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News Microsoft claims Windows XP costs businesses dearly

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by brumgrunt, 28 May 2012.

  1. brumgrunt

    brumgrunt What's a Dremel?

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  2. digitaldunc

    digitaldunc What's a Dremel?

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    Don't you mean DLL Gareth? :p </nitpick>

    So they've obviously got a vested interest in this one. I suppose it's entirely plausible that support costs for 7 would be less but I'm guessing the difference is minimal, really -- is XP that unreliable or prone to problems when compared to 7?

    I'll take the quoted figures with a pinch of salt as they don't really go into specifics with regards to the support issues XP encounters that 7 doesn't. I've never played with a Windows 7 centric domain controller so I can't really comment on that for admin issues, but is it really that much better than an XP based domain?

    I'm not saying it would be a bad thing to dump XP (quite the opposite, actually), it's just that it's perfectly adequate for a large number of organizations.
     
  3. Phalanx

    Phalanx Needs more dragons and stuff.

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    Well, as I work in the support area of IT, all I can say from my years of experience with both is that we get a lot more calls in regards to XP than to 7. It tends to be profile problems above others in the vast majority, so it's not so much to do with the speed of the machine. 7 doesn't give half as many problems to us as XP does.
     
  4. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    Yes. Yes, I do. Fixed, ta.
     
  5. fdbh96

    fdbh96 What's a Dremel?

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    Totally agree with MS here, our school still uses XP and its rubbish. Doesn't help that the PCs are ancient and filled with dust though :/
     
  6. Xir

    Xir Modder

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    we have a lot of specific macro's and database aplications tailored especially towards XP and an ancient version of office.
    Also, our production machines run on either XP or win2000.
    We have a great deal of problems with win7 and the latest office, that's what our tests tell us. With backward compatibility that is, the new systems themselves run very well.
     
  7. AmEv

    AmEv Meow meow. See yall in 2-ish years!

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    Same here! We're still chugging away with Pentium III 600s in classrooms with 128MB RAM!!

    7 simply cannot run on those computers!
    (Tried to convince them to run Linux on those machines and 7 on the nicer machines, but that didn't fare too well....)

    Also, like has been said, all our software still works on XP. They see no reason to upgrade.


    As for me, I still run XP because a: I simply cannot afford an internal card reader, let alone a Windows 7 licence, b: I'm not the eyepatch-wearing kind of guy.
     
    Last edited: 28 May 2012
  8. tristanperry

    tristanperry Minimodder

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    The majority of the computers where I work are running XP (new Core i7, Windows 7 machines are being bought though), and I see no drawbacks from running XP. Heck, the hardware powering the older machines is ancient but they're still fairly quick even with tonnes of applications running.

    I'd say that XP is more efficient than Windows 7 any day.
     
  9. misterd77

    misterd77 What's a Dremel?

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    I was one of those XP fanatics, till my system died (old hardware), lets face it, W7 requires less resources to run, is faster, smoother, and a whole lot less troublesome when it comes to drivers and software installs, I recently installed W7 on a machine that had been running W95, (yes, I know, but he's a cheapskate mofo), the machine had 256mb ram, and a 40gb 5,400rpm disk (IDE of course), the board was ancient, somewhere around 1998-99, I stuck in a gig of ram, a larger disk, and installed W7, and held my breath, W7 managed to install all of the drivers cept the realtek sound chip, which I managed to track down an XP driver for, and W7 just accepted the 10yr old driver like they were old pals, MS really done a great job with W7, and they are gonna have to offer something special to convince most of us to switch again, wonder what that will be.....DX12...?.......the XBOX is due for an update, so what better than to get us all panting than a new DX edition, I mean, surely they aint gonna cripple the new shiny XBOX with DX11 code ?, it wouldnt make sense.....W8=DX12.......time will tell....
     
  10. silky

    silky What's a Dremel?

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    Heh well in my day... my school had nothing but half a dozen of these:

    [​IMG]
     
  11. r3loaded

    r3loaded Minimodder

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    I agree with Microsoft on this one - XP is just so much more difficult to manage than Windows 7, especially in a domain. If nothing else, 7 is more efficient and far more secure than XP. That in itself should be reason enough to upgrade.
     
  12. AmEv

    AmEv Meow meow. See yall in 2-ish years!

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    My school's excuse?
    "Then we'll have to re-train everybody, and we'll lose profit that way!"\


    -.-

    >_<

    *slap*



    Yet they forced us to switch from Office '03 to Office '07 because "it's the latest and greatest".
    (hypocrites...?)





    The other reason they're not switching to 7 is their imaging software (Altiris) doesn't support 7, and they won't find one to replace it because they don't want to dish out more cash than they currently are.

    *cough*FOG*cough*
    "But that's Linux! We don't support Linux here."
     
  13. digitaldunc

    digitaldunc What's a Dremel?

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    Really? Why?

    Not disputing, just interested to know.
     
  14. play_boy_2000

    play_boy_2000 ^It was funny when I was 12

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    In a domain, windows 7, no if's, ands or butts. I have 1 lingering xp box in a SBS server I manage on the side, and I can't wait for it to be gone.
     
  15. fdbh96

    fdbh96 What's a Dremel?

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    Its weird really because all our IT technicians in the school have windows 7 on their machines and so do most of the teachers, it just us that that get XP.

    Also, I find W7 runs better than XP on older hardware.
     
  16. Mentai

    Mentai What's a Dremel?

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    God I hope the IT department at my work buys into this, I'm using old NT based terminals that have a max resolution of 1600*1200 and give static on a res higher than 1024*768, so my 1080p monitor is suffering along with my eyesight. Also using office 2003, which I have to relearn because university taught me with 2007. Oh and the only image editor I have for my photos is old school paint.

    Having said all that, the network it's all running on is worth hundreds of millions and for the most part is pretty responsive. I get the feeling that they really don't want to try and fix what is "working" already, even if they did earn over 2 billion AUD in profit last year.
     
  17. feathers

    feathers Minimodder

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    XP is a pile of shite.
     
  18. mi1ez

    mi1ez Modder

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    I did a stint this year doing desktop support at News Ltd and they still use XP. It killed me seeing the image put on brand new i7 machines. They ran so slow and had no end of problems, about 50% of which were fixed by reimaging the machines! ...and don't even get me started on multi-monitor support...
     
  19. r3loaded

    r3loaded Minimodder

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    Anyone who is scared off by Linux is not fit to work in an IT department imo.

    Various stuff really - the new imaging and deployment system that came with Vista, sensible security defaults out of the box, managing updates is far simpler (plus there are a lot fewer updates to bother with). Drivers actually work properly - the only bluescreens I get are when I overclock too far. No special partition alignment nonsense or tweaks for SSDs is needed since Windows 7 automatically detects them. It's just a lot of the little things that you don't need to worry about that make your life so much easier.
     
  20. Phalanx

    Phalanx Needs more dragons and stuff.

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    If your eyesight is suffering, then just put in a complaint. Health & Safety will crucify them.
     
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