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XP support extended to 2014
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 27th June 2008
Although you won't be seeing these after this year, that doesn't mean that XP won't still be available.
Information Week quotes a letter sent to major Microsoft customers this week by senior vice president Bill Veghte which states that the giant will, somewhat unwillingly, be providing security patches “and other critical updates” until April 2014.
For those of you keeping count, that's rather later than the 30th June 2008 deadline Microsoft had originally planned, and even beats the June 2010 'extended availability' of Windows XP Home that was prompted by the growth of Linux on low-powered sub-laptop systems
In his letter, Veghte states that his company's support for Windows XP is “the result of our recognition that people keep their Windows-based PCs for many years.” Presumably it has nothing to do with the somewhat lukewarm reception its successor, the resource-hungry Vista, has received from businesses.
Perhaps most telling is that the extended support for XP doesn't stop at patches and bugfixes: Microsoft is actively promoting the availability of a 'downgrade' option by which business customers who purchase Vista PCs will be able to switch to XP for free. While this will please corporations looking to expand their XP infrastructure beyond the official end-of-life, it's hard to see it as anything other than an admission that Vista is unsuitable for business use.
Do we have any Vista Business users here, or are you sticking with XP in the corporate environment until you see a good reason to change? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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i still have trouble finding things in vista at home due to heavy xp use at work
if i was to roll out vista i think company productivity would suffer
I quite like Vista as an HTPC OS, but as my day to day OS, I still prefer XP by a long shot.
Having said that, I'm actually a bit (positively) surprised by Vista. It might be a resource-hog, but when you have the resources, it's no slower than XP. But it's not faster either. The only REAL difference I've experienced, is, that it looks a lot better and the interface is a lot better thought out.
But I see no reason for a company to spend X amount of pounds to upgrade all their computers to Vista. There's just no point.
I know it did have problems at the start (the iPod issue and EAX to name two) but they are getting there, shame it wasn't right at the launch.
But an OS is an OS, it's in some ways like discussing hammers - it's just a tool so you can get / do what you really want.
Ditto.
It's not so much doom-mongers as people looking for reasons it's worthwhile. XP offers me absolutely nothing more than 2000 did, which really only offered stability increases over 98, so I have no idea what they could possibly offer me after three major releases and ten years without a really notable change in anything.
I aggree with banshee256, vista is not bad when you throw a ton of RAM at it, but that should not really be the answer to getting it working well. I am hoping that windows 7 turns out to be a lot better - though that will probably need 8gb of ram to run well.
Back at XP, trying SP3 at the moment, runs fine and fast (it was shocking to see how fast XP is after > 6 months on Vista) and I don't plan to go back to Vista before October at least. Hopefully I'll find the time to set up a dual-boot system once I moved to England.
Anyways, at work we just got our test PCs for Vista (yay for being in the IT department of a 100 people sub company of tesa :D) and we have more issues than you can imagine (well, maybe you can).
Using infor:COM 6.4 as ERP system... no Vista support. It works somehow but noone knows if it really is 100% stable and if everything works as intended. It's also getting quite stressy as we're just the IT department of the sub and Beiersdorf (the company behind tesa) hired BSS to take care of IT what means every single decision made by us has to be given to tesa and BSS for approval... i.e. "Why the hell can't you just make me local admin on my bloody Vista test PC?!"... waiting for an answer for > 1 week.
tesa will roll out Vista to all their employees by the end of this year and I'm just happy to not be there anymore as this will be such a mess. ;)
We run XP... and there's no plans to shift to Vista any time soon.. I'll be long long long gone by that time. If it even happens.
Unless you have 2Gb ram, Vista is just too slow,
Win Xp Sp 3 + 1GB ram + Budget laptop = happiness.
The pity here is that XP - seen as horribly bloated and slow compared to 2k - is now seen as "normal".
Computers have improved enough that xp runs at the same speed as win2k did a few years ago. Same will happen with vista, once 8 core nehalems, 12 GB DDR3, radeon 6850 and 4 ssd's in raid 0 are low end rubbish in 2011 or so.
I don't think the situation is quite that bad... With enough money you could probably get a machine which could very comfortably run Vista nowadays.
sure you can, a E7200, a p35 board, 2GB cheapo DDR2 a radeon 3650 and a decent hdd like a samsung f1 320 GB run vista just fine and woudnt break the bank.
the reality is that many companies use far worse pc's, try first gen p4, 512 MB ram and integrated graphics from back then and you have the reality in todays offices.
If you get the latest drivers (from nvidia, not Windows Update), the OS runs just as well as XP ever did. Now, granted that the video card drivers are not optimize at all (nvdia does not care about their old FX 5000 series). However since 2005-2006... no game works other then pure minimum settings (even Half-Life doesn't run smoothly), so I just don't care, and it does a great job with Aero.
- Why did I upgraded... It was easy to transfer my program configuration from my newer PC to this one (just copy & paste your profile folder in Vista)
- I navigate trough my computer way faster, thanks to the instant search bar on Start Menu.
- Transparency on the boarders allows me to better manager a lot of windows.
- I like the overall feel of Vista UI.
- More responsive.
- SuperFetch
- Fast install (25min for this computer).
However, I still prefer Vista 64-bit.
I think this is missing the point entirely.
I own a computer to run applications - the OS is a means to an end!
Making it harder to run the OS is going BACKWARDS.
So why do you need a more powerful computer? Ah because your applications has more features and require more computer power. And your games demands more and more power.
Wait... is that making applications and games go BACKWARDS?!
Your logic makes not much sense. Vista has new features which require more computer resources, like every other applications on your computer.
no, your pc is high end, the majority of office pc's doesnt even have c2d yet and often even less than 1GB ram...
I believe that many industries won't even change on Windows 7. They will change Windows when they believe that the computer are too old, and lack of hardware support. For example, if they use DDR1 RAM and it needs to be upgraded for a much needed software of the motherboard brakes (discontinued), they can't get those easily and cheap. Once they reach that point, they will get new computers with the latest Windows, and upgrade all their software to have them Windows NT6 (Vista and later on OS) compatible, and they will see about 64-bit version.
I wont be going to Vista until I need a new laptop and it comes with it, because I cant afford the PC and OS.
@nitrous9200, well in reality every windows is guilty of UI inconsistency and old icons thing... The idea of this, is crossing our (I posted stuff some time ago) figures that Windows will look at it, and start fixing those and create the first Windows that is all nice, or try and grab some Windows developers to spend a couple extra minutes to seek for such things and correct them.
As nitrous9200 pointed out... most of us tweak Windows XP to the max and that is why we see that Vista is more heavy.. but if you don't do it, you will see it's not that much. And yes you can optimize to your needs Windows Vista. I made it run smoothly under a Pentium III 800Mhz, with 512MB of RAM. Granted to was HELL at the begging as everything is enabled... but once you disable about everything... it's lite and as (or nearly as) speedy as XP.
I've been using Vista 64 for just under a year or so and I've found it pretty spot on. I got it free through an MSDN subscribtion though, I'm not sure I'd be willing to pay for it knowing that Windows 7 is only a couple of years away!! :)
Vista isn't even in the picture.
From a business perspective, when you ask what's better about Vista, the answer isn't enough to justify not only the cost of the new OS, but also the cost of migration and of potential incompatibilities with mission critical software.
Or, to put it another way, if you want users, especially bsuinesses, to change OS, you need to offer enough new features to make it worthwhile. I feel that Vista has failed to deliver on this point.
I'm happy navigating around XP, so don't want to learn a new OS layout. I'm also concerned about the complaints of performance reduction with Vista, and lastly possibility of any compatiability issues (although most of my software is new so that shouldn't be a problem) . . . hence I think if it ain't broke don't fix it. Probably be 6 months before I put SP3 on ;)