Posted on 04/08/2014 11:51:45 AM PDT by deoetdoctrinae
Windows XP, Microsoft Corp.’s beloved seventh major operating system and arguably the company’s most successful, was left to perish on Tuesday at its creators’ hands. It was 12 years, seven months old.
~snip~
Windows XP’s funeral, a private ceremony held deep within Microsoft, was quiet. In lieu of flowers, Microsoft urged customers to donate to Windows 8, one of Windows XP’s grandchildren.
(Excerpt) Read more at pcworld.com ...
Or you could run the old OS on a VM on the new hardware and get the best of both worlds.
For this purpose, the "legacy replacement XP" that you download would be specially designed to work properly in the VM, by Microsoft.
The new security software for Win 8 and 8.1 is a new *Windows Defender*, seems to work pretty good and is supposedly better than MSE.
Been using Win 8.1 on my new machine, only a day and a half of cussing before I got a handle on it and it ain't bad at all, faster compared to Win 7 and XP.
The problem with that model is support. How many devs should they have writing patches for their 13 year old OS? How many techs on phone or web support should be trained in their 13 year old OS? How much downward compatibility should the new software have with their 13 year old OS?
Supporting multiple versions of the same software is incredibly expensive, each additional version adds time to training, complexity to your dev environment (gotta keep able to build the old stuff), and you’re sapping resources that could be used to add features to the next version. Dropping XP drops 2 OSes from their support list (because there’s actually two XPs out there the 32 bit original and the 64 bit “upgrade”), that’s millions of dollars saved. There’s no way your model would keep XP profitable. It’s ancient, way past time to kill it, anybody that still has a business need to keep it needs to hoard hardware for it, or make the switch to VMs.
I have 7 on my desktop and still have XP on my laptop. Some of the “improvements” in file handling on 7 are no improvements at all. It works okay. But no one was demanding a change from XP, which has been working just fine. The change to 7 was more of a con game to boost Microslop’s income and stock values than any need to address problems with XP.
Is XP unsafe to use while surfing the net?
LOL!
I've been running XP since the SP1 days of late 2002. Updated to SP2 in late 2004 to get some of the Wi-Fi enhancements. Would still be there if TurboTax had not insisted on SP3, installed in early 2009. SP3 was really worth it.
I understand MSFT makes money by selling software. But they have to offer real value to get existing users to upgrade. In my case (Win XP SP3 and Office 2000). MSFT has never given me a good reason to upgrade. There are lots of features and bell and whistles in XP and Office 2000 that I never use. So why should I upgrade?
Having said that, I may update to Win 7 Pro one of these days just for kicks. There are really few differences between XP and Win 7.
Of course, it's different strokes for different folks and YMMV.
I liked MSE. A lot less intrusive with less bloatware than Norton and Mcafee and best of all it is free. It has worked fairly well.
For home, I'll probably install Norton which is free through Comcast.
I doubt that any of those would ever be an issue. Security issues would be handled by the newer OS that the VM is running on.
"There’s no way your model would keep XP profitable. It’s ancient, way past time to kill it, anybody that still has a business need to keep it needs to hoard hardware for it, or make the switch to VMs."
I never said it would be profitable......but it would let customers who have VERY EXPENSIVE HARDWARE (like that $1MM++ superconducting NMR) that cannot run with newer OS's keep that hardware up and running, and keep those customers buying NEW COMPUTERS with the NEW OS as customers.
There are plenty of computer repair stores with OEM XP discs, and they can reinstall the OS.
I know of some scientific equipment that only runs on NT4 SP5. The vendor has been out of business for a long time. Evidently the equipment can still be bought used and there are 3rd party techs around that support the system as is. Same thing with some laser milling equipment. That vendor is out of business and only runs on W2K. In those cases you just keep backup computer hardware and image files on hand.
Oh, while I was setting up and had only Norton running, it let a bunch of adware/malware through, Malwarebites cleaned it out.
Setting up Windows Defender became my priority after that, no further trouble since.
That paragraph isn’t about it on a VM, it’s about your idea of them keeping all the OSes available for download for a fee. That has the OSes running straight up, which means they’ve got to be supported and patched and everything else.
If it wouldn’t be profitable there’s no reason to do it. MS is a business, they exist to make money, period. Customers that have very expensive hardware that can’t run the new OSes have had a long time to figure hoard equipment and copies of XP to keep that setup going. Nobody is forcing them to uninstall XP, they’re just not making patches for it anymore. If they want to be on new computers then they need to get with the OEMs and figure out why they can’t run the new OSes and fix it.
Windows 7 does not run all the windows XP applications (Myst for example)
I'll probably continue to run XP with free Norton from Comcast. I wonder if you can only install pieces of it. The system performance feature is a waste of resources. I think that it has a back up program too.
resources used to support XP are needed for supporting current and future products.
Apparently their solution is to create a virtual machine utility. It is a bit finicky for us here at work.
Hmmm. That's interesting. I recently got hold of an old laptop running XP, and I had that exact problem. Other search engines (e.g. Duck Duck Go) worked fine. The machine was totally clogged up with crapware and remnants of old sofware loads, and it was very sluggish. I did a total reload, and now it works like a champ, with no problem with Bing or Google.
It has nothing to do with XP's demise, but there's something you have that's blocking those sites, but I have no idea what it is.
To celebrate the passing, I bought my wife a new lap top
Windows 8 will challenge her to keep her skills up to snuff
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