On 12/27/2012 07:02 PM, Mark Wallace wrote:
I can't believe that Microsoft would be stupid enough to stop supporting XP on schedule, unless they offered the remaining users some sort of free upgrade, but I am old enough to remember the New Coke and the Edsel.
Well, I did some experimenting with Win7, and was able to decruft it enough to be usable. Granted, when I customize an install of XP through Win7, it ends up looking more like Win2000 (I disable the theming service, shut off all effects, etc). Surprisingly, Win7 even ran on a 1G ThinkPad T23, better than XP on the same machine. If I could have bought a dirt-cheap license for W7 ($25-35, about the most it would be worth), I would have considered leaving one clunker in the house running native Windows (not going to waste my good hardware on Windows <g>). The only thing I end up using Windows for these days is running a couple of Windows applications that need USB connectivity; Win7 Starter Edition would be enough to run those.
Really would prefer that MS would make a basic version of Windows at a cheap price. Look at the way they package their versions: "Home Ultimate"?? How can you have an "Ultimate" version if you don't have a non-ultimate version? Like I said; would like buy legitimate upgrades to Win7, but not at the prices they sell them at. Would rather give that money to the Wine or ReactOS projects to get FLOSS alternatives.
And forget about Win8: I have enough hardware without PAE processor support that I can't load it on them, and can't strip the GUI back to a dead-simple look anymore.
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