Anti-upgraders unite

http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2005/07/13/anti_upgraders_unite/1.html

 

Type in notepad... way to rebel!

I mean really... what MS would be smart to do is have a stable OS (I could stop there...) which doesn't have me with a quarter of my gig of ram used upon booting from a fresh install, but rather runs on the old hardware that companies or home users don't want to pay to upgrade, or for systems like Via EPIA's which don't pack quite the punch of an FX57 but have that uber-compact-integratedness-which-kicks-ass-for-an-office-apps-machine factor going for them.

i.e. system requirements of Win 3.1 to Win95 with better than XP's stability, and a feature mix somewhere between them (ie no teletubbies desktop on the fresh install, but still has some of those things that you take for granted until you can't find them anymore, although tbh I can't think of any but that's kind of the point). And for God's sake if they don't include Firefox/T-bird as the default net/mail apps, at least make it so IE isn't built into the shell so you can remove ten thousand vulnerabilities and prevent the full system crash when it could have just taken down the browser window.

Good read, anyways.

I know way too many people that hate windows xp. It drives me nuts, because they all use Win98. And the problem is that their opinion of XP sucking is SOLELY based on the fact that half our school comps are P3-500MHz with 64-128MB ram trying to run a novelled-up (*shudder*) XP Pro with a ton of anti-idiocy programs running in the background that don't work anyways. With each new OS, I need a new comp. So the expense goes from the already crazy $100 for an upgrade version of the cut-down home version to often times almost a grand for a decent mid-spec box just to keep up and run for a few weeks without getting bogged down.

I, for one, see no need to rotate my desktop windows in 3d, a la Longhorn. Sure, it's fun in Sketchup (not to mention actually useful), but if I wanna rotate them I'll just draw a rectangle and apply a screenshot as a texture and throw some zooming into the mix as well. I have no desire to have my SLI'd 6800GT's running at full load just to browse Bit or some watercooling store, no matter how addicted I am. Or to type up a death threat to MS in openoffice

honestly, if it was $100 for a permanent upgrade, I'd pay it. But all the crap that comes loaded with stock XP combined with that horrible activation process really makes a pirated version which includes office and Firefox and removes activation that much MORE worthwhile. Yes I DO own a legit copy, but my pirated version is just so much more convenient to work with (not to mention only cost thirty cents for a CD plus a dollar or so for the bandwidth).

although in a slight bit of fairness, the hardest part of activation is either a) typing in fifty numbers first into the phone then into the comp, b) giving an acceptable reason for reinstalling or c) understanding the numbers through the outsourced worker's very heavy accent.

enough talk for now... 5:30am... about time to go to bed.

 

Good article, couldn't agree more.
I've been working in the IT industry for close on 15 years, and I have to say that the industry in general is slowing down between its announcements of "the next big thing".

[me settles back into comfy armchair, lights pipe and hitches the blanket so it's higher than the waistband on my trousers - which is up underneath my armpits]

When I started in the industry, we used to have something new to be excited about every few weeks, and a new next big thing every couple of months. But that was a time when the industry really was providing new, better things that actually helped users and made their lives better.

These days, few of the next big things deliver what's promised (ever heard of a completely successful CRM implementation?) - but the industry has learned, and fewer and fewer next big things are being announced.

The one arena where this hasn't slowed down is the PC, and PC-related technology - week after week, we are bombarded by promises of heaven on earth if only we buy the next big thing from whomever: 64-bit, dual core, Longhorn, the next range of ATI/nVidia cards, Office12 - the list goes on.

But we're still in the situation where the reality still isn't living up to the hype: 64-bit and dual core won't deliver any performance benefits until software is written to take advantage of the hardware, Longhorn has been pushed back so many times it's still just a dot on the horizon, graphics cards are 12-18 months ahead of the games that make full use of their facilities, and Office12 won't offer any benefits to the average user (on top of which VBA support is being dropped in favour of VBA.net)

The wider (business-related) IT industry has learned that people just become jaded by too many announcements of the next big thing. It's grown up.

Isn't it time the PC industry grew up too?

 

i agree with you , but the last paragraph is someting out of this world, congratulations. I dont remember having soo much fun reading a serious computer article

 

Not used OneNote then? (okay its really only for tablet PCs).

MS are wanting people to rent their software, tbh i don't mind that, its quite easy to say £10 a month for my 4 copies of NT workstation (XP + 2k), and 2 copies of 2003 (nt server class), with another £4 a month for my office class. Makes budgeting easyer.

The problem i find with software is you have to have the latest to talk to that person who's on the latest because someone they work with is on the latest and so forth. I sometimes think they just give a college a new Office suite version to force the whole world to upgrade.

Digital ink is about the only new thing the whole office scene has had for 10 years i think its fair to say (voice recognition i consider to be a quirk).

But as far as OS tech goes, i couldn't disagree more.
2.6 for linux was a hudge jump, it actually lets people seriously contend it with BSD (well not really, but at least its allowed to sit at the kiddy table now).
server 2003 really is a great timesaver to anyone whos had to set up a domain!

Whilst i say to myself i could do everything i do in office now on Lotus's 123 running under 3.1 i think its fair to say that its not as easy, these silly new features, whilst not worth £50 per license, are good. I had the unplesant task of having to use open office for something the other week, my god that was painful, i had a MUCH better DTP tool on an acorn in like 1992 or something!

Software goes in hand with hardware, and before you lampoon software people for not doing anything new or creative, whats hardware done lately? 64bit 'yey woo now i can do soo much more' for those not ripping dvd's or trying to squeaze an extra 4 fps in a game, its just not exciting. Granted there are some good things with 64bit (thou i've just seen a post were people complain that DEP does its job?!).

The new office XML zipped filetype has been brought about to help allow multipule devices render the page, so a smartphone can actually stand a chance of rending your dissertation. The other side effect is this will be kinder on people who choose not to upgrade their hardware or software.

 

I'd say Windows has been generally good with it's upgrades. Not too frequent and with the excpetion of XP they have some fairly considerable changes.

It's not just Microsoft though. They all do it. Autodesk bring out a new version of Autocad every year and it has only minor adjustments that don't justify the £3,000 expense of upgrading a single licence.

I would much rather see more service packs to upgrade existing software than completley new versions every 5 minutes.

 

Tell you what, that was a really good article, I really enjoyed reading that!

 

Excellent artical , love the Notepad bit, the only thing i use word for iws typing up Uni Course Work, eveything else is notepad or wordpad

 

Good article.

Here at work, in the main office, we still use Office 97. We have absolutely no need to upgrade to the latest versions of Word or Excel. We have OfficeXP in our London Office though.

We have only recently migrated onto Outlook 2003, as we are now running Exchange 2003 - but before we had that? A mixture of Outlook 97/98/2000/XP using the Microsoft Mail service. The free WorkGroup PostOffice software that I think first arrived with Windows 3.11!

We've only just gotten rid of the last PC running Windows 95 OSR2, 3 PCs have Windows 98SE; a couple still run 2000 but the majority of our PCs run XP (and most of those still use SP1 not SP2).

I doubt even after the entire company's moved over to Windows XP we'll upgrade Office - at least not for another few years.

 

Excellent article, as usual, Chris! I laughed my ass off about the last paragraph...as was mentioned above, the most fun ever reading a serious computer article. This should honestly be forwarded for publication to a magazine or two.

Now, I DO have to agree with Animus about there being some upgrades worth paying for (XML standard is a beautiful thing, believe me...). And Server2003 is an IMMENSE time saver when you actually set your office up on a domain instead of just running a patch network.

But...does it justify the massive cost? No. I've set up 2 servers running 03, loved it. For my own firm, though, we sit with Server 2000. A financial office of 5 people just does not need all the handy roll-out stuff. Darv mentions autocad...can someone point to me the differences between AC2000 and AC2004? Because there have been 3 releases inside of those two titles (exclusive) and I can't tell the difference between any bloody one of them. That's 5 versions of software, each with a $3000+ price tag. For the upgrade. Ahuh, I really care that much about where they moved the close buttons on the windows.

And Firehed, be careful what you wish for...MS is releasing a "stripped" version of XP to run on those smaller, office compatible systems. Run away, run very fast. I think by stripped, they mean they removed all that bloat of a working OS and left us with a few pretty graphics and all the error messages. Shaved a total of 5mb of RAM off the system requirements.

Le sigh. Some days, I wonder why I haven't switched to Linux yet. Plagued by the same upgrade problems, but at least it's all free.

As a side note...has anyone noticed yet that XML and CSS are getting to be much more powerful for publishing and writing than Office software (of any version or brand)? Seriously...with the stuff I can do in PHP, MySQL, and XML, I wonder why I need an office suite some days...it almost seems like it would make more sense to make my documents be dynamic webpages.

 

I still use command line text editors, any uni work is done in the same way but in html.

 

lol I'd believe it. I was implying they should do it right. Seriously, the only change in functionality from Windows 3.1 to XP was the start menu, perhaps the quick launch bar within it after going up to 98 from 95. Other than that, it's all bloatware, "eye candy" (though it's usually quite fugly), and adding in help files that cover things that you had damnwell better know before turning on the power. In fact, the only time I've used the help feature in an MS product in the last five years was to find out how to turn off all of the auto-help-your-stupidity crap.

And you know what? Now that I use ObjectDock, I NEVER use the start menu or quick launch. Ever. I'd be more than happy to run Win3.1 provided it could support my hardware and software (which it can't, and really the only reason I haven't given linux a good try in some time - native game support). I PREFER how things were laid out in 3.1... and after you are done installing all of the software to protect you from yourself and the vulnerabilities that are in the OS as a result of crap coding, your start menu takes up more than the full screen at the default 800x600 that the masses leave it at.

 

Well we have a micture of 2002 and 2005 in the office. We can't justify upgrading everyone at the same time becasue it's so expensive.

There are some very nice new features in 2005. I'm still using 2002 so haven't found them all yet, but things like sheet styles (I think they're called that) kind of brings drawings together so you can work on multiple drawings, apparently at the same time as other people. There's also a new attribute feature that I will use quite a lot. Plotting multiple layouts is made simpler.

Other than that I would have to use it extensively to find anything else.

Autodesk are just taking the piss releasing new editions all the time. Our company is getting very annoyed at them and are trying to get a deal with them so they get us cheaper upgrades.

 

if you belive those are the differnces with 3.1 and NT then go use a 2.4 linux kernel.

seriously you might be saying from an end user aspect all thats changed is the start menu, the desktop, hell its pretty much like you had norton desktop installed on 3.1. But thats the point if all your looking at is the GUI it shouldn't change that much, it needs to be intuitive so it can't change loads.

I'm not even going to try to tell you whats changed "under the hood" but my there has been an awfull lot. But your kinda right in comparison thou, windows 95, in some respects is more advanced than linux 2.4 and below kernels, NT3.5 is more advanced in (almost) every single way and that was a fair few years before 2.4

 

So yeah anti upgraders can unite but nothing will change. Up-to-date software will be sold together with new computers and soon will spread to big companies, schools and regular home users. And although united or not we will not be able to change much.

 

Why do I care what they've done "under the hood"? I AM an end user, so I'll state what I've noticed from my perspective. I expect a version upgrade to have significant changes to the end user, whether this means an improved GUI, new features (that will actually be used, in my experience remote desktop comes to mind), more stability or more security. And to the end user, the start menu and added stability are really the only big changes since Windows 3.1, other than some miscellaneous features, and making it so you can actually use the internet.

End users couldn't care less about what goes on under the hood as long as it works well. It's like a car... if I put my foot on the accelerator, I want it to move, and if I hit the brake, I want it to slow down. If that doesn't happen on the first time, every time, then something's gone wrong. People expect reliability over anything else from their OS, and the last stable OS I've used was MSDOS. Of course I had to tell my games exactly the port and irq for my sound card, but it got the job done the first time every time, and the bsod hadn't been created yet. Granted, it's all still improving, but there's much more that could be done.

Basically, a truly useful upgrade would be an OS that would only crash from a crazy overclock and is relatively speaking free of security loopholes. I'd imagine building the primary internet browser into the shell doens't really help anything in that department.

 

Excatly, however as this is sold with new computers you are no longer constrained to paying the premium for it.

For example, when we first upgraded to Windows 2000 none of our machines came with the software and that cost us a LOT of money. However, now we have an 80% base of Windows XP purely from having to upgrade old hardware. If we had upgraded via a MOLP agreement, that would have cost us a lot more.

However, we are still happily running Office XP and Windows 2000 Server throughout and currently have no intention of upgrading until it is in our interest as a business to do so. If, by that time, we are on yet another revision of various applications then MS would have lost out on upgrade fees for the version we did not need.

 

And if anyone wants more reasons why upgrading isn't worth it, it seems MS want to charge EVEN MORE for their software:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/28/microsoft_skus/

 

Luckily, our parent company has a Worldwide licence agreement with Microsoft.

In the past few months, we've upgraded our Head Office from w98se to xppro. I'm hearing a hell of a lot less problems with computers these days. We've also stuck in a dedicated win2003server, which worked fine until exchange2003 was stuck on - something to do with the domain name and our email address being the same.

The only thing I find handy in Excel 2003 (yes, we all have office2003 now) is the column and row heading is shaded a different color for whichever cell you're working in - no more running your finger across the screen, causing mucky marks.

We're using Access for a little more than how many sugars the boss takes in his coffee - there's a full-blown database growing, which will be linked to all our 17 depots through vpn, which offers severe cutbacks on the amount of paperwork going back-and-forth-and-back, i.e. holiday requests, accounts details.. pretty much the whole shooting match.

From when I started, in the six years I've been working here, we've gone from Office97, to Office2000SBE, to Office2003, equally, we've gone from w95/98/98se/me to winxppro. We've also had to upgrade all our head office computers and, as we get round the depots, around 90% will have to be upgraded or replaced to run XP. But then, they've been running 98 for years and years - we don't generally jump on bandwagons or go with the flow. If it works, why fix it? Everything's only really being upgraded for the sake of broadband being put in each depot so they can vpn into head office, be managed and maintained from head office a darn site easier and the fact that, to run xp most will get new PC's that will run a darn site quicker as well! Considering that most PC's left to do are in the region of Celeron-400, 64MB powerhouses they have paid for themselves a few times over.

 

type in open office that is better than notepad and it is being a rebel