt that most MS users can say that.
Re:It makes perfect business sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Erm well of course the new version feels slower. (Score:3, Insightful)
So new version of software expects it'll be installed on faster machine than the last one, so they can shove more features in.
So if I run new version and old version on the same machine, the new version will appear to be slower. Over time you'll PC will get faster and faster and the 'new' product will appear to get snappier and snappier - until the next new version of
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Re:Win2000 rules (Score:4, Informative)
This is strange, because on my test install of Vista, most tasks use less than 5 MB of RAM.
And yes, that's even the total working set, not just the private.
About 30 of 38 use less than 5 MB now.
Maybe MS split up some of their tasks into more processes though, not really sure about this.
Netcraft confirms it: Windows 2000 is dead. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Netcraft confirms it: Windows 2000 is dead. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Netcraft confirms it: Windows 2000 is dead. (Score:4, Funny)
Whoa, dude - slacken that off a bit - If it's too tight to your head, it just works as a transmitter!!
Re:Netcraft confirms it: Windows 2000 is dead. (Score:4, Insightful)
Vista can have all the oooh and aaaaah it wants in it's GUI, but guess what? When I eventually "upgrade" to it, I'm turning all that crap off.
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Re:Netcraft confirms it: Windows 2000 is dead. (Score:5, Interesting)
The first thing I do on Vista is switch to classic (the second being turn off the side bar forever). I wonder if Microsoft have ever heard that their OS is being used by real people to run CAD/CAM applications... not that they want it, but they are forced to.
Will try the same this week with a FireGL card to see if ATI are better.
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"dual opteron system with 4gb memory and quadro fx560 graphics card"
is just 'reasonable'. my computer is a lowly athlon 64 with 2gb of ram and builtin 6150 graphics..
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I do the same thing in XP - reminds me of the beloved Win 2k days. However, having looked and played around with Vista, it actually looks fairly decent, so I think I'll actually give it a chance.
Re:Netcraft confirms it: Windows 2000 is dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people did.
Windows 2000 was an amazing operating system for its time. As stable as XP, it wasn't as much of a resource hog. It would run quite nicely on 64mb of ram. Yeah, aero looks good in Vista, but when it comes to hardware requirements, it is simply not suitable for many businesses who may have hundreds of computers not quite vista ready. If you like aero and would like to upgrade, that's fine. But locking out w2k users with software that will run fine if not for an explicit OS version check is just unfair. If the software is capable of running on an OS, I expect it to run on that OS. I don't think that is asking too much.
Re:Netcraft confirms it: Windows 2000 is dead. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Who are these "most people"?
Only one person I know changed the XP interface back to Classic, and he's a cranky fellow.
Re:Netcraft confirms it: Windows 2000 is dead. (Score:4, Informative)
How about this: a non-negligible number of people changed the UI back to "Windows Classic," and others would if they knew how.
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Welcome to the wonderful world of proprietary software, where the corporation decides what software you can run and under what conditions.
Re:Netcraft confirms it: Windows 2000 is dead. (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft faces a monumental testing job for every piece of software they release. If they cut an OS from the lsit of supported configurations, that's a heap of testing they can avoid. It also means they don't have to worry about future updates being compatible with Windows 2000. In short, a smaller set of platforms is cheaper to develop for.
And I say this as a Windows 2000 user myself. Sure, I'd rather that MS continued to fully support 2000 until there's a genuinely superior option, but I think there are non-evil business reasons for ending such support.
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But what if something obscure in the program happens to not work. If they say it works on 2000 they'd have to support it. This isn't MS screwing anyone, this is just common sense.
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Nice colourful blues and reds, easy to spot the various bits you need to click on?
Re:Netcraft confirms it: Windows 2000 is dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because, of course, black is far more exciting than grey...?
Look, even Apple has been increasing the grey content of OS X steadily since the very start. Now half the applications are brushed metal, which is, uh, kind of grey. And remember the "graphite" theme they introduced after their graphic artist customer base complained that Aqua was too distracting? You know, the one that turns the entire OS grey?
This "grey is for boring people" thing is getting seriously old. Themes are for people who have nothing better to do than play with themes; "dull" colours like grey (and Ubuntu's beige) are for people who are doing interesting things with their computers, and want the interface to get out of the way when they're not interacting with it. Maybe you spend all your time salivating over your awesomely pretty menus and scrollbars, but some of us are too busy enjoying our interesting and fulfilling work to care what the menus look like.
Re:Netcraft confirms it: Windows 2000 is dead. (Score:5, Funny)
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Actually, I worked at a school that had many 2000 machines. It had nothing to with paranoid (these guys would have jumped off a cliff if MS asked). It had everything to do with cost, and Microsoft hadn't released anything in the past 7 years that they would find cost-effective.
Re:Netcraft confirms it: Windows 2000 is dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Netcraft confirms it: Windows 2000 is dead. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Netcraft confirms it: Windows 2000 is dead. (Score:4, Informative)
No, "they" don't. Whoever "they" is.
Out of the box, most distros have a GNOME or KDE desktop with a structure that's quite similar to Windows, sure. Why is that? Because that's what most people who are using Linux for the first time are comfortable with. The distros install a default look that's similar to Windows in order to make it familiar.
However, when you take a look at the desktops of more serious Linux users, people who have been using it for a while, they begin to lose their Windows-ness pretty quickly, some in subtle ways, some in very obvious ways. Mine's not as different as the other guy who responded to you, but it gets less and less Windows-like all the time. The equivalent of the start menu disappeared a long time ago, because I never use it. Where the "start" menu was is my pager application, that allows me to pick which of my virtual desktops to use. Next to it is the system tray (a good idea that Windows picked up from Unix UIs), organized so that 'klipper' is nearest the easily-reached corner position. That's the applet that lets me pick which of the last 40 things I cut I want to select for pasting. I have a task bar, but it's configured to work very differently from the Windows version of the same thing.
If you start looking at behavior, it gets even more different. Focus-follows-mouse is a huge difference, and one that nearly all experienced Unix/Linux users prefer. I like single-click activation. It's fairly rare that all of the windows displayed on my screen are actually running on the computer connected to the screen. A large portion of my work is actually done on command lines -- not because I can't do it graphically, but because the CLI is more efficient. My desktop can hold icons, but rarely does (Alt-F2 plus a working /tmp eliminate the majority of reasons people put stuff on their desktop).
The Windows-ish look is just a default put there for people who don't know how they really want it to be. Experienced users typically make heavy modifications, altering the environment so that it works the way they want it to. And I'm sure that some like it to work like Windows does, and that's a perfectly workable option as well.
Finally, I don't hate Windows. I just don't like the way it works, and I can't change it to work the way I want it to. I feel the same way about OS X, though it's more usable (to me) out of the box than Windows is.
I walked away from Activation (Score:5, Interesting)
I was an MSDN Universal subscriber and Windows developer when XP came out, so I had 10 legit XP licenses. But I had no interest in being an early adopter setting a precedent for activation. Nor, now that they don't allow people to take their copy of the OS with them when they upgrade the machine, did I want to further lock myself into system whose costs increase while my freedoms decrease. I suppose I could have planned on piracy, but I have the odd conviction (one apparently not shared by a whole lot of companies) that it's unethical to make money by breaking the rules.
I stayed with Win2k, moved my data away from Office and into open formats (mbox, Open Office), turned my attention towards FOSS development, and finally switched to Mac. Incidentally, the Mac is very pretty, but I would have been fine with W2K's "hideous" look. Apple's no saint; someday I expect I will similarly have to make the shift to Linux.
Paranoid? No. I just want control of my computer and my data, and I don't want my money to encourage schemes like DRM which erode my freedom and that of others.
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You need to keep up. They rewrote that part of the agreement.
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Re:Netcraft confirms it: Windows 2000 is dead. (Score:4, Informative)
On several occasions, I have recently gone into a couple of local banks and while I was standing in line, I noticed the words "Windows 2000" on their screen savers. I have noticed the same thing at several other business as well. Apparently many businesses that have not felt the need to upgrade.
Re:Netcraft confirms it: Windows 2000 is dead. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Fine, Upgrade to XP an OS that is 6 years old. Yeah right...
The consumer version of Vista is due out Jan 30 2007. I just upgraded everything older than Windows 2000 to Ubuntu Dapper Drake. I still have a few Windows only apps and they run fine on Windows 2K. If I upgrade my Windows 2K machine, it won't be to Windows XP Home.
Are you insane? (Score:2)
Yes, we should upgrade sometime soon, but as long as we can buy extra Win2000 support we won't, as it would mean a *serious* investment. And for what? To have the same functionality as we already have? Get real.
Ease of system administration (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what you get for having systems that can be administered using a simple mouseclick by somone with only superficial knowledge of the matter!
Of course it would be simple to automatically install a registry fix on all systems on his network, but he has become so accustomed to every tiny fix being installed in a hundreds of KB executable with automatic installer that he has never learned (or forgotten) how to script such simple things himself.
The daylight saving time mechanism in Windows is broken anyway. Posix DST handling is much better, especially (but not only) when the definition of start and end dates changes.
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I disagree. My take is "this is what you get for hiring people who believe that the correct way to fix a large number of systems is to click "next next next" on every one of those systems like a trained chimpanzee". What are such people doing in IT anyhow? The whole point of computers is to make repetitive tasks quick and easy, why are you giving yourself a rep
Pretty obvious.. (Score:2)
How do you know the product works perfectly on Win2000? Just cause it looks like it doesn't mean it does...
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I think this is the REAL issue here. Microsoft didn't know for sure it worked on win2k, and this guy doesn't either. He hasn't rigourously tested it in any fashion. He just installs it, runs it a few times and proclaims 'Hey, it works!'.
When an app IS supported, it can have major issues. Unsupported has got to be a lot more risky. If your whole point of running win2k is the stability, running un
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Not only that, but even if Microsoft has tried it and verified that it "works," they almost certainly did not go through a full test cycle on these products using Windows 2000. Although the "if it compiles and runs, ship it!" mentality might work for small OSS programs, it
Cut the BS (Score:5, Insightful)
From the summary: "other software (like MS's anti-spyware product) will install and run flawlessly -- but only if you remove an explicit check for Windows 2000 in the installer."
I work for a software company - and I suspect many Slashdotters do also, and there are extremely good reasons for this. My company's software dropped support for OSX Panther in our last release, even though in all likelihood there wouldn't be any trouble running it on Panther - we weren't using anything that would specifically be known to break Panther, right?
But one has to realize that to release software on a mass scale involves a lot of QA work. You cannot say "we're not using any XP-only features, so it must work on 2K also!", you have to rigorously test your software on all supported platforms. Failure to do so is irresponsible and unprofessional. This means that, if you wish the drop the overhead of testing in 2K, then you stop supporting 2K, and to prevent consumers from installing your software and then coming back to complain about it (or worse, posting a scathing blog entry about your software's suckitude), you simply block the installation of the software on the older OS.
There's nothing evil about this, this is a simple business decision: you cannot support every legacy OS forever, and as new OS'es get released, your QA load increases. At some point you have to drop support for legacy OS'es, even if they are still technologically compatible with your software.
Re:Cut the BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of programs in the win9x era would show a dialog box at installation when you tried to install them on a winnt system : Might not work, unsupported...
Then, it's the user responsability to choose.
Re:Cut the BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Another poster below you also pointed out the same strategy. It is a valid notion, I admit, but considering our software is targeted at average users who may not be technically inclined, I believe ours is the right decision. I believe you are grossly underestimating the intelligence, or dare I suggest, honesty of the average software user.
If you give them the option to install, they will ignore any and all warnings and call you anyway when they run into problems. Worse yet, they will fly off the hook and begin slandering your software to anyone who will listen, and you bet your ass that their version of the story won't contain the fact that they're running on an unsupported OS.
Some won't even understand what the warning means, or some won't even read it - the "OK" button is just too large and tempting to click.
The install/runtime check is more of a preventative motion than anything else. We don't want to present a negative image of our product when know-nothing users decide to run it on unsupported hardware/software and get stuck. We don't want support calls related to this - even listening to them long enough to kick them off the line costs us valuable dollars and cents. We want nothing to do with this possibility - and the number of honest consumers who will legitimately accept the lack of support and run it on an old OS is small enough that we really don't want to open ourselves to that risk. Honestly, if there were a significant number of people still using the OS, we wouldn't drop support for it.
Disclaimer: The above is a personal opinion and in no way represents the views of my employer.
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Add a line on the top of the window when the software is running on an unsupported OS: "This program is not supported on this operating system."
Nothing will stop complete idiots, but this should help significantly.
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Re: Evolution of the OrdinaryUser(OU) (Score:3, Insightful)
Flash Forward to 1999: With the arrival of Windows 98 as the "semi-stable Win95 service pack", many companies ditched DOS and coaxed their employee armies into bei
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There are plenty of
Re:Cut the BS (Score:4, Insightful)
What might work in the shop adequately may not be robust enough for general use. We take OS faults in stride...
Back on topic, I've suspected artificial version lockout on many occasions, stuff that will install on XP but not 2K, even though they are almost identical "under the hood". Seems especially common on high end A/V editing/processing programs. I'm interested that TFA pointed to the Orca editor, that sounds like an quickie way to see just how many of these programs will _actually_ run under win2k.
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Huh? Are there many corporate VPs who phone external tech support themselves, instead of just telling their PA to send an angry email to their corporation's internal IT department -- you know, where that tech that checked "OK" works? How many corporate-VP-type users who don't install their own software even know whic
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I work for a software company - and I suspect many Slashdotters do also, and there are extremely good reasons for this.
Besides taking home a paycheck?
So much for the charitable theory (Score:4, Interesting)
But Microsoft does, through their announced product lifecycle, [microsoft.com] promise to deliver security and other fixes for a period of up to 10 years beyond "general availability" (NOT date of license purchase, a nice loophole penalising customers who buy late in the lifecycle). According to that page, Business customers can expect security updates through 2010. Perhaps they don't classify Spyware as a security issue (would explain a lot).
Al Capone put it best. You can get more upgrades bought with flashy launch hype and a gun, than just flashy launch hype.
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Evil? Not in the best interest of legacy OS users for sure, but evil? Where in blue blazes do you get off on calling that evil?
Get off the high horse and realize that just because we refuse to support your usage of an ancient OS, and we refuse to spend millions in man-hours QA'ing for it when you represent an infinitesimal portion of our customer base, doesn't mean we're evil. For cryin' out loud the damn thing is 7 years old! You don't expect Doom 3 to run on your Nvidia TNT2 do you?
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If the number of users of the ancient OS is that infinitesimally small, then even if it's broken you'll only get a handful of support calls. Force people to jump through a little hoop to install the program, like running the installer with a special "/skiposc
Windows 2000 works *reasonably* well for me ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, I run win2k(sp4) on an old PIII 600 with 128 megs of RAM. It does what I need it to do, if only grudgingly. Why would I "upgrade" to Vista, when I've never had any intention on "upgrading" to XP, which probably would refuse to work with my hardware anyway? (dunno really, haven't checked)
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I've got 3 P75s running here, they have 80W PSUs and passive cooling. Am I supposed to ride this "curve" by upgrading them to 400W monsters ? What would I gain other than increased power usage and unused cycles ?
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built in obsolence (Score:2)
Window
Switch to Solaris then (Score:2, Interesting)
People using Windows really should accept that they are be paying for it to Microsoft and that they will be paying for it in the future, for upgrades or various subscription based offerings. There are plenty of alternatives if you don't want to accept
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Yes. One of the alternatives is to hack around Microsoft's artificial forced upgrade path.
Not true (Score:2)
I've recently done a new install of Win2k, so have had only a few months' use.
(The box was previously running NT Server, and has been retired from that role. It doesn't have the hardware to run XP, so Win2k was the obvious choice. Win2k will be fine for that particular user, until such time, perhaps, as they start getting PDF files that need a n
MS no longer "supports" win 2000 (Score:2, Interesting)
Since when did MS support any OS? I mean if I report a bug in Windows XP it won't be fixed. MS help desk will just tell me that's a "known issue", or they won't even admit the bug exists. So, basically I have the same level of support in Win 2000 as any other version.
All you need to do is avoid using MS products ( I mea
Solaris 2.6 support? (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, 2.6 is a pretty old release and we're overdue doing an upgrade on it, but it's inaccurate to say Sun still support it. Added to that, there are a number of Sun Alerts which come out and say that older versions aren't being evaluated for certain bugs.
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Pray tell, are you trolling, or merely ignorant?
The upgrade from Win2k to WinXP damn well does not require a reformat. You pop the XP disc in the drive, it upgrades Windows (leaving everything else just how it found it), yo
And somebody asked why MS is hated the other day (Score:2, Insightful)
You love me, you really love me ! (Score:5, Funny)
I think that's why Microsoft does it too.
I still haven't figured out why Uncle Tom squeezes me though.
Self-competition! It's *SO* nice. For MS. (Score:2, Interesting)
Frankly I'm sick and tired of it. I have installed Ubuntu Linux as a cross-boot on many of my machines. Unfortunately, several things are still making it hard for me to abandon Microsoft completely. One of them is actually Microsoft's DRM being used by a
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The irony is that in the US.. and it literally would be any one. Just take out your local financial section and throw a dart at the page.. yep.. that one's got it's greasy bribing hooks in the government too.
The antitrust law here is kind of like the bill of rights, an antiquated and curious roll of vintage toilet paper.
It's a sin to bear false witniss. (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally I suspect that they are still making enough cash on the current releases that they don't have to resort to petty tricks. IF they wanted to pull the plug on the older O.S.'s then they could probably do a much better job than disabling software.
Anyhow, it's better to be unassuming than to assume they would be dishonest. We really don't don't know what their motive was, and, like them or not, we shouldn't just assume their action was dishonest or that it was done for an insidious reason.
The bottom line is: it's a sin to bear false witniss, even if it's against Microsoft.
Article should be entitled... (Score:4, Funny)
Another windows 2k user here (Score:2, Insightful)
Vista Upgrade Advisor (Score:5, Interesting)
Is MSFT all that unreasonable? (Score:2)
Meanwhile, you have to do the same thing for... (Score:2)
Abandonware status for OS'es once dropped (Score:3, Insightful)
It may run well, but I bet you a dollar that... (Score:2)
This is very interesting... (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems as if they've forgotten who they work for?
Do they really believe that users will continue to take this incredibly shoddy treatment?
It is becoming incredibly obvious to me that Microsoft is trying to leverage their monopoly worse than ever before, with products and the general attitude of the software design towards the user such as Vista.
Then again, what more can you expect from a company who has pretty much 'stolen' their way to the top? The
Lazy admins. Boo hoo! (Score:3, Informative)
I'm puzzled... (Score:2)
Anyone who's ever built an install for an Windows environment, be it with the (weak) tool in Visual Studio or InstallShield or whatever has most likely seen an option screen where you can choose to check which OSes the install is for (and will be allowed to be used on.)
A software developer could've just as easily built software that locked out Win2k five or more years ago if they wanted to.
Another problem I've found, (Score:3, Interesting)
I went out there and found that they've changed the online Hotmail interface.
It informs you that there is some "new & improved look" to the Hotmail interface.
It hangs up indefinitely but displays a message telling you to click a link if you are
having trouble with the new look. She must click the link for anything at all to happen,
it then gives her a Hotmail screen but informs her that she is now in "reduced functionality mode"
and that not all features will be available.
"But it works on my home computer!" and I query her, "Ah, but I'll bet it's running Windows XP, right?"
"Yes" she tells me.
So I then go to the microsoft site and check for any win2k updates that may help with this.
I find none are available. So then I attempt to track down IE7 for win2k.
Nope. According to the M$ website IE7 is available for windows XP and up.
A few minutes more of research and I find that IE7 will not now nor ever be available for Windows 2000.
Another machine in that office (set to do automatic M$ updates) is running Office 2003. Over the past several months M$ Word has become almost unusable. The woman at that machine opens online email from Yahoo then uses copy & paste, she copies the text from an online message in an IE6 window then tries to paste it into a M$ Word blank document.
Word just hangs up for very long periods, sometimes 15 minutes, sometimes Word crashes. Most of the time she just brings up task manager and kills Word then re-tries it over and over until it works.
It always worked fine until about 6 months ago. The copy of Office was pre-installed by Dell.
How much you wanna bet they sabotaged it during an "update" to cause frustration and make the customer seek a solution which of course will be a shiny, brand new package of Office 2007 ?? Eh?? No way to PROVE it, but...
Cha-ching for M$!! There are several win2k machines in that office and they all use Hotmail.
I will guarantee you that over the next 12 months that they will strangle everything else off, slowly.
Win2k and below will be choked off at an insane pace, XP will be choked off a little slower but it will still happen none the less.
I want to also note that the Linux developers are following suit.
I use Suse 10.0 on my primary work horse. I've noticed support and focus has wanned.
Everyone is all gung-ho on 10.2 (which I have no intentions of using) and developers are putting all their effort on the current release. 10.0 has been moved to the back of the bus.
I find that many of the apt repositories have been abandoned or moved and I'm having trouble
with dependencies thus making upgrading a nightmare.
Because of this and the MicroSu$e merger it appears that it's time for me to jump ship and move to
one of the latest ubuntu distros.
M$ isn't the only one pulling this crap off.
The Linux folks do it yearly, M$ does it about every 5 years.
God strike me dead for saying in defense of M$..
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Word just hangs up for very long periods, sometimes 15 minutes, sometimes Word crashes. Most of the time she just brings up task manager and kills Word then re-t
The Boston Globe (Score:5, Funny)
Man, those guys are good!
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Do you mean the Malicious Software Removal Tool [microsoft.com]? That also gets delivered on Windows 2000, IIRC. It will run exactly once after install, and check for a numb
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Are these changes also minor? http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/12/XPK ernel/ [microsoft.com] (and that article refers to the RTM version of Windows XP, so doesn't even touch on the changes introduced in XP SP2)