News Windows 7 starts countdown for XP

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2009/05/01/windows-7-starts-countdown-for-xp/1

The general availability of Windows 7 will mark the start of a one-year countdown for the popular Windows XP, with OEMs having to move away once the time is up.

 

I beg to differ, as im sure the 1000's of businesses and schools will too.

 

bearing in mind most businesses seem happy to run ancient hardware in office tasks i don't think they'll worry too much, by the time they upgrade xp will ikely be 15 years old

and dont schools need to teach kids the most current os, seems more useful than trying to learn an out of date one. my school had acorns and i can tell you they were just plain awful, not that i'm saying xp is anything like acorn os, just that it would have been nice to learn on the current one

 

Schools just can't afford to replace their entire infrastructure on Microsoft's timetable. Many academic programs are bedroom programmer affairs and just don't work on Vista and there isn't the money or time to fix it. Aside from obvious compatibility issues there is the training costs even down to the end user. Teachers just don't have time!

 

The school I went to got 300 brand new Dell PCs for free back in 2003. They didn't even unpack them before late last year.

So, yeah, they'll run XP for a long time to come.

 

One company I know, ran their operations on AS/400 servers until this year!

 

I am a die-hard PC Gamer and I would like to see XP die. I would like to see something BETTER to replace it, but languishing in the doldrums of DX9 is very old.

S*D

 

I, for one, don't see anything that would make Win7 superior to XP in any way. It's not more secure, it boots slower, it's worse in gaming, and it's generally more sluggish than XP, even on top-end hardware, not to mention all the bloat included. Well, it looks better so I'd say that for 98% of Windows userbase that's enough innovation to justify the cost.

 

the percentage of xp users is still far above vista users what 2 yrs after vista release and w7 is just a
upgrade of vista so your not going to see a rush to w7. as for vxp in w7 it will have to be proven very
compatible before I jump ship from xp pro and I imagine for many others as well.

 

Do you have any proof for that, n3mo?

It doesn't feel sluggish on my laptop with 512 MB RAM, it's more secure [kernel access for example], and how is it worse in gaming? It uses the same driver as Vista and that is the same as XP [182.50]. Performance is not that different, that was the case back when Vista just hit the market.

And with bloat you mean what exactly? Windows Movie Maker, Windows Photo Viewer, ... ? Yeah, right.

 

and i, for one, don't see any reason for XP to be continuly supported if 98se boots faster, better in gaming, and generally snappier than any later OS.

it's all a matter of personal preference, Vista just changed a few things and people started to panic. There is no reason to dislike Vista or Win7. the only thing that doesn't change is that everything will change. human need to evolve, those who don't evolve are still hanging on trees eating banana.

 

This amuses me because I'm reading it using a Win98 system.

 

I still have my W98 SE CD right here. Will give it a go in a virtual machine soon to re-live those happy memories.

 

it's all a matter of personal preference, Vista just changed a few things and people started to panic. There is no reason to dislike Vista or Win7. the only thing that doesn't change is that everything will change. human need to evolve, those who don't evolve are still hanging on trees eating banana

the bananas on my tree are mighty tasty and all my legacy software works!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Windows 7 is worlds better than XP.

To think otherwise is ignorant. Windows 7 runs great on my laptop, just because Windows XP runs faster does not make it a better operating system! If that's your argument than obviously Windows 3.1 > all.

Just because Windows 7 uses more resources, and the initial file size has increased compared to Windows XP, does not mean it's bloated. It's called features. New features require more resources. I think that's just common sense.

To say it's not anymore secure than Windows XP is even more ignorant! How do you even know it isn't more secure? What, did Microsoft just fire their security team.."guys, you know what, the security of XP is the best it's going to get. We don't require your services anymore. We decided that we're going to slap on aero effects to XP and dub it Windows 7. Our users will eat that **** up."

Ugh, get real. It's a whole new operating system.

 

While I agree with the rest of your post, it's actually more like a service pack for Vista.

Windows XP: Windows Kernel 5
Windows Vista: Windows Kernel 6
Windows Server 2008: Windows Kernel 6
Windows 7: Windows Kernel 6.1

Further to that, I think a lot of the positive press windows 7 has been getting has been wrongly attributed to windows 7 instead of the windows 6 kernel which is just better than the previous incarnation. I think it was the finish on Vista and mayhap misinformation / marketing issues that meant that a lot of people didn't see that, and still thought XP was superior.

 

I'll stick with XP while it still works great for what I do and I don't exactly have the money to instantly get Vista or Win7. I know for 1 I shall skip Vista and go directly to Win7 because I will probably not shed the money for both.

 

Can't afford an upgrade yet and dont see that I really need anything more than XP for the time being - for work or games.

Would be a shame to force an upgrade on people who dont want it.... eg the majority of XP owners!

 

they aren't forcing an upgrade . they are only cutting off supply to OEM's, long after they were initially supposed to.

 

Well, PC Pro's benchmarks showed an XP system with 512MB RAM outperforming a Vista system with 4GB.

"Feel" is very subjective and not a good substitute for benchmarks. As for gaming performance, have a look at this Windows 7 Beta Performance Preview - it shows Win7 running games faster than Vista generally, but still slower than XP.

This shouldn't be a surprise - every version released of Windows (with the possible exception of Windows for Workgroups 3.11) has run slower than the previous one, despite various "go faster" features touted by Microsoft (VCache, PreFetch, SuperFetch, etc). Vista was certainly a far worse example of this, to the extent that Windows 7 may genuinely outpace it, but no-one should expect performance to reach XP (or Win2K) levels.

This is incorrect. One of the more significant changes made in Vista was moving the video driver out of Windows' kernel space. Now the reason that the video driver was moved into the kernel originally (back with Windows NT 3.5) was to improve performance - kernel mode code runs faster. So moving it back out should, quite reasonably, incur a performance penalty despite DX10's "go faster stripes".

Windows XP's code has had years of patches applied to fix security holes. Vista on the other hand had a complete rewrite of its network stack which meant old problems resurfacing and some Vista-specific vulnerabilities (example).

As a general rule, the more lines of code that are present in a product, the greater the number of bugs and, thereby, security vulnerabilities. So any significant increase in codebase size (and Vista has 50 million lines of code compared to XP's 40 million) will lead to more security holes (commercial software typically has 20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code according to Cylab). Small and simple is the real road towards a secure system.