It is untenable for Microsoft to phase out support of XP on schedule.
It will either create an after market of companies who will keep the XP
systems running, or some move to Linux or something. the companies are
not going to pay to upgrade their desktops, especially since is the
desktop that is running XP it is fairly old and might be both
technically obsolete and not a high priority use.
I think that there problem is that XP is different from state of the art
to the point where maintaining a product that they are no longer getting
revenue from is untenable. If you upgrade from XP to seven, the only
thing that the upgrade CD does is make sure that you have a valid XP
license and then completely installs seven from scratch.
My guess is that Microsoft will give free upgrades to a unique product
that isn't a completely different environment from eight rather but will
run on legacy systems. I am not sure that Linux will be the clear
beneficiary, as it has moved on too. Only Lubuntu among the Ubuntu
distros will install on 386 architecture.
But I played around with a Windows 8 system for a week and put it back.
The tablet style desktop makes sense until you think about it. Very few
people maintain corporate dbases or do desktop publishing on tablets.
You need an old fashioned start menu, etc for them.
On 12-12-30 09:05 AM, James E. LaBarre wrote:
On 12/27/2012 07:02 PM, Mark Wallace wrote:
I can't believe that Microsoft would be stupid enough to stop supporting
XP on schedule, unless they offered the remaining users some sort of
free upgrade, but I am old enough to remember the New Coke and the
Edsel.
Well, I did some experimenting with Win7, and was able to decruft it
enough to be usable. Granted, when I customize an install of XP
through Win7, it ends up looking more like Win2000 (I disable the
theming service, shut off all effects, etc). Surprisingly, Win7 even
ran on a 1G ThinkPad T23, better than XP on the same machine. If I
could have bought a dirt-cheap license for W7 ($25-35, about the most
it would be worth), I would have considered leaving one clunker in the
house running native Windows (not going to waste my good hardware on
Windows <g>). The only thing I end up using Windows for these days is
running a couple of Windows applications that need USB connectivity;
Win7 Starter Edition would be enough to run those.
Really would prefer that MS would make a basic version of Windows at a
cheap price. Look at the way they package their versions: "Home
Ultimate"?? How can you have an "Ultimate" version if you don't have
a non-ultimate version? Like I said; would like buy legitimate
upgrades to Win7, but not at the prices they sell them at. Would
rather give that money to the Wine or ReactOS projects to get FLOSS
alternatives.
And forget about Win8: I have enough hardware without PAE processor
support that I can't load it on them, and can't strip the GUI back to
a dead-simple look anymore.
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College
Jan 9 - High Performance Computing at a Small Scale
Feb 6 - Raspberry Pi
Mar 6 - 10th Anniversary Meeting - Linux where you least expect it
--
Mark Wallace
PO Box 11144
Newburgh, NY 12552-1114
Telephone: (845) 541-7396
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College
Jan 9 - High Performance Computing at a Small Scale
Feb 6 - Raspberry Pi
Mar 6 - 10th Anniversary Meeting - Linux where you least expect it
