Will the upgrade to WinXP 64 be free?

[Chaotic42]

Any chance of that? I already paid $150 for Windows XP, and I'm hoping against hope that it will be a free or cheap (~$20) upgrade.

Anyone hear anything?

 

[Confused]

Knowing Microsoft, i seriously doubt it!!


Confused

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: Confused
Knowing Microsoft, i seriously doubt it!!
Confused

Yeah, that's pretty much what I think, but I'm hoping against hope. I plan on going to an Opteron system when that God-forsaken BTX form-factor gets released.

 

[sak]

try Hell no...FRee..hahahaha..cmon man..MS and free..(oooh..well there RMA is good thought...and free )

 

[Nothinman]

Do you think AMD will be offering a free upgrade to 64-bit?

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Do you think AMD will be offering a free upgrade to 64-bit?

Only after Debian begins a per proccessor pricing sceme.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: Chaotic42
Any chance of that? I already paid $150 for Windows XP, and I'm hoping against hope that it will be a free or cheap (~$20) upgrade. Anyone hear anything?

Not going to happen (can't believe anyone actually would think it would).
Bill

 

[rmrf]

there is a price difference between the 32bit and 64bit version of win2003, guarenteed winXP64 will be more expensive, and the upgrade from 32 to 64 should be about as crappy as all the other upgrade versions of the OS. just my $.02

you can always hope

 

[EeyoreX]

Super-sizing at McDonald's isn't free. Upgrading to 64-bit processor isn't free. Upgrading to a in-dash CD changer isn't free. Generally upgrades to any software aren't free for major revisions. SOme software is great in that it offers lifetime upgrades for free, but many more do not. When a major release (ie, version 2 to version 3) is released you pay for the upgrade. Minor point upgrades (version 2.0 through version 2.9x) are almost always free. And I can't believe the thought occured to people too.

\Dan

 

[Nothinman]

Minor point upgrades (version 2.0 through version 2.9x) are almost always free.

Except for the NT 5.0 to 5.1 upgrade a lot of people payed for.

 

[Budman]

Will the upgrade to WinXP 64 be free?

hahahahahah LMAOPIP!!!! Now that's funny !!!


Thanks for the laugh Chaotic42 . Good one. free upgrade from Microsoft !!! hahahahahahahaha

 

[WobbleWobble]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Minor point upgrades (version 2.0 through version 2.9x) are almost always free.

Except for the NT 5.0 to 5.1 upgrade a lot of people payed for.

Or Windows 98 and Windows 98 SE... and even Windows ME (which is close enough to Win98 Third Edition)

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: drag

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Do you think AMD will be offering a free upgrade to 64-bit?

Only after Debian begins a per proccessor pricing sceme.

What do you mean? You already have to pay 4x as much for a dual processor machine, and 16x as much for a quad processor machine...

 

[Chaotic42]

All right, all right.

I was under the impression that the only difference is that it supports 64-bits. It's like charging extra to upgrade a game's support from DX8 to DX9. I don't see charging for it, but hey, it's capitalism.

 

[Nothinman]

I was under the impression that the only difference is that it supports 64-bits. It's like charging extra to upgrade a game's support from DX8 to DX9. I don't see charging for it, but hey, it's capitalism.

It's a completely new architecture, it's like buying a NT 4 CD for x86 and expecting to get the PPC build too...oh wait, that's how it used to work.

What do you mean? You already have to pay 4x as much for a dual processor machine, and 16x as much for a quad processor machine...

Not really, my dual motherboard and CPUs were fairly cheap and the rest of the parts aren't specific to the box. Once the Opteron 246s come down in price I'll probably buy a pair of them to put on the board Tyan recently released and will be reusing all my other current parts again.

 

[stevewm]

You do realize that in the 64-bit versions of XP and 2k3 you MUST use 64-bit drivers. 32-bit drivers WILL NOT WORK AT ALL. If you hardware does not have 64-bit drivers, it will not work at all plain and simple.

I don't think a upgrade install would be possible. In the x68-64 version of XP and 2k3 there are quite a few low level changes. It is not as simple as copying in 64-bit executables to replace the 32-bit ones.

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

I was under the impression that the only difference is that it supports 64-bits. It's like charging extra to upgrade a game's support from DX8 to DX9. I don't see charging for it, but hey, it's capitalism.

It's a completely new architecture, it's like buying a NT 4 CD for x86 and expecting to get the PPC build too...oh wait, that's how it used to work.

Right, I guess it would be more like expecting a free patch to a game when a new type of video card comes out. Personally I think that a license should have effect for a product no matter the architecture. I should be able to use any Windows XP Pro version for any architecture.

But that's just me.

 

[Nothinman]

Call them and complain, couldn't hurt.

You do realize that in the 64-bit versions of XP and 2k3 you MUST use 64-bit drivers. 32-bit drivers WILL NOT WORK AT ALL. If you hardware does not have 64-bit drivers, it will not work at all plain and simple.

Good thing all my drivers are Open Source (minus the nvidia one, but they have IA64 and AMD64 builds).

 

[Vanye]

AMD said they would give free 64 bit software to anybody that registers their A64s. Its not unbelivble that AMD would give away copies of xp64 or at least discount coupons when the time comes

 

[rch4001]

of course it wont be free - ms has had 1000 or so people working on it for 2 years. free???????????

 

[Nothinman]

of course it wont be free - ms has had 1000 or so people working on it for 2 years. free???????????

They had those people working on Windows in general, the AMD64 port shouldn't be much extra work since NT currently runs on 2 architectures and has been on up to 4 at once. Pretty much all the work should have been in the bootloader, misc drivers that have embedded asm and getting 32-bit apps running cleanly on a 64-bit system.

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: rch4001
of course it wont be free - ms has had 1000 or so people working on it for 2 years. free???????????

How much work can it be? The free OSes have people working on it in their spare time and they've already got it up and running.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Chaotic42

Originally posted by: rch4001
of course it wont be free - ms has had 1000 or so people working on it for 2 years. free???????????

How much work can it be? The free OSes have people working on it in their spare time and they've already got it up and running.

That's because Linux is based on the Unix design philosophy. Which is that operating systems should be open as possible and portable as possible. It's the whole layed design thing, each aspect of the operating system should do there job and that's it. (Unix didn't turn into the big dinosaurs until companies like SCO and Sun tried to monopolize the developement, think the portability of NetBSD....)

In unix if a programmer has to pick a comprimise between speed or portability or conveniance, they should pick portability almost every time.

Since each part of the operating system is designed to exist in a high level of abstraction (at least that's the idea) most of it is isolated from hardware changes. Since the kernel is <i>suppose</i> to be the only thing that realy interacts directly with the hardware, you port the kernel/drivers and create a C compiler for a architecture then 90% of the work is already done. Of course the remaning 10% for memory tweaks and algorithims or whatever for many programs to take advantage of hardware features is a pain in the butt to port.


I suspect that in Windows developement that the philosophy would be to pick speed and conveniance over portability.. so lots of the apsects the operating system involve hardware-dependant choices and tweaks. Lots of the OS interacts directly with hardware and <i>may</i> (for example) have some limited parts written in assembly in order to get as much out of the hardware as possible. Which would explain how in some respects windows would always be just a bit faster then Linux...

Since lots of these choices in designed may span back all the way to the win95 days, many of the original developers are either long gone or forgot about what they did 10 or so years ago. The Windows Operating system is complex enough that I am guessing that nobody realy remembers what is going on in the deep dark resesses in many programs... So it's going to be very labor intensive to go and track down all those changes and tweaks and then once you find them you have to then figure out how to rewrite them for a brand new and untested hardware that design may not yet be in the finalized stages of developement.

Programmers reuse code as much as possible. If for example you have to create a file sharing program for Windows XP, are you going to spend a couple years designing/testing/implimenting a brand new design? Or are you going to spend a couple months adapting Win98/NT's version of SMB file sharing to the new OS?

This is also (from what I understand) why crackers are always finding new buffer overflows and stuff in Unix/Linux and Windows programs. Now programmers know they must make checks and put special protections around buffers and stuff, but 10-20 years ago you were operating under much more restrictive hardware and security wasn't in the for-front and you had to make this stuff fit in 720k worth of memory.. Who would of thought that decendants of DOS/Windows 95 would be using in machines with 3 gig proccessors with over a gig of memory?

All in all I am guessing that it would be much more work to port Windows then to port Linux.

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

What do you mean? You already have to pay 4x as much for a dual processor machine, and 16x as much for a quad processor machine...

Not really, my dual motherboard and CPUs were fairly cheap and the rest of the parts aren't specific to the box. Once the Opteron 246s come down in price I'll probably buy a pair of them to put on the board Tyan recently released and will be reusing all my other current parts again.

I was referring to debian.... see, it's free for 1 processor, and costs 4x as much (free) for 2 processors, and 16x as much (free) for 4 processors .

 

[Nothinman]

Sorry, my math skills have been lacking recently :/