News XP support extended to 2014

Computers have improved enough that xp runs at the same speed as win2k did a few years ago. Same will happen with vista, once 8 core nehalems, 12 GB DDR3, radeon 6850 and 4 ssd's in raid 0 are low end rubbish in 2011 or so.

 

I don't think the situation is quite that bad... With enough money you could probably get a machine which could very comfortably run Vista nowadays.

 

sure you can, a E7200, a p35 board, 2GB cheapo DDR2 a radeon 3650 and a decent hdd like a samsung f1 320 GB run vista just fine and woudnt break the bank.
the reality is that many companies use far worse pc's, try first gen p4, 512 MB ram and integrated graphics from back then and you have the reality in todays offices.

 

What about all that Vista-capable PC crap? My PC can run it perfectly fine at stock and I would NOT consider it being high-end.

 

I run Vista 32-bit on my AMD Athlon XP 3200+, nforce 2, 2GB of RAM, Geforce FX 5900 128MB. (my mobo in my sig is being RMA)
If you get the latest drivers (from nvidia, not Windows Update), the OS runs just as well as XP ever did. Now, granted that the video card drivers are not optimize at all (nvdia does not care about their old FX 5000 series). However since 2005-2006... no game works other then pure minimum settings (even Half-Life doesn't run smoothly), so I just don't care, and it does a great job with Aero.

- Why did I upgraded... It was easy to transfer my program configuration from my newer PC to this one (just copy & paste your profile folder in Vista)
- I navigate trough my computer way faster, thanks to the instant search bar on Start Menu.
- Transparency on the boarders allows me to better manager a lot of windows.
- I like the overall feel of Vista UI.
- More responsive.
- SuperFetch
- Fast install (25min for this computer).

However, I still prefer Vista 64-bit.

 

so are they extending the life of XP Professional too?

 

> Computers have improved enough that xp runs at the same speed as win2k did a few years ago.

I think this is missing the point entirely.

I own a computer to run applications - the OS is a means to an end!

Making it harder to run the OS is going BACKWARDS.

 

So why do you need a more powerful computer? Ah because your applications has more features and require more computer power. And your games demands more and more power.
Wait... is that making applications and games go BACKWARDS?!

Your logic makes not much sense. Vista has new features which require more computer resources, like every other applications on your computer.

 

no, your pc is high end, the majority of office pc's doesnt even have c2d yet and often even less than 1GB ram...

 

+1 to naokaji.
I believe that many industries won't even change on Windows 7. They will change Windows when they believe that the computer are too old, and lack of hardware support. For example, if they use DDR1 RAM and it needs to be upgraded for a much needed software of the motherboard brakes (discontinued), they can't get those easily and cheap. Once they reach that point, they will get new computers with the latest Windows, and upgrade all their software to have them Windows NT6 (Vista and later on OS) compatible, and they will see about 64-bit version.

 

Perhaps Vista was ahead of its time? The average PC user didn't have the requirements to run the OS properly to begin with. Except for the few "Hardcore PC gamers" who have like 4+ GB's of RAM that is. I remember when XP came out most people still used less than 128mb's and some were even still running on 64mb's of ram. The average PC retails with 1GB I believe today and a majority that I've seen lately still have 512mb's. Don't you need 2Gb's to even run Vista properly?

 

I would suggest running Vista with at least 2 Gb of RAM. Even relatively idle with a couple of very minor apps running, its usually chugging around 850 Mb of memory usuage looking at the Task Manager. But who knows, if you turn off some of the 70 some odd processes that seem to be running in the background you might be able to run it on 1Gb. I never really tweaked the default installation when I got this thing out of the box from HP.

 

I notice that Vista Ultimate, having all of the features from both Business and Home Premium, runs many more services which eat up RAM. Shutting a few down reduces Vista's memory footprint. I'm running an unlicensed version for 30 days to test it out, and I'm very pleased. (AMD X2 3800, 1GB RAM, 6600GT) I ran the betas and RC's when I only had a 3200+ single core and it ran just as fast. And besides the new UI, which is awesome (still some rough patches like old icons, etc. Look at http://www.istartedsomething.com/taskforce/ ) I love how all I needed to give it was my wireless driver, and then it found drivers for all of my system components as well as my printer and scanner. XP might be a little faster to start up and shut down, but that's because I've tweaked it like crazy. 1GB of RAM definitely isn't enough though, ~400 MB are used on an average desktop idle screen w/ sidebar, but running a game or other memory intensive app still fits in with RAM to spare. 2GB would be more than enough.

 

Not a lot of people actually go ahead and do this, but Ubuntu or some other Linux distribution is perfect for business, SAMBA on Linux is a great domain controller and file server too.

 

My office has only recently upgraded to XP from Windows NT workstation after MS stopped supporting it. We wont be upgrading to Vista until MS refuse to support XP.

I wont be going to Vista until I need a new laptop and it comes with it, because I cant afford the PC and OS.

 

@mikeuk2004, fo rteh price of Vista, you have to dig... I got Vista Ultimate RETAIL for 20$ (I got 2 of them... so 40$).
@nitrous9200, well in reality every windows is guilty of UI inconsistency and old icons thing... The idea of this, is crossing our (I posted stuff some time ago) figures that Windows will look at it, and start fixing those and create the first Windows that is all nice, or try and grab some Windows developers to spend a couple extra minutes to seek for such things and correct them.

I have Vista ultimate and easily manage to make it eat ~300MB. The big thing that "takes" up the most RAM is SuperFetch (that is the thing that pre-loads your applications before you do for a way faster startup). You just have to remember that this feature does not reserve RAM, it freeze up as needed.


As nitrous9200 pointed out... most of us tweak Windows XP to the max and that is why we see that Vista is more heavy.. but if you don't do it, you will see it's not that much. And yes you can optimize to your needs Windows Vista. I made it run smoothly under a Pentium III 800Mhz, with 512MB of RAM. Granted to was HELL at the begging as everything is enabled... but once you disable about everything... it's lite and as (or nearly as) speedy as XP.

 

We're moving to Vista at work towards the end of the year, not exactly a small company either with 10k+ employees just in the UK. I imagine the situation is similar elsewhere in the finance industry too.

I've been using Vista 64 for just under a year or so and I've found it pretty spot on. I got it free through an MSDN subscribtion though, I'm not sure I'd be willing to pay for it knowing that Windows 7 is only a couple of years away!!

 

Still going strong on 2000. The desktops are early P4 models, runs 2000 as fast as my parents late model P4 runs XP, except they cost peanuts at the time and changing them results in spending money for no actual gain.

Vista isn't even in the picture.

 

Good, that's all I have to say.

 

We've reached something of a plateau in terms of performance available vs performance needed, especially for business users. Most business users don't need anything more than office and perhaps some propritary database / VPN / POS / whatever software. A few need high end photoshop or video editing machines, but the vast majority get along just fine with a P4 and XP. I think what people are realizing is that at this point, there just isn't any real need to upgrade either the hardware or software.

From a business perspective, when you ask what's better about Vista, the answer isn't enough to justify not only the cost of the new OS, but also the cost of migration and of potential incompatibilities with mission critical software.

Or, to put it another way, if you want users, especially bsuinesses, to change OS, you need to offer enough new features to make it worthwhile. I feel that Vista has failed to deliver on this point.