MS to WinXP diehards: Just under 3 more years' support Microsoft continued its campaign yesterday to convince stuck-in-the-mud Windows XP customers to upgrade to Windows 7, the company's current operating system. Windows XP is now 10 years old, and for some, it's still going strong. So Microsoft has reminded those users that support for the OS that refuses to die will end in less …
I wouldn't say that Windows 7 (or rather 6.1) is awful, it is adequate, but I wouldn't say that I come close to XP or win2k (basically the same OS). I used the latter until I was forced to change last year.
For the average user it might be better and more secure. For me it is not, until it can provide me with a volume control that controls the hardware instead of the software, a start menu that follows some basic menu guidelines and a search function with a GUI. As for security it is a big thing for me to know what my computer does most of the time. I no longer do, with a ton of extra services doing something, scheduled tasks hiding god knows where, auto-updaters you have to wrestle with on monthly basis, delayed start services that hide themselves etc. I constantly got this feeling that this is no longer my machine.
I predict a duality of votes on this one. Seems to be the trend.
... what "extra" do I get from each version of windows ?
- More secure ? Till it gets broken.
- Better UI ? bah..
- Support for latest silverlight/flash whatever ? That's usually doable on older OS.
- New hardware support. That's drivers and is doable in new OS.
So why am I forced to buy a new OS (not just a new version) every couple of years ? I understand they can't forever support XP, but what am I getting by buying a newer OS ?
If I buy a newer version of adobe photoshop, usually it means that they have added some extra functionality like layer support (whatever).... I don't see it in windows (perhaps it's not obvious to me).
...after all these years - I'm still puzzled.
Windows 2000 was reasonably streamlined and could have been the basis for a reasonable OS.
XP is bloated, slow and lacks anything useful by default.
And as for Windows 7 - it's still a LAN only OS - the internet has been around for while now and you'd think they'd be able to seamlessly link to SSH shares at the very least.
Sorry - it *can* connect to SSH shares all you have to do is...
Download and extract mindTerm
Run mindterm.jar (double click it if you can, otherwise in command prompt type in java -jar mindterm.jar)
Type in the host you want to ssh into followed by the username and password
In the menu click on Plugins>FTP To SFTP Bridge…
Type in 127.0.0.1 for the Listen address
Type in 21 for the Listen port
Select the Remote system type
Click Enable
Click Dismiss
Next we want to install NetDrive
Once netdrive is installed, open it up, and click New Site on the bottom
Type in localhost (or whatever you want to call it) for the Site name
Type in localhost for the Site IP
Type in 21 for the Port
Select FTP for the Port
Select a Drive letter
Check Connect as anonymous
Click Save
Click Connect
Click the X to close the window (will minimize to system tray)
but for all the improvements, there has been plenty of regression too. The file browser, for example, is less flexible than it used to be in XP. It now takes multiple clicks to find out the size of a group of files, instead of just selecting them and looking at the staus bar. The right mouse button now sometimes works one way, sometimes another, depending on the phase of the moon.
The new Control Panel is a nightmare. The new network interface management crap is shit, and takes far too many clicks to do tasks that were just two or three clicks in XP. The new search function is crap, I want my old, /functional/ search back. And the "libraries" can fuck right off, I don't need my OS obscuring the location of my data, I want to know *exactly* where my files are. If the concept of directories is too scary for you, then maybe you shouldn't be using a computer in the first place.
Too many leaves taken from Apple's book, I reckon, trying to hide all the scary system plumbing away from the end user, which is exactly the opposite of what I want in an OS. At the very least, Win7 *Professional* ought to have an "expert user" mode where all the internal workings are exposed and easy to get at. [And yes, I know Linux will do that, it's why every other machine on my network runs Linux. My gaming (and therefore primary) machine, though, needs to run Windows because WINE is just not good enough yet.]
Under the hood, Win 7 might have quite a few improvements (although it's far too RAM-hungry), but the interface designer should be shot. In fact, Microsoft shouldn't let a *designer* anywhere near their next version's interface. They ought to instead ask an engineer to design it, then we might get some useful functionality instead of bells and whistles.
XP works perfectly for my office, no need for anything else given how we work here. XP also runs well on the hardware we have and I don't want to have to upgrade them just for the sake of it. I've got Win7 on a couple of laptops and it is of no benefit as far as I can see.
We are also running Office 2000 because it does what we need. I've looked at more recent versions and see no benefit upgrading there either. They stopped including updates automatically last year so I had to roll my own for post SP3 updates when I need to do a rebuild.
I appreciate that they need to keep developing and innovating and can only spend so long supporting products that no longer being them income but as an end user I don't need to chase the latest version.
If a tool works, why change it.
As a business it is indeed important not to waste money in areas that could be better spent affecting your bottom line, however to ignore advances in product version indefinately is foolish. Sooner or later you will come accross some add on or product which does office integration and you will not be able to use it and it WILL be beneficial to you.
At that point you will need to upgrade machines, os, producitivity software in one big hit, seems expensive to me.
Holmes.. because its not always obvious what the answer is but you'll figure it out in the end .
As long as there is no business need, but they are proactive in dealing with the potential effects of forced hardware replacement it's better to wait.
Not only do they make more on the money they hold back, but they will be making a larger purchase when they do upgrade and therefore should be able to get a better deal.
If there is a good reason to change, then go for it. however, I doubt it is more expensive to do in one step, probably less in total, though a bigger expense at that point in time.
However, if you don;t need to change, they why do it?
Ah yes, security...more so after end of life. But then you could:
1) Convert your working XP computer(s) to virtual machine(s).
2) Run them on Linux host and deny XP internet access, so email/web must be on the safer platform.
3) Profit!
Training is needed, as it is with ANY change. Most users are not El Reg readers after all.
So leave it to that point and not before - in fact - do a cost benefit on all the options and see if you can do without the new add-on.
MS point about time to replace something that is good enough with something that is better is not going to chime with how many businesses are feeling right now - in fact "good enough" would be a luxury to a lot of businesses who work with not quite good enough equipment and software because they can't afford even "good enough" never mind being amongst the aspirational acquirers of the latest and greatest.
Windows 3.1 is a DOS shell.
XP is a version of NT.
Windows 7 is like BluRay. It's a product that represents a much smaller relative improvement than it's predecessor does. XP was the first consumer version of NT. The difference between it and it's predecessor was much more meaningful. (much like DVD)
It's not about naievely whining about age. It's about actually bothering to consider the characteristics of the products in question.
Plus, XP is really only as old as it's last service pack.
Because Microsoft has made honest-to-goodness improvements since then. But somewhere around XP and Office 2000 they apparently ran out of useful innovations and decided instead to make the OS more "secure" (read annoying and user-hostile), and make the interfaces more "transparent", both literally (which is *so* useful), and figuratively by hiding all the commands from us.
To the best of my acknowledge, the only feature added since XP that I actually want is support for side-scrolling mice. But I think I can live without that.
I got a machine recently that was a few years old, and was shipped with V***a (2 options were available from the factory, XP or V***a). Reformatted it immediately and loaded XP. I also had a spare HDD for it so I loaded 7 on that for comparisson.
Bearing in mind that the drives are identical, 7 actually ran faster than XP, so on certain platforms an OS upgrade can actually provide a noticeable speed benefit.
Maybe he did not read your post, maybe he did. His point still stands though.
Clearly if you have an old computer and you stick 7 on it it will be slower than XP. But if you downgrade a new one and put XP on it, 7 will be faster (if not right away then definitely after a few weeks). Also as other people have pointed out - it's all about productivity and XP is crap compared to 7 for that.
Whenever I have to go back to XP on someone else's machine it takes twice as long to do anything (even when I remember the exact convoluted way to do it).
> But if you downgrade a new one and put XP on it, 7 will be faster
That's a strong assertion - and one that I've yet to see borne out. And I've seen quite a few machines that have been "downgraded".
> XP is crap compared to 7 for that.
My customers roundly disagree; none of them prefer Vista or 7 to XP. Not being a Windows user myself, I have no opinion on that.
But judging by the number of downvotes my simple post has got, I'm not allowed to express an opinion anyway :-(
Vic.
Whenever I have to go forward to Win 7 on someone else's machine "it takes twice as long to do anything (even when I remember the exact convoluted way to do it)." Proving what? ... that whatever we're most used to is easier. Meh.
And my own opinion is that 7 is crap compared to XP for productivity. But apart from sysadmins, who produces anything with an OS? Users run applications and produce with their apps. Office 2003 or 2007 or 2010 looks much the same on XP or on 7 or on a Mac (yes, I know, it's 2011 on a Mac).
The main reason for not upgrading is the cost of forced replacements. It's not just elderly PCs that are still OK for XP. It's also a host of printers, scanners and other useful gadgets that don't have Windows 7 drivers. Some places have "legacy" software that won't run under "7" and which will cost a fortune to migrate upwards or away from. Or even worse, software that has no migration path at all (vendor defunct, source code buried).
The other reason is the retraining cost. Even if you and your staff are capable of retraining themselves, their productivity will drop while they are un-learning the old way of doing things and finding out what the new way might be. And if that's going to happen all over again with Windows 8, delay makes more sense than burning bridges.
"But if you downgrade a new one and put XP on it, 7 will be faster (if not right away then definitely after a few weeks)."
Does Windows 7 become faster over time in your world, or are you one of those users that manages to fill your computer with so many background applications, malware or otherwise, that your computer gets slower with time?
My eight year old installation of win2k still boots in the same time as it did when it was installed. Interestingly enough it boots in about the same time as Windows 7 does on its new machine with twelve years newer hardware.
Hardware yes - but not, it would seem, Microsoft operating systems - where "bigger and slower" would seem to be what he meant to say.
Microsoft's idea of an "upgrade" involves buying a PC, a new operating system, new printers, scanners etc, and a whole new set of applications software - all because the old versions are not "compatible" with the new version. And to boot - I get a whole raft of features that I don't want, or use, from Microsoft too. Oh yes - and we all have to use that God Damn tool strip thingy that making my life miserable on the one application that I did upgrade.
I better get a move on.... only 2 more years before I have to start looking at alternatives and see what's for sale then. Because unless you work in the largest of organisations, a year is a perfectly adequate time to do a serious amount of testing and then a massive one-off upgrade for something like that. And that's if I decide that we actually *need* to move to something else at that point, and that we will move to Windows, and that it will be Windows version X (whatever is best at that point).
Shame, because if you'd sorted out your educational licensing, Microsoft, so that I didn't have to pay annually for something I originally paid for once and owned a perpetual license to, then I'd have been on Windows 7 last year.
In the meantime? 3 years? That should see me into Windows 8 at least, by which time Windows 7 will be cheap and stable and I'll know all its quirks, and then extended support for that will last me until 2020 at least (assuming there isn't another endless deadline-slip like there was for XP). I'll set my calendar to remind me in 2 years to check the end-of-life date again, but that's about it.
What makes you think that having your systems infected is in any way a preventable thing, or anything more than vaguely related to the last OS security update you installed? If you're doing things properly, it doesn't matter what OS is in use - people can't open attachments with .EXE's or even HTML code in them that hasn't been scanned / sanitised already and they shouldn't be able to execute programs that haven't been authorised.
Preventing malware infections is a way of life for IT guys, and we deliberately limit things as much as we practically can and spot suspicious activity. In a properly locked-down environment, you have no need to know what OS is running at all.
MS stopped doing most security updates for Windows XP years ago, they only ever do the most serious now (i.e. ones that a huge, public virus exploits and causes millions of infections) so you've been in pretty much the same position for the last few years anyway. The point is that if you properly secure the points of entry, and properly sanitise anything passing through, and properly look for anything that's slipped past, what OS is on a desktop is neither here nor there.
Having the latest OS software updates is a useful tool but it's not the be-all-and-end-all of security. For a start, you're vastly more likely to catch something through an application exploit than anything else. Having the latest OS software updates applied without proper testing is vastly more likely to end in tears, though, especially if you deploy them automatically to every machine. I've had more downtime because of Windows Update than I've ever had through virus infections on the networks I manage.
Even better now - http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/7/12/windows-8-will-run-all-current-pc-hardware/ is a quote from an MS exec that says that anything that runs Windows 7 now will run Windows 8 when it's released later this year.
Next up from Microsoft: How to kill Windows 7 deployments with two simple steps:
1) Announce that XP is support for another three years.
2) Announce a new OS coming within the year.
3) Announce that any investment in 7 will be the same as an investment in 8 a year later.
If they are to be believed, I'd cancel all my Windows 7 deployment plans now... if I had any.
Especially if, like certain companies I know, they'd already spent 9 months testing Vista only to find out that Win7 was annouced so all the Vista testing was a complete waste of time and money! The testing would have be done all over again with W7 but that won't happen until the budget allows, so XP is here...ahem, there to stay!
I picked up a core2 duo desktop pc and a bit of extra ram from 'bay for my mum to run windows 7 on for about £60. That is hardly a deal breaker, is it ? But if I did not have a spare 7 licence from work to use then the cost of a retail Win 7 probably *would* have been a deal breaker.
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