Happy 11th birthday Windows XP

[jmagelitz]

its been that long already? wow

 

[Ken g6]

And some games, my beloved "Silent hunter 3 with GWX gold expansion pack" will not run on even 7, when winXP support ends I will install 7 on my web machine and continue to use XP to play my game, (dual boot)..

I suggest you Wine about it instead.

(In other words, install Linux, potentially in a VM, and run your game there with Wine.)

 

[Red Squirrel]

fortune 500, ~50k employees.

seems like most of our office people have win 7 now, but all of our revenue generating software is built for xp, All of our fracturing pumps, all of our control systems, all of our logging tools, etc.... billions in equipment.

Sounds about right. I worked at a hospital for a while, most medical software, especially any software that has to interface with a medical device, is made for windows NT4/98 with basic support for 2000... and happens to work in XP. Not supported, but it works.

Same with most server software, it's made for 2000, but works in 2003 but is not supported. Every time we'd deploy a new server we'd start with 2008 then realize the software wont install, then go to 2003. The vendor would later on tell us they prefer 2000 but it will work in 2003.

These big companies have no reason to make their software work in other OSes, they can just force their customers to use an OS that will work, because their customers were told by the government that they have to use this software. Man I'm in the wrong line of business, I want to write some crappy software and never have to update it and have the government force people to use it. :biggrin:

 

[Imp]

Work still uses it. Supposed to be migrating to 7 in the next year... That's going to confuse the hell out of a lot of people, but they'll probably strip away the Aero.

 

[fire400]

I still run xp. it's beautiful... I have it super-tweaked out and saved a cloned image of it.

when it tanks, I put in another hard drive in, and back to work.

 

[mmntech]

Sounds about right. I worked at a hospital for a while, most medical software, especially any software that has to interface with a medical device, is made for windows NT4/98 with basic support for 2000... and happens to work in XP. Not supported, but it works.

Most of our computers transitioned to Windows 7 some time ago. Before I started there. Though there's a small number that still run Windows 2000. Some of the broadcast equipment still communicates using serial ports so IT carts around these decade old Pentium III laptops to configure them. I'm told the computers that throw weather graphics out to TV are pre-386. They encode and display text information for regional weather. The reason they keep them is because they own the software. No licenses or royalties to pay.

When I worked at a radio station, they still had some Pentium II servers.

 

[BUTCH1]

I suggest you Wine about it instead.

(In other words, install Linux, potentially in a VM, and run your game there with Wine.)

Na, it runs fine in XP pro, it's easier to just do a dual boot setup and load XP when I want to play it, the partition will be small as I will do a fresh install of XPSP3 then let Microsoft update it, install SH3 GWX and it's done. That's the only thing that will not run on 7..

 

[holden j caufield]

lots of legacy stuff won't run on windows 7. And I love windows 7 but lots of businesses still run on xp

 

[Red Squirrel]

My company is still on XP and don't think there's any plans to move. Lot of programs need very specific versions of java, which probably wont install on 7 anyway. The whole concept of a web based app should be that it's easy to deploy and universal.. but our 3rd party coding company sucks at making stuff that is flexible.

 

[Ackmed]

My laptop in my patrol car uses XP. We're supposed to go to tablets next year though. Not sure how that is going to work with the amount of typing that we do. Some sort of docking station I guess.

 

[jumpncrash]

I still have a few machines on XP, they annoy me to no end. This week I wanted to stream some movies from my shared drive on my server, but the stupid XP computer was no longer able to connect, nothing had changed, same network setup, same usernames, passwords, but it wouldnt connect.

Fast forward a few days, still no changes have been made, it works again...ah XP

 

[Ichinisan]

My laptop in my patrol car uses XP. We're supposed to go to tablets next year though. Not sure how that is going to work with the amount of typing that we do. Some sort of docking station I guess.

Bluetooth keyboard solves that problem.

 

[mikeymikec]

MS drops support and won't protect it's consumers from security risk and force them into their new product?

Between this and the new tablet, MS is pulling some Apple shit on us.

F them

Apple abandons customers running 'legacy' versions in about a third of the time that MS does, do you expect MS to forever support a platform with security fixes? Have you thought about how much that costs?

Perhaps all electronics should have a mandatory lifetime warranty as well at no extra cost?

A lot of people conveniently forget that until Service Pack 2, XP was an awful OS. It's the reason why I forced myself to learn computers. It was unstable, at least for me. I'd have to do a full reinstall at least annually. Not to mention it was notorious for all the malware. You'd have to lock that thing down like Fort Knox with third party security software. IIRC, the only protection it offered was a basic firewall.

Windows 7 works better, is stable and secure. Windows 8 is Windows 7 with a tablet interface. So I'll be skipping 8. Might put it on my HTPC but not the desktop.

It was unstable for you. I was service packing XP for loads of customers, but not once because of stability issues. Service packing a machine with stability issues is potentially asking for trouble (unless of course the stability issue is very specific and documented as 'known to be fixed with service pack x').

I'm sure some people would pipe up with "Win7 has been nothing but trouble for me", but when a platform has millions of users, there are bound to be some with problems (which may not even be the fault of the OS).

I mean no malice when I say this, but computer owners with that mindset are the single biggest threat to the Internet today. You're purposely making yourself vulnerable to attacks, and in turn opening yourself up to being used in further attacks. Virus scans and software firewalls cannot replace real software security, and thanks to XP's haphazard design you could easily be infected with a rootkit exploiting a known vulnerability and not even know it. Good malware - the kind that builds long-lasting botnets - operates completely below the radar.

Simply put, if you operate an Internet-connected device then you have a social duty to make sure your devices aren't being used to engage in other attacks. And keeping your devices up to date is the cornerstone of that duty.

+1

One can never be 100% certain of the security of their machine, and the goal of a lot of malware is to be undetectable through normal use. Not installing Windows updates is just asking for trouble, and the fact that they are so little trouble to have automatically installed just makes the act of not installing them even more pointless.

 

[Sonikku]

Ah, good ol' XP. It seems like I bought an OEM for $70 off the egg nearly a decade ago and went on to use it and activate on three completely different builds I made over the years to spend every free dollar on maximizing the hardware. It was only when I was faced with making my most recent one that I used a free key for Vista 64 ultimate nobody wanted so I could reap the benefits of faster 64bit loading times/DX11 features/8gb's of ram ect for gaming. (Vista isn't that bad I guess, after you have it fully updated and configured with all the annoying pop ups disabled)

I lament that when my current board becomes obsolete so will my OS. It appears as though only with XP was Microsoft allowing people to re-use the same key over and over. Making matters worse, gone are the days of a single motherboard carrying me from Pentium 4's all the way to Core 2 Quads. I have no doubt the machine and OS will need replacing sooner than ever. With the kind of shenanigans that go on in this industry, I am positively shocked that we have things like Pci Express 2.0 and 3.0 that are more or less compatible with each other and not a brand new completely different socket ala AGP every single year.

 

[AlienCraft]

Or like a little Pakistani girl! D:

She was shot in a bus.Out Front. Similie not found.

 

[ComputerWizKid]

I just put together a XP machine for myself to play my "Old" trucking simulators
My mom still uses XP on her computer. She still plays and old dos game (Dragon or Shanghai II) the computer only has 2GB of ram can the X86 version of Windows 7 run 16-bit programs?

 

[Doppel]

I expect there will be literally millions of people still using xp when its support is cut down and eventually they'll all become spamy virusy hellscapes and they will probably resent Microsoft for it. I assume MS knows this. If it would support XP through 2020 I bet it would still have plenty of users.

 

[mikeymikec]

I expect there will be literally millions of people still using xp when its support is cut down and eventually they'll all become spamy virusy hellscapes and they will probably resent Microsoft for it. I assume MS knows this. If it would support XP through 2020 I bet it would still have plenty of users.

If by 'plenty of users', you mean the tiniest fraction of 1% of Windows users, because by 2020 the driver support will have dried right up, in the same way that Win3x or Win9x drivers aren't available now for modern boards. IDE support will probably be long gone as well, AHCI only or better, which leaves the possibility of running an older OS pretty much impossible.

I enjoyed my time running NT4 and doing IDE driver hacks where NT4 IDE drivers weren't available in order to get DMA performance, but at some point I wanted USB support, you know?

Though it would be interesting to see what take-up there would be if Microsoft was to say "Ok, we'll continue supporting XP for another ten years if we can drum up x amount of money in 'extended licence' fees, everyone who wants to use it for longer and still get security updates needs to pay <whatever the cost of that XP licence is in that country>. I can think of quite a few small businesses I know to which that would make a certain amount of sense as they're stuck running XP due to legacy hardware/software support*.

Note that I say "interesting", not "good"*, because there comes a time when people must move on. Also, the likelihood of even the best quality kit lasting another 8-10 years stretches the bounds of plausibility IMO. A lot of boards don't make it to 8 years, let alone 20.

* - because the purveyors of said "legacy hardware/software" will be even less inclined to full their finger out and start developing for newer platforms, which they should have been the moment Vista went into beta let alone now.

I've already countered your point about people resenting MS for not supporting their products forever: http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=34160651&postcount=64

 

[highland145]

Win 7 upgrade from xp? Or a recipe for disaster?

3 pack for $142.
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Wind...ords=windows+7

 

[Nintendesert]

Win 7 upgrade from xp? Or a recipe for disaster?

3 pack for $142.
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Wind...ords=windows+7

Even with an upgrade you can do a fresh install of Win 7 and upgrade itself to activate. Microsoft has a walk through etc. on how to do this so it's not exactly a shady practice.

 

[Drako]

Work still uses it. Supposed to be migrating to 7 in the next year... That's going to confuse the hell out of a lot of people, but they'll probably strip away the Aero.

Same thing here - we are still using XP on all the machines at the office. There are a number of apps that we use that do not work with W7, but work arounds are in process. Supposed to be going to W7 1st quarter next year.

 

[highland145]

Even with an upgrade you can do a fresh install of Win 7 and upgrade itself to activate. Microsoft has a walk through etc. on how to do this so it's not exactly a shady practice.

:thumbsup:

 

[OutHouse]

There's nothing happy about this birthday. WinXP needs to be taken out back and shot Old Yeller style.

why? its a solid OS.

 

[OutHouse]

I enjoyed my time running NT4 and doing IDE driver hacks where NT4 IDE drivers weren't available

that shit sucked. NT4 sucked especially when you had to get a new piece of hardware working and the fucking driver that came with it didnt work.

 

[Nintendesert]

why? its a solid OS.

Keep reading what Virge wrote, it's NOT a solid OS at all.