IT bods: Windows XP, we WON'T leave you. Migrate? Chuh! As if... It's not going to be easy to pry open the death grip of IT bods on the last copies of Windows XP, according to Spiceworks, whose survey had a whopping 33 per cent of tech professionals planning to keep the OS on at least one device after its end of life. The social business network for IT pros, much beloved of sysadmins, …
IT firm CDW, which sponsored the research, sells hardware kit. So naturally they'd want to drive home the point that XP is near end-of-life as we know it. A large number of computers running XP today would run Windows 7 poorly, lacking the processor horsepower, main system memory, hard drive capacity, or even driver support for some of the hardware. So in a great many cases, upgrading a system to Windows 7 makes no sense at all, hence KA-CHING! a potential sale by CDW of a replacement.
My rule of thumb is that I would not consider upgrading to Windows 7 unless the processor was at least a dual-core (or upgradable) and the memory could be upgraded to 4GB. But when one takes into account the manpower cost and the hardware cost to get a system up to speed, well, a replacement is less expensive. KA-CHING! for CDW. So goodbye to all the Socket 478 systems, probably the majority of Socket 775 desktop systems, most of the laptops with DDR2 memory, and all laptops with memory older than DDR2. Hello, Windows 7.
Needless to say: you must move off of XP (the next zero-day might not get fixed). You should move off of MS asap to never get into this shit again.
Keep old hardware, get Linux, solved. Keep XP in a vm until you figured how to replace those legacy apps - you might be able to pay for the migration to an open platform with the savings ... support is waaaay cheaper than cals and client os licenses, believe me, intentionally excluding server licenses, that is your budget for newer kit to improve server performance even more!!!!
All it takes is cojones!
"Keep old hardware, get Linux, solved."
Uhm, but the Linux kernel alone has had more vulnerabilities (over 900) than the whole of XP! (~600)...And when was the last time you found an Enterprise Linux distribution supported for 13 years?! You would be swapping one problem for another
>Keep XP in a vm until you figured how to replace those legacy apps
So inspite of the tone of your post, you are also one of the "36 per cent would be keeping at least one copy around."
I note the survey didn't ask participants just how long they thought they would be keeping that cover around - I've still got a WfWG laptop (386 !!) that gets booted once every so often to deal with certain archives - at least the nice thing with standards is that it still plugs into the electricity supply!
Slowly but surely we are getting there and our users desktops are mostly done. But as a company that is 50% a software house and writes software for large gas companies and banks I can tell you testing our software on XP will be continuing here for quite some time. So yes of course we will still be keeping copies of XP floating around Spiceworks but the situation really isnt as 'bad' as you suggest. A % of user desktops might have been a more appropriate measure. Anyway who doesn't have one of those annoying little apps tied to a machine sitting in the corner? I bought myself some time and managed to move one to server 2003 but some people will have ones that are machine tied or require ie6 on XP exclusively.
As a previous poster said, I don't want a flame war, but seriously - if you are going to do an upgrade anyway...
Linux + Virtualbox + Wine offers a variety of approaches to corralling the Windows beast.
A user running WinXX in a full-screen VM won't care that Linux is under the table. Linux can be configured very "lean" in it's use of resources, can be netbooted, etc.
Just saying.
You can configure Linux to be as parsimonious as you like, to a point; but XP, even in a VM will still need memory, disc, CPU and you would be a fool to skimp on these.
Also, which Linux? Have you really got the skills to do support beyond configuration and hoping you find the right, latest library etc.?
Linux is not the answer to all, sometimes it is even the problem. Now, BSD ….
As for old hardware: it is not infinitely expandable; solder, disc and more do tend to degrade with time and efficient use of electricity, for which you pay comes only by replacing the hardware with modern versions. Now tell me you have never experienced a hardware failure, a corrupt disc or paid an electricity bill.
XP in a VM is isolated from underlying changes to hardware or, by and large, to the host operating system. You could use Win7/8 or any one of a range of Linux distros, depending on your use-case and licensing costs, etc.
In my experience the XP VM runs as well, if not better, under Linux as natively (intensive graphics aside) and you can save & restore from backup in minutes if corrupted. You can also have several VM, each with different software that won't play happy together, and run the one you need at a given time.
As such, you can also run RAID on the host machine for better availability, etc, and the workings of that need not concern the VM, it just sees the virtual disk as a file stored somewhere.
As for time, skill, etc, needed, well this is El Reg and folk here are discussing how they choose to solve things. If you don't know then find someone who can advise and implement, and pay them for it. Simplez!
"over half said they hadn't made the switch because of a lack of budget, 39 per cent said they didn't have the time and 31 per cent said they didn't have the resources"
Lack of budget or not having the resources fair enough, but didn't have the time is a bit of a lame excuse considering they've had years.
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