XP death knell?

[Glenn]

Dell lays down the law: no more Windows XP shipments after October 22nd

http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/08/dell-lays-down-the-law-no-more-windows-xp-shipments-after-octob/

[kinmel]

Yet again, the Master speaks and will later change his mind as sales fall.

[Rik]

It will be interesting to see, won't it.

[esh]

I think it has finally become accepted; Windows 7 is actually "ok" as long as you have more than 1GB RAM. Just like Win XP was "ok" if you had more than 128MB RAM back in the day. Personally I doubt there will be so much uproar this time... businesses have had their grace period, SP1 is scheduled for Win7, and no doubt Microsoft are really wishing to kill it off.

[DorsetBoy]

Haha ......... the other day I saw someone whining on a forum that he was having issues with Avasts latest release, it was slowing his system down.

His OS of choice ...  Win98SE 

[cavillas]

But his computer did have 56mb of memory.

[Rik]

His OS of choice ...  Win98SE 

It was a lovely OS - in its day.

[pctech]

and then of course you had Millennium Edition or Monkey Edition as it was nicknamed here as we couldn't get anything to work on it.

[Rik]

Like Vista, imo, one to avoid - a marketing release.

[Steve]

I think MS had an idea what they wanted to achieve with Vista but failed or was it just a ploy to get everything on more ram so that 7 would be a success.

[Rik]

I think Vista was an RC for 7 myself, Steve, they then set about debugging it.

[Fox]

I never had any problems with Vista, I have it on my gaming PC (and have had it on there since Vista was released). It does have quite a high spec so I never had issues caused by lack of RAM or slow single core processors some people suffered. All my hardware and software runs fine. Most of Vista's early problems were caused by lack of driver support from some manufacturers cough*creative*cough. My own experience of it has been good but I do know other people may have a different tale to tell.

[Rik]

Drivers, the bane on Windows for as long as I can remember.

[esh]

Indeed, it's always drivers. It is partially Microsoft's fault with Vista; everyone had fallen into a lazy stupor when the NT architecture became so standard and Vista was delayed and delayed... and they just didn't give all the OEM's the necessary kick, so the drivers were literally cr*p for about a year after Vista came out unless you had a magic hardware combination. Obviously there were the software incompatibilities, but they weren't the things that crashed it.

I still have some Win 7 issues. Anything past NVIDIA driver version 197 crashes the video card when I try and play... video. But this is NVIDIA's gross incompetence. The only crazy thing I had was I managed to corrupt the Win 7 keyboard driver once and had to do a full reinstall. But it still boots up gloriously fast compared to Win 2000, is pleasant to use, and looks fairly modern. I kept dual boot for about 4 months before realising I was clearly not going back.

[Den]

I'm amazed that anyone is still hanging on to XP, windows 7 is superb but it still seems to be the in thing to slag MS off 

[esh]

They took a lot of flak for the Vista cock-ups, admittedly not entirely their fault, but some. Management was bad leading to the over-runs, communication was bad leading to the driver problems, and some vendors (hello, Intel) did some legal wrangling to get their products Vista certified even though they could barely run it. This was about the time the whole buffer overrun thing via browsers became extremely popular and Microsoft got panned for their security. So all in all, it was PR mayhem and they didn't handle it that well. Fortunately for them, there isn't a real competitor over a large range of markets that they hold. Perhaps they lost a bit on the sever front, but to be honest, if you've bought into a server architecture you do tend to keep it. They will have lost a bit on the high/elite end to Apple as their OS X became increasingly solid and they moved to Intel CPUs. But the small business and end user market... the options were and still are Windows or Windows. If there was any other big player out around this time Microsoft could have been scorched badly, like when they decided to stop development on Internet Explorer and Firefox came along ( ). In spite of this, a disaster with Windows 7 as well would have been exceedingly bad.

[JB]

I'm amazed that anyone is still hanging on to XP, windows 7 is superb

Sorry but I think that statement is a little too simplistic.

I use Win 7 on two of my machines but sometimes one has no choice and again it comes down to drivers. Some folk use older ancillary hardware which is perhaps not replaceable with exactly the same quality device (at acceptable cost).

A case in point is my Canon negative/slide scanner on which I am slowly digitising my old photographs spanning many years. As SLR photography was a hobby of mine for many years there are thousands to do. I would love to use a Win 7 machine but the scanner simply will not work with it, believe me I have tried.

I keep a basic install of Win XP on an old XCube simply for the purpose.

[esh]

If it is serial or USB you can try passing it through to an XP virtual machine if you can be bothered.

Most of the hardware issues have been resolved in the XP->Vista debacle -- the drivers have either been fixed or the hardware has been made obsolete. Legacy incompatibility is pretty much the only reason unless your hardware is simply not up to the job, but I would hope everyone agrees that at *some point* legacy support has to be dropped in favour of an improved product.

[Rik]

It does, and that will mean some very fundamental changes to Windows. The problem, though, is would business buy into that change, just thik how many are still using IE6.

[JB]

If it is serial or USB you can try passing it through to an XP virtual machine if you can be bothered.

It is connected to a dedicated SCSI card which came with the device.

I'm quite happy to continue with the thing running XP on my old Xcube which owes me nothing. I did think of upgrading the negative scanner but I haven't seen better results on more 'modern' units. I'll keep it going until either it wears out or I complete my task.

Then I'll put Linux on the Xcube and find something else to do with it 

[Rik]

I miss SCSI. Short stubby cables but a great interface.

[nowster]

I miss SCSI. Short stubby cables but a great interface.

SCSI still exists. It's run over SATA cables, and called SASI. In fact, SATA (and PATA) is based on a subset of SCSI.

[Rik]

Nut all those stubby cables and terminators were such fun.