I'm pretty much forced to use Windows 7, because I have 64-bit applications. Sure there was a 64-bit version of XP, but it's pretty hard to get support for it anymore especially with software updates. My biggest complaint is the number of devices for which there are no 64-bit Windows 7 drivers. I recently had to buy a refurbished 32-bit dual core Dell Windows XP Workstation on EBay to run my large format scanner. The computer built in 2003 bundled with the scanner had Windows 2000 and was way underpowered with just an 850 Mhz Pentium III and 256 MB RAM to be able to process images after scanning. I bought a workstation class machine with 3GB ECC RAM, because I wanted to make sure its components would last at least 10 years.
It's pretty ridiculous that a $20K scanner would have to be abandoned due to lack of Windows 7 drivers. I think it's also ridiculous that Microsoft is dropping XP Professional support on April 8, 2014. I can understand them dropping support for the lame Home version, but there are lots of expensive devices used by businesses that will never have drivers for newer versions. I'm sure after the end of support, future servers won't support Windows XP clients, so it will be more difficult to share files created by devices that must be connected to machines running XP.
You could have installed virtual box with USB support and made a virtual xp machine and use the usb through that.....
I don’t believe it. They aren’t going to drop support in 2014. They’ll extend it again at least once before xp doomsday. I’m guessing 2016 will end up being the absolute last and final no exceptions end of the line for xp.
Agreed. You and I both know that someone could write the drivers for that, but the question is - will they be allowed to? Could such a thing be done out in the wild?
It's a problem that I'm thankful I don't have, but certainly there are millions of people around the world being affected by this OS upgrade. Seems that someone could do what's necessary to fix it.