Winamp Shutting Down On December 20

New submitter Cid Highwind writes "If you want to download the latest version of Winamp, you'd better do it soon. According to a new banner on the download page, AOL will be pulling the plug on the iconic llama-whipping music player in a month. 'Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release. Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years.' Ars Technica ran an article last year detailing how the music player lost its dominance."

Drivers are still a bloody pain. I have recently started going quite retro as far as running windoze proggies, since as far as I can see the only "advantage" of acquiring a newer 'doze OS is more system requirements and slower speeds, along with larger and larger hard drive space.

Just recently worked on an upgraded W7premium system, and I must say I am not impressed. Not only does it insist that it is an invalid copy of the OS, despite the presence of the install disc and cert sticker on the machine, I really can not see any performance or useability improvement. Not to mention that I am NOT connecting to the internet to 'validate' the system by the MS pukes, thereby giving them access to the machine, I refuse to 'register' it over the telephone. It's nobody's business what I put on the machine. I paid for the system, not an IRS audit. I'll simply do a websearch to find out how to bypass the MS snoops.

Going back to earlier 'doze versions is looking more and more like the way to go for various reasons, where installing Linux is not possible, and not just the increase in speed for pretty much all programs. Less system demands are a benefit as well!

Yes, MS is intrusive, and the W/8.1 upgrade from W/8 pushes Skydrive more as well. However, writing code for a living than can be easily pirated does present a problem that results in someway to activate it. But i think the automated the phone method should work without a Internet connection, and i think there are ways to prevent info from being sent to MS.

I can imagine how W/9x would fly on a this 6 core AMD 6350 3.9ghz. CPU, ASRock 970 EXTREME3 mobo w/ 8gb ram box, but as it is 64bit then it is a no go. The main reason i upgraded from a Sony Intel 2.8ghz dual core cpu with 4gb ram, which i used extensively for about 6 years, was because i ended up getting low on ram (with about a dozen docs open on OOo, and 80+ tabs on FF), as 32 bit can only use about 3.5gb of ram, even with PAE. Plus it had some glitches.

The CPU on that was 64 bit, but the mobo was not, so i could upgrade to W/8.1 64 bit but i could not access more ram than 3.5. gb ram.

But after someone gave me $600 to buy a new PC (an answered prayer as i work in Christian ministry), i bought the AMD from http://www.computerlx.com/products.aspx?category_ID=136. </a>

It is good and handles the large loads, although my old Acer TravelMate 2480-2779 (1.7GHz Intel Celeron M) boots up faster then that - under XP that is, which replaced the Vista OS that was on it. I fact, it even boots faster than the new copy of Puppy Linux i dual boot it with.

The XP is only 32 bit (retail), and while i would have went with W/7 (no Metro UI for me) as an upgrade, yet a new Windows 64bit OS for 29.00, that i could transfer to another PC (which before was restricted to boxed retail copies), seemed a wise move.

What flavor of Linux do you use? I have tried all the major ones, but unless i learn coding then i cannot get the same level of functionality as i get in Windows, even using WINE. Then there is the media codec issue. But I may install a copy on a separate HD for this AMD someday, to see how it goes.

Sorry about the delay in responding, something came up.

MS is quite intrusive indeed. After the distressing regularity with which problems have repeatedly cropped up in their offerings I have learned to simply refuse all their attempts to "help" with registration and auto-updates. Did you know that in the UK recently the courts have ruled that even an Install Disk and Certification stickers on the machine were insufficient proof that the version of 'doze installed could be ruled as a legitimate version?

Another thing that annoys constantly is the fact that even though they are phasing out support for XP for EOL reasons they still demand that you authenticate an install? I learned this when a refurb I was using abruptly had its drive fail and I needed to reinstall the OS. Unfortunately, the expected way to restore the machine was with a separate partition on the drive which had all the critical information saved on it. Since the drive refused to even spin up any more that was no longer an option, so I turned to the two CDs provided for assistance. That would be the XPhome SP2 and the HP Restore disks. The system had been upgraded to XPpro SP3 just prior to purchase. Therefore I would not be at the same OS level if I went that route.

Attempting to use the Restore disk (on a newly-installed hard drive) resulted in it demanding the XPpro Install disk, which I of course had just found out I did not have, so that was a no-go. I then through gritted teeth attempted the XPpremium install. XP installed but did not recognize the PCI-bus network card and promptly put up a warning on each bootup that I had x-number of days to register the OS by phone since it could not connect to the network (ha! I did not even have an internet provider at that point!) or it would be seen as invalid. Thirty days later, the machine would only boot up to a warning that the OS was invalid and would simply sit there.

Never trust MS again.

I have recently redone a couple of machines back to 2k and 98SE, respectively. At least for those few programs I use which still do not work completely reliably on Wine. Incredibly fast now, and I found a quick and dirty way to bypass some of the driver requirements at least for the machines that I dual-boot with. I look at the Xwindows config files and write down what video libraries the machine uses, then look for a rough equivalent in the older 'doze drivers I have files for. Think of it as using the VESA drivers vs the Trident drivers. You won't get the full range of capabilities perhaps, but you will definitely get past the 640x480 / 16 colors level. My eyesight is not so good these days anyways, which probably explains why I sometimes wonder what I ever saw in some previous girlfriends sometimes, but anyways I really do not need 1680x1400 / 64million colors to work on text files, schematics, or search the web. I would just get a headache if I tried.

Dedicated machines work much better, I have found, especially when you use Linux to run on older machines. I have one machine set up for simple web browsing, email reading, and video downloading. Another is set up for use entirely for internet television and video viewing. A third is one of the more recent and set up for video processing and editing, and a fourth is a file compressor and BluRay burner. The latest one after those is an older one running 98SE for those 'doze programs which I still cannot get reliably running in linux.

For Linux, I use uberstudent 2.0 lxde with Dolphin and Opera for the web-accessing machines, since it has some extremely light system and memory requirements and ease of setup, and for the main machines and maximum difference in machines it runs on I run Mepis for its stability and decent Wine version.

I dual-boot on most machines for various reasons, not the least of which being that sometimes I have to use 'doze to properly fix an errant ntfs file since MS STILL has not published an official standard. The other is that some of the high-end programs I use run only with XP and above as its most common platform. Oh, they put out UNIX versions, true, but Linux Is Not UniX, of course, so I stick with what works. I still have to laugh however when I point out to the macophiles that NO high-level program manufacturors publish versions that support macs. Always worth a smile when I watch their reactions to that.

Well, you know you way around, while i am not that concerned with MS seeing things my PC does, as maybe it will help them to turn to Christ!

I am much a “power user” on Windows, and always found Linux to be come short in certain equivalents i really like, or ease of getting things to work, but it is useful. Plus i would have to purchase some media codecs to be legal as i live in the US.

Yet W/8 actually requires you to purchase ($10) Media Center for that! I got it for free as part of the early bird promo.

What mainly makes Linux somewhat viable for me is that you can use Firefox and OpenOffice (or LibreOffice). FF is working on a FF OS i heard. More competition is coming, but the Desktops are being marginalized somewhat.

I think one thing that has lots of potential is speech to text, which is still in its infancy i think, despite the price Dragon charges (i have 11.5).

It's not so much that I care about what MS sees on the systems/machines I have. Crikey, as many derogatory comments as I post about TheW0n, let alone posting on FR to begin with, I am already well-certain that I am on some No-Such-Agency -type's Barky-loving radar. It's the fact that no one really knows what type of info MS gleans off of their "registration" and "validation" programs. Let alone their "updates"

It was only a few years ago I think that the 'Nix crowd found over thirty different security flaws with the latest 'doze update within one week. The security consultants and the coders were quick to post the discovered problems and were on it night and day publishing fix after fix to resolve the issues.

Microsoft? They ignored the problems at first, but after some time had passed they began to grudgingly post one "official" fix after another. I believe if memory serves correctly that at most they acknowledged under ten total "updates", which everyone else knew were in actuality fixes for the security faults discovered.

So, I will use the 'doze OS when there is no other choice, but I keep hoping to someday see when the programs I need most can work within Linux. Running Wine if necessary, but I take heart that more OEMs are starting to realize that there is a real demand for Linux ports.

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