Windows XP to Ship Into 2010?

Windows XP to Ship Into 2010?

AppleInsider claims that Microsoft will allow HP to ship computers loaded with Windows XP until April 30, 2010, almost a year later than Microsoft was originally going to allow. Many PC companies today offer computers with Windows XP, which is referred to as a "downgrade"; their ability to do this ends July 31 this year, unless of course they can get the same deal as HP. Chances are that if HP gets such a deal, other computer companies will be able to as well.

Just because HP will supposedly be allowed to sell Windows XP beyond the original expliration date does not imply it will be supported by Microsoft; mainstream support for Windows XP Pro ends on April 14 this year; only security updates will be provided after that date.

Full Story (AppleInsider.com)
Via (PCWorld.com)
Via (Gizmodo.com)

 

"Tonight on Oprah.....operating systems that just won't die..."

 

Glad they will keep XP until then. I wish they continue to support it beyond that date

 

Personally I'd be a lot more likely to buy one of these sub notebooks if they shipped with Vista. Seems like they could turn off services or whatever if it actually runs slow (which is sort of hard for me to imagine, though I've never run it on anything but a Core 2).

 

Will someone please let this eight-year old operating system pass away peacefully? It had a good run, but with Win7 around the corner, there are very few good reasons for consumers to stay on XP (businesses are slightly different creatures - I honestly think they'll NEVER budge from XP).

 

Actually, XP is still pretty good.
It's use in Netbooks for example is well thought of given the fact Vista has higher hardware/space demands.
I do agree with the premise that consumers would benefit from moving on, but they can easily move on to Win7 when it comes out instead of going to Vista.

 

I resisted Vista for a long time; my initial experience with it was nothing short of disastrous. I have only been using it on my primary machine since Fall '08; it appears all the problems I had at first were worked out/fixed. At this point, I am neutral about Vista; it doesn't offer me anything XP didn't (ok, so not having to use a floppy to load RAID drivers is nice), and doesn't help my productivity. Windows 7 looks like it has some features that will actually help productivity, so I may move to it for that reason.
One way or another, I think it is time for XP to die. People shouldn't stop using it just to move to Vista, but newer machines should come with Vista (as most do nowadays). Time to move on.

 

Eh, XP is easy and useful and for that reason won't die easily, as we've already seen. Remember how Microsoft wanted to stop producing it, and then had to repeatedly extend production and introduce more keys since they ran out?

(Disclaimer: Currently running Vista x64 Ult.)

I don't see any reason for most users to use Vista (or even 7) over XP. The only real upgrades are visual. Some tools (defragment tool I'm looking at you!) are worse in Vista. Now I can't even see what my harddrive 'looks' like, or how long it will take?

XP is also convenient for businesses because they can run one version to do everything.
-Run multimedia? Yep.
-Built in management tool, business features, and remote access? Yep.
-Also, while not intended to be a server, you can even run it as a make-one while still holding on to the interface for ease of use. Try running a server using Vista Ult. as its base so that you can push the same patches through to every machine you have. You'll' have to wasting a massive amount of hardware, and that's assuming you turn off Aero too, so you've already given up your fancy UI you were trying to keep.

The ONLY thing I am conscious of liking in Vista is that explorer.exe can restart itself. But opening the task manager and hitting 'new task' wasn't exactly the hardest thing to do.

Vista continues to strike me with bugs and incompatibilities that never fixed within reasonable times. The HL2.exe glitch wasn't fixed for over 18 months. Drives aren't being done for old devices. What I hate most are these 'access denied' boxes when trying to edit things in restricted locations. If I want to edit a small text file to change Opera's behavior, I shouldn't have to move it to the desktop, edit, and move it back. That's stupid. All because you can't (easily) edit it with admin privileges. The only thing that is stopping me from moving back to XP is that I haven't had the time where I can do a fresh install. But I have a copy of XP Pro waiting. This machine will end up with XP or 7, but Vista isn't on the long-term radar.

 

I was skeptical of Vista at first and it was very unstable for me until SP1 and after that I have not had any problems. But I am not to fond about the 2GB ram min because of netbooks, but W7 should fix that. I am still amazed that Vista gets better battery life than XP.

But I do have a hard time trying to find how to change setting in Vista other than the color...

 

lets start using 98 again...anyway,joking aside,I am really looking forward for SP2 and Win 7.

 

I think you're on to something there, Xirurg! Where on earth are my Windows 2000 downgrade rights?
It's only one year older than WinXP, and is still being used in PCs all over the world (more than Linux and Win7 Beta combined, actually).
If Microsoft is going to keep one perfectly-working-but-aging operating system afloat, why not more?

 

har har har.

If you want a serious answer, the reason why XP and not 95 is more then pure speed. Using 2000, 98, 95, or even better 3.1 would be faster, but it would make daily life harder.

XP added a lot of important features such as automatted networking and drivers that makes installing and running the OS very easy. The only challenges to installing is that it is very slow, and RAID drivers can be difficult since their orgional installation method (floppies) no longer exist for most people. Running XP is only difficult for the most part because of high security risks, but AV software and firewalls have become so advanced this is rarly a problem today for those that spend a few minutes on it, or pay for a decent package.

So, XP added a good interface, advanced drivers and networking.

What did Vista add? What will 7 add? I remember when Vista was still longhorn and the big reason for the upgrade was for WinFS. Then it was going to be realeased a few months later, then with SP1, then sold seperatly. Now its not even going to be a part of 7, so why upgrade? To get a new taskbar when I already like the one I have?

This is the same reason why so few people move to linux, or even OS X. If everything already works relativly well and its decently priced, why use anything else? Linux is very hard for most people and only saves them what, $80? OS X costs more and depending on how you feel is either a little better, or a lot, lot worse.

 

With newer programs demanding more computer resources (especially RAM), XP fails in one major respect: 64-bit support. 64-bit was not really "done right" for consumer operating systems until Vista. It offers many benefits in stability and efficiency over 32-bit operating systems, and that factor alone would make me switch from XP to Vista 64-bit.

I do wish the XP-style defragmenter were used in Vista, but apparently, you can't have everything.

 

This was my issue with XP and why I ended up with Vista. However, I've been using several XP x64 machines and while they may not work as well as XP x32/86, they still work better then Vista x64.

 

I haven't used it, but I've never heard anything good about 64-bit XP. Always that it was just a testbed for Vista (and it's based on Server 2003 like Vista anyway).

For the most part I've found Vista to be a very nice incremental upgrade over XP. Lots of things have been modernized, and I don't see any performance hit at all, on my semi-modern hardware. (And of course XP runs terribly on hardware that's too low spec for it too...that's just how stuff goes.)

In a sense Vista isn't as major an upgrade, since it's just switching from NT 5.1 to 6, and ditto for Vista to 7, or 2000 to XP, but they all add and refine things here and there.

I do dislike a few things that got cut from the terminal program. Like you can no longer drag and drop folders or file into it to avoid typing them, and it can no longer switch to text mode. Did I ever really use text mode? Um...not really, but it was sort of fun having it there.

I find the search less useful than XP's search too, weirdly (and miss the cute puppy!)

And I do miss the graphical feedback to the defragmentation program, but it's been going that way for a long time. I'm just glad it's included free, and it works so well. As it's gotten more advanced, visual feedback has been getting more meaningless, given that the best way to arrange things on the drive isn't necessarily to just blindly put them in a line at the beginning of the drive as older versions used to.

Hate how you actually have to BUY a defragmenter for OS X...I'm a fan of having most stuff built in!

 

I've never used XP-64bit but from what I understand, it's major drawback was the lack of good drivers. Atleast vista X64 doesn't seem to have that problem.

I moved from Vista to XP for both my laptops; so, including my desktop, I am on an all XP setup now and I don't miss Vista to be honest. The 'extra' performance from XP on the laptops is quite nice, but that said, I wouldn't complain if I were forced to use vista again...my experience with it was not bad...just neutral.

As for defrag, vista's is better than XP's in many ways, but had some drawbacks like the lack of a GUI, and the slow speed was miserable. Anyways I've been using a third party defragger (Diskeeper 2009) on the systems for a long time now, and I am very happy with it's performance.

I am eagerly awaiting win 7; I hope it will deliver on all it's promises right from launch, and we won't have to wait for a SP1 to extract it's full potential.

 

I used 64-bit XP Pro for over a year and a half on my desktop; I did not have any problems with it, even for gaming. Driver support was there for all of my desktop's components. Notebooks are another story however; only a few notebooks ever shipped with XP 64-bit and those were very specialized business machines. If XP 64-bit wasn't supported on your notebook, it was pretty much a guarantee that you couldn't use it. XP 64-bit just never took off for consumers; I recall it was designed for workstations.

 

I returned an HP laptop (HDX16) recently because there was no way to install XP on it (that I could figure out), and there wasn't much of a speed improvement in my daily computer usage with the HP running Vista than my 7 year old desktop running XP. Plus, it just seemed clunky. I couldn't consistently get my NAS drives to map, and I couldn't stand all the extra "features"/services. Maybe I'd get used to it, but there were just a lot of very minor changes to the interface that bugged me and made me want XP back. I saved about $400 and got a slower MSI laptop with XP and it's smoking fast.

 

XP Was and till Microsoft 7 comes out the best microsoft OS. I tried Vista a few times but i had some very bad experiences at first. Then after all the patches and fixes came out it didnt seem to offer any more than XP.
So ill stick with XP till Microsoft 7 is running smoothly =)

 

There was something *very* wrong if a brand new computer was slower than a 7 year old system. If anything, Vista is faster and more efficient on a semi-modern piece of hardware.

Windows 7 is just another release of Vista basically. New GUI features and some other changes, but it's not a major change architecturally (which is a good thing).

 

I'm sure it would be way faster than my old system if I was doing anything processor intensive, but just booting up, using windows explorer, checking email, playing mp3s and video files, or browsing the web, the thing didn't fly like I think it would have with XP.

 

That still sounds messed up. Bloatware maybe? I guess boot times on mine aren't much better than my 2006 XP machine, but once it's running everything's faster.

 

I second Wolfpup's assessment. My Vista is faster than XP on the same machine.

 

With most of Vista's GUI enhancements enabled, and running on a desktop with integrated graphics, it does seem a bit more sluggish than XP - however, with the Windows Classic theme, Vista performs just as well as XP did on the same machine, while being much more stable. XP's pretty much at the end of its lifetime, although I'm sure many businesses and schools will continue to use XP on their machines into the future.

 

It's sort of time for XP to die, yes.... but Win 7 had better be good. Because Vista isn't. There, I said it. And that's coming from someone who's spent the most time on Vista out of any operating system. I'm glad I bought a copy of XP for the desktop I'm building. But I sure hope Win 7 is good, because I would like to keep a Windows OS around, just for Windows' sake.

However, Linux FTW.

 

Basically Windows 7 is to Vista what Windows 98 SE was to Windows 98.

It is what Vista should have been if given time.

I resisted Vista. I beta tested Vista and was disgusted at the time. After SP1, Vista has matured into a very competent OS, but the damage is done in regards to mindshare.

Microsoft knows it can't afford to shank it with Win 7 and quite honestly, the beta is BEAUTIFUL IMHO. For me, right now, it could run as my permanent goto OS no problems and when it finally hits the shelves, XP will finally go bye bye.

 

Yeah, I've only used SP1, so I don't really know (and I still don't see how any of the growing pains were any different from the migration to XP! It's just been so long people seem to have forgotten the massive resistance to XP at first.

I've having a few issues on my Vista machine-Windows networking resources (including my Exchange password) refuse to save for some reason. Also for some reason my touchpad drivers keep triggering a prompt (NOT UAC) every time my system boots, though I don't know if either has anything directly to do with Vista.

Also I find the search a lot less useful than XP's. I actually prefer XP (or 98's) default search to Vista/OS X, which just seem to never return what I'm actually looking for, but 12 pages of random things that have nothing at all to do with it.

I've run into some stupid 64-bit incompatibilities though-a lot of them-but...