Their problem is the PR hit that they would take for walking away from
55% of the world's desktops. They also are on a much shorter regulatory
leash in Europe and might have problems within the European Economic Union.
On 12-12-30 03:49 PM, ew wrote:
On Dec 30, 2012, at 3:25 PM, Mark Wallace wrote:
It is untenable for Microsoft to phase out support of XP on schedule. It will
either create an after market of companies who will keep the XP systems
running, or some move to Linux or something. the companies are not going to
pay to upgrade their desktops, especially since is the desktop that is running
XP it is fairly old and might be both technically obsolete and not a high
priority use.
I think that there problem is that XP is different from state of the art to the
point where maintaining a product that they are no longer getting revenue from
is untenable. If you upgrade from XP to seven, the only thing that the upgrade
CD does is make sure that you have a valid XP license and then completely
installs seven from scratch.
My guess is that Microsoft will give free upgrades to a unique product that
isn't a completely different environment from eight rather but will run on
legacy systems. I am not sure that Linux will be the clear beneficiary, as it
has moved on too. Only Lubuntu among the Ubuntu distros will install on 386
architecture.
But I played around with a Windows 8 system for a week and put it back. The
tablet style desktop makes sense until you think about it. Very few people
maintain corporate dbases or do desktop publishing on tablets. You need an old
fashioned start menu, etc for them.
Why should Microsoft give free upgrades to an obsolete OS?
It may be viewed as unfair for the folks who purchased a netbook in the past
couple years with XP, but for customers with systems over
eight years old not so much.
Just because support will end, does not mean people and business will stop
using it. If you go to MHVFCU you will likely see workstations running Windows
2000!
I'm sure they're not alone.
XP is over 10 years old, and has passed it's shelf life. As stated earlier,
Windows 7 will likely run better on systems with 1Gig of RAM or more, compared
to the same system running XP fully patched.
This is of course if the video and other hardware has drivers available.
To put things in perspective, Microsoft is not alone. I build a PC in 2009
expecting to use onboard ATI graphics. I had mixed results with open drivers
and proprietary drivers, running Mythbuntu 7.10.
Now the same card is considered legacy and no longer supported by ATI. If you
purchase new hardware it likely only has a one year warranty, with few
exceptions.
Personally I think it has been a fairly amazing accomplishment to keep XP
supported for so long. I hate to imagine the dollar value invested in such as
task. I'm sure MS is still in the black though :)
Eric
PS: I think we may have drifted from the original post.
On 12-12-30 09:05 AM, James E. LaBarre wrote:
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.
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College
Jan 9 - High Performance Computing at a Small Scale
Feb 6 - Raspberry Pi
Mar 6 - 10th Anniversary Meeting - Linux where you least expect it
--
Mark Wallace
PO Box 11144
Newburgh, NY 12552-1114
Telephone: (845) 541-7396
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College
Jan 9 - High Performance Computing at a Small Scale
Feb 6 - Raspberry Pi
Mar 6 - 10th Anniversary Meeting - Linux where you least expect it
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College
Jan 9 - High Performance Computing at a Small Scale
Feb 6 - Raspberry Pi
Mar 6 - 10th Anniversary Meeting - Linux where you least expect it
--
Mark Wallace
PO Box 11144
Newburgh, NY 12552-1114
Telephone: (845) 541-7396
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College
Jan 9 - High Performance Computing at a Small Scale
Feb 6 - Raspberry Pi
Mar 6 - 10th Anniversary Meeting - Linux where you least expect it
