from the article:
“XP users, on the other hand, may encounter some problems.
Windows XP must use an emulation layer that makes the 4KB sectors appear to be several 512 byte ones. This won’t have much of an impact when reading from the disk, but could lead to”
SmokingJoe’s question:
“How do you know MS will not offer a patch for XP when the time comes?
Remember, these new hard drives don’t even hit the market till the end of January of next year”
J Edgar’s reply:
Maybe I’m wrong, but I thought that was the point of the article under discussion -XP users are are of luck - left in the cold by MS for not upgrading to vista or win 7
From what I have seen, this is driven as much or more from the hardware side as from Microsoft. They want to be able to keep offering larger drive capacities and the old format limits them. If you noticed in the article, they will work with XP, albeit slower on the writes. I’m not sure the older versions of the other OS will have the option. They may have to upgrade. At least it is free with Linux.
The new had drives are not out till January next year. Microsoft is still selling Windows XP on netbooks. How do you suppose Microsoft is going to keep selling XP netbooks and not put in a fix to allow XP users to benefit fully from the new hard drives?