Microsoft gives XP an extra two years to live (kinda)

The Register ^ | 4/3/2008 | Austin Modine

[dayglored]

> I want one. I need one. Nice computer, too.

I'll take the pair.

[snort]

[neb52]

I run XP on my Thinkpad PIII-500 with 192MB of RAM with no problem. My point was if they kill off XP what will they offer to run on these smaller laptops? The trend supports small lightly used laptops like the eee-PC. Are they betting on the processing power of them to be increased in the next few years, because I doubt that. Eventually as they(Intel and VIA) reach the 2GHZ mark on these processors the heat and energy will be to great. Unless they will come out with multi core processors for this type of computing. So I still think Linux will rule this roost in the long. Linux can be very small, like 2MB small if necessary. Windows can’t even get below 2GB today.

[devere]

Microsoft as usual offers us a choice of an unsupported operating system that works, or a supported one that does not.

[dayglored]

> My point was if they kill off XP what will they offer to run on these smaller laptops? ... I still think Linux will rule this roost in the long. Linux can be very small, like 2MB small if necessary. Windows can’t even get below 2GB today.

I don't dispute that Linux has the ability to be pared down much farther than Windows. Though I'm sure you have a typo there... 2MB (I presume you mean disk space) is not enough to hold any Linux install that can be reasonably used by a typical home user. I would believe 20MB, as I did an embedded Linux controller for a product a few years ago that ran about 30MB and we had a few extra functions.

Anyway, they're not going to kill off XP in practice -- they just want to make it harder to choose. They'll keep trying, but Vista is such a resource pig that they will lose an increasing share of the low-end market if they don't address it with something people want.

[dayglored]

> Microsoft as usual offers us a choice of an unsupported operating system that works, or a supported one that does not.

Cute, but:

1. XP is still supported in the ways that matter (updates), and will be for years to come. It just won't show up on newer machines. Oh well.

2. Vista is still unforgivably poorly supported, given how late in its cycle it is. It's nearly unsupportable.

[wastedyears]

Wow... how much?

[dayglored]

> Wow... how much?

How much what?

[arderkrag]

Yes, it obviously has nothing to do whatsoever with the fact that Vista simply isn’t selling... [/sarcasm]

[zeugma]

That's how it started, and how I saw it running last November when I visited Taipei. It's really meant to run Linux.

Microsoft is in desperation mode. That's the only reason they're allowing this. They see their market getting eaten from above (OS-X, Macs) and below (Linux, Eee-PC).

Even with 90% of the desktop market still theirs, they sense the deterioration, and are willing to allow XP to live even though it hurts Vista, because otherwise their market will collapse around them.

Absolutely. This is something that I've been talking about for a while. Until this announcement, it appeared that microsoft had abandoned the low end of the PC market completely because Vista just simply cannot compete in this space at all. This is really bad news for microsoft because they've bloated their code with piss-poor programming and DRM that sucks the performance out of a system that they may have finally given the opening competing products like Linux have needed.

Apple and Microsoft are effectively competing in the same space of the higher-end systems. Sure, manufacturers will put Vista on mid-level PCs, but those setups are really being sold to the clueless who will pay the price of their ignorance in crappy performance.

This is a smart move by MS as it is clear that Vista is a dog in the marketplace.

[dayglored]

> Yes, it obviously has nothing to do whatsoever with the fact that Vista simply isn’t selling... [/sarcasm]

That's true too, of course. But I think that while Microsoft was developing Vista, the bigger and bigger bloatware, they totally overlooked the fact that that market is moving towards smaller devices (phones, pdas) that want a tighter OS.

[shorty_harris]

I have a fully functional Puppy Linux install on a 256MB USB key. I run it occasionally on my EEEpc (booting from USB). It has a word processor, spreadsheet program, even a few games. Even wireless works. Of course, you need additional space for storing stuff, but for web surfing and email it works fine. But you’re right...I wouldn’t want to use it as my primary OS.

[shorty_harris]

Sorry...I though everyone was talking about linux not fitting on anything smaller that 2GB, so my post doesn’t make much sense..

[Petronski]

Nice ring. I didn’t know you’re Italian.

[Petronski ducks, runs away]

[Golden Eagle]

Good move which will help Microsoft increase their already record profits. The company that makes the EEE PC is excited as well since they’ve already announced the new Windows version is expected to easily outsell their current Linux model. Guess you missed those articles somehow.

[wastedyears]

For the girl

:)

[dayglored]

> Good move which will help Microsoft increase their already record profits. The company that makes the EEE PC is excited as well since they’ve already announced the new Windows version is expected to easily outsell their current Linux model. Guess you missed those articles somehow.

I didn't miss anything, GE. And I didn't write anything at all about how well the Eee-PC/XP might sell against the Eee-PC/Linux. You're getting those visuals again, I guess; better check your meds.

If I HAD commented on the relative potential sales, I'd have speculated that the XP version would indeed outsell the Linux version, if the performance and features were suitable for the market for such small machines.

So what?

The point of the article, which --you-- apparently missed, is that Microsoft is being forced, by a combination of the marketplace and their own mistakes in Vista, to not only prolong the life of the major competition to Vista (namely, XP), but to release versions of it for machines they never anticipated addressing before.

My hat is off to them if they succeed. Good for 'em.

But either they didn't foresee this extra longevity of XP, or they lied for years about it, in an effort to hump Vista (unsuccessfully, obviously).

You know as well as I do that out in Redmond, there are a lot of Vista-humpers who are fit to be tied about the fact their shiny new albatross is being put tight into a corner by a 7-yr-old operating system.

So I don't care one whit if they outsell Linux on the Eee-PC. I'm only saying, "Geez guys, if you're so rich, why ain't you smart?"

You are welcome to retort, "If you're so smart why ain't you rich?", but that's a different thread... ;-)

[Publius6961]

BUMP!

[ThePythonicCow]

2MB (I presume you mean disk space) is not enough to hold any Linux install that can be reasonably used by a typical home user.

True, but not because of Linux. Rather, this is true because of the various applications, such as web browser or word processor, that a general purpose home user will want to run.

The Linux operating system itself can go much lower than the usual desktop applications that run on it.. As stated at IBM's Embedded Linux page:

a Linux system can actually be adapted to work with as little as 256 KB ROM and 512 KB RAM.

If they didn't mind running telnet for their web browser and ed for their word processor (one at a time!), they might need only another 128 Kbytes of RAM. But this is for serious (and insanely impoverished) geeks. Beware that none of the usual command line shells, not even sash - Stand-alone shell will go quite that low. When I have to work down here, I write my own shells using a page or two of C code to fork and exec simple commands, one at a time, as read from the input.

Linux can also stretch the other way. I've run on it systems with 2048 CPUs and 2 terabytes of main memory. This wasn't a cluster; this was a single system image (SSI) multi-processor system.

[roamer_1]

Microsoft HAD to allow XP to live for this, otherwise this would have been Linux's first huge strike against them in the consumer market.

Glad to see XP sticking around, especially if still being sold OEM, but they should have woke up DOS/9x and open-sourced it for these things to get an open community started...

[ThePythonicCow]

There is actually a quite usable Linux that does fit in memory sizes such as 2MB ... embedded Linux in cell phones.

The Motorola RAZR²
is an example of an
advanced embedded system
using embedded Linux

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_Linux:

Embedded Linux has been ported to a variety of processors not suited for use as the processor of desktop or server computers.

It is an alternative to the -- usually proprietary -- bespoke assembler or C software largely used in embedded development. Advantages compared to other embedded operating systems include: the source code can be modified and redistributed; relatively small footprint (a typical installation may require less than two megabytes of memory); no royalty or licensing costs; mature and stable; and a large support base. Embedded Linux systems combine the Linux kernel with a small set of free software utilities. The glibc is often replaced as the C standard library by less resource-consuming alternatives such as dietlibc, uClibc or Newlib.