Windows 7 starts countdown for XP
Windows XP - the OS that just won't die - will be available to OEMs for twelve months after the release of Windows 7.
According to an article over on ComputerWorld, Microsoft's Mike Nash – corporate vice president of the company's Windows product management group, so a man who should know – has confirmed that OEMs will be allowed to continue installing Windows XP on their devices up to twelve months after Windows 7 hits general availability.
Despite the existence of a cut-down edition of Windows 7 targeted – at least unofficially – at low-powered devices such as netbooks and nettops, Windows XP is still proving overwhelmingly popular for manufacturers of such devices. With Windows Vista, the company's current generation of operating system, demanding far higher system resources it's not hard to see why – and even though Windows 7 goes some way to addressing its predecessor's predilections for RAM manufacturers will be pleased to know there's a get-out clause for a while, at least.
All good things must come to an end, however, and Nash has stated that once the twelve month grace period is up it's Windows 7 or nothing for the OEMs. It's a move Microsoft will be pleased to make: the company has been looking to rid itself of its previous generation of operating system for quite some time, and each time customer demand – along with threats to move to alternative operating systems – have resulted in a stay of execution. The continued support has cost the company dearly, too: the company's financial report for the last quarter showed the Windows client revenue stream drop by 16 percent – largely due to a majority of sales being to netbook OEMs who opt for Windows XP Home, the cheapest version.
There is no immediate indication that the deadline – which could hit as early as the latter half of 2010 – will affect the continued support of what will then be the last-last-generation operating system. Indeed, with Windows XP being added to Windows 7 as a virtualised guest in order to boost compatibility confidence, we may even see XP receiving security updates beyond the original 2014 best-before date.
Are you pleased to hear that cheap Windows XP netbooks won't be going anywhere for a while yet, or do you think OEMs should be looking to move to Windows 7 sooner rather than later – even if it means chucking more processing power at the problem? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums Replybearing in mind most businesses seem happy to run ancient hardware in office tasks i don't think they'll worry too much, by the time they upgrade xp will ikely be 15 years old
and dont schools need to teach kids the most current os, seems more useful than trying to learn an out of date one. my school had acorns and i can tell you they were just plain awful, not that i'm saying xp is anything like acorn os, just that it would have been nice to learn on the current one
So, yeah, they'll run XP for a long time to come. ;)
S*D
upgrade of vista so your not going to see a rush to w7. as for vxp in w7 it will have to be proven very
compatible before I jump ship from xp pro and I imagine for many others as well.
It doesn't feel sluggish on my laptop with 512 MB RAM, it's more secure [kernel access for example], and how is it worse in gaming? It uses the same driver as Vista and that is the same as XP [182.50]. Performance is not that different, that was the case back when Vista just hit the market.
And with bloat you mean what exactly? Windows Movie Maker, Windows Photo Viewer, ... ? Yeah, right.
and i, for one, don't see any reason for XP to be continuly supported if 98se boots faster, better in gaming, and generally snappier than any later OS.
it's all a matter of personal preference, Vista just changed a few things and people started to panic. There is no reason to dislike Vista or Win7. the only thing that doesn't change is that everything will change. human need to evolve, those who don't evolve are still hanging on trees eating banana.
the bananas on my tree are mighty tasty and all my legacy software works!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Windows 7 is worlds better than XP.
To think otherwise is ignorant. Windows 7 runs great on my laptop, just because Windows XP runs faster does not make it a better operating system! If that's your argument than obviously Windows 3.1 > all.
Just because Windows 7 uses more resources, and the initial file size has increased compared to Windows XP, does not mean it's bloated. It's called features. New features require more resources. I think that's just common sense.
To say it's not anymore secure than Windows XP is even more ignorant! How do you even know it isn't more secure? What, did Microsoft just fire their security team.."guys, you know what, the security of XP is the best it's going to get. We don't require your services anymore. We decided that we're going to slap on aero effects to XP and dub it Windows 7. Our users will eat that **** up."
Ugh, get real. It's a whole new operating system.
While I agree with the rest of your post, it's actually more like a service pack for Vista.
Windows XP: Windows Kernel 5
Windows Vista: Windows Kernel 6
Windows Server 2008: Windows Kernel 6
Windows 7: Windows Kernel 6.1
Further to that, I think a lot of the positive press windows 7 has been getting has been wrongly attributed to windows 7 instead of the windows 6 kernel which is just better than the previous incarnation. I think it was the finish on Vista and mayhap misinformation / marketing issues that meant that a lot of people didn't see that, and still thought XP was superior.
Would be a shame to force an upgrade on people who dont want it.... eg the majority of XP owners!
they aren't forcing an upgrade :|. they are only cutting off supply to OEM's, long after they were initially supposed to.
This shouldn't be a surprise - every version released of Windows (with the possible exception of Windows for Workgroups 3.11) has run slower than the previous one, despite various "go faster" features touted by Microsoft (VCache, PreFetch, SuperFetch, etc). Vista was certainly a far worse example of this, to the extent that Windows 7 may genuinely outpace it, but no-one should expect performance to reach XP (or Win2K) levels.
As a general rule, the more lines of code that are present in a product, the greater the number of bugs and, thereby, security vulnerabilities. So any significant increase in codebase size (and Vista has 50 million lines of code compared to XP's 40 million) will lead to more security holes (commercial software typically has 20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code according to Cylab). Small and simple is the real road towards a secure system.
As for windows 7 vs xp, have a ssd? then moving to windows 7 will be almost mandatory as xp has zero optimizations for them, xp requires a freaking floppy drive to install raid drivers, support for optical sata drives plain out sucks in xp.
Performance difference? whats that good for? Even if xp runs faster, all that means is that it waits 0.0003 seconds longer for the user to catch up.
Security? currently they are all the same, just don't login as a admin by default and you are pretty much good to go, of course ms is too stupid to figure that out, during win7 install it still only creates one admin accout which is then used by default, however, in the future security will cahnge in favour of the newer ones as ms will certainly not update xp as often anymore.