Keep XP on all models until WIndows 7 comes out - even Microsoft seems to be pointing that way

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Keep XP on all models until WIndows 7 comes out - even Microsoft seems to be pointing that way

210 points posted to Operating Systems by jmxz Jan 28

With industry speculation that even Microsoft is already giving up on Vista and is setting up business users to switch from XP to Windows 7 - please please keep XP as an option on all systems until Windows 7 comes out.

In the name of your "Simplify IT" campaign please please please don't force an unnecessary software migration to Vista on people when it looks like next year businesses will be migrating from Vista to Windows 7 (or, as the link suggests, other operating systems).

okroger104 Jan 28	Win 7 isn't coming out next year. Sorry to say. They'd have to be in beta testing since early last year for that to happen. Try 2011 or 2012. Microsoft's official response to the question of when Win 7 will be out was 2011 or 3 years from now. Google "winVistaClub windows 7" Vista SP1 will iron out the two major issues with Vista and a few others.
aikiwolfie Jan 28	I vote Dell drops Windows altogether and focuses on Ubuntu.
bweed6 Jan 28	http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/28/windows-7-isnt-headed-for-2009-says-micros...< the delays we saw with the release of vista, and the subsequent disappointment, i'd be surprised if we saw 7 roll before 2012.
bweed6 Jan 28	based on their recent performance getting products to market (vista), it seems that later than sooner is likely. but of course we can only speculate. i guess it is not impossible that they could have a new OS,relativley bug free, that will not be roundly rejected by the market ready next year. it just doesn't seem probable.
winoffice Jan 28	They are not giving up on Vista just yet - Windows 7 will not be coming until the turn of the decade (2010-2 more precisely) most likely. So we can expect Vista to still be here for four more years for a total of five. That was more or less the same distance between XP and Vista. So I see no giving up here.
winoffice Jan 28	"I vote Dell drops Windows altogether and focuses on Ubuntu."???????? Never!!!!!!!!
winoffice Jan 28	aikiwolfie: saying what you said there makes Ubuntu look bad. Many people would actually turn against Dell for dropping Windows - the OS that they know and are familiar with. Besides that suggestion was already posted by IdeaStorm user couger, and it was severely rejected by the IdeaStorm community - its score was 440 points below 0 when I last looked.
jdelidc Jan 28	@bweed6: jorge giot you over here already? @winoffice: i agree with you on not dropping windows. at least right now. 5 ish years from now, i'll be disagreeing.
aikiwolfie Jan 28	@winoffice: Just expressing my opinion ;o).
sugarbear Jan 28	Let`s hope 7 is better than Vista.
jdelidc Jan 28	at least for microsoft's sake. but if they are going to be rushing it out to compensate for vista, it's gonna suck
sugarbear Jan 28	You are right about that.
pattyboy Jan 28	Yikes, couple more years with ME 2007?
bweed6 Jan 29	jdelidc - nope, i've been lurking around ideastorm since shortly after it launched. i just don't find myself compelled to participate very often.
winoffice Jan 29	I agree with jericho above.
jmxz Jan 29	Seems even more appropriate here than on the tech sties; since the tech sites don't make me pay for windows, but Dell does.
toyota_supra Jan 29	THE TRUTH ABOUT WINDOWS VISTA. Vista's Home Premium and Ultimate editions both require 15GB of disk space to install, 10 times that of Windows XP. The OS has also gained a reputation as a memory hog, leading outfits such as 2X to argue that companies would be better off running Vista on centralized servers and providing it to users via thin http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,141992/article.html< What do you get in Vista that you don't get in XP, that would justify the 10 time size of install footprint?
winoffice Jan 31	I disagree with both of you, jericho and jmxz...Vista does NOT suck.
jdelidc Jan 31	as long as you're ok with waiting 2 or 4 times longer than you need to for stuff to work (longer with spyware), it's perfect. if you got the hardware to handle it, heck, take advantage of it. enjoy. bragging rights to your machine i'm more worried now about how bad windows 7 is gonna suck compared to vista. ms has seen all the complaints so they are probably rushing to get 7 out and we all know what happens when things get rushed, or at least what usually happens. and i'm willing to be they are going to try to throw some of beryl into it. nightmare in the making since beryl running on a windows machine would need a poweredge duel socket machine to handle it don't know how true this is but somewhere i read that they were going to put distributed processing in there so that you could use an old machine to give a new one a boost. anyone else heard that?
zanlok Jan 31	I personally don't like all of the flashy nonsense (IMO) in Vista. But there's lots of advancements. The other stuff is hard to get past / get used to, though. Kinda like my reluctance to switch from 2000 pro to XP, once I turned of enough stuff, I basically got used to it. And, now, I can't imagine going back to vanilla old 2000. Same for XP. Once you get used to everything. I can't say the transition is fun, though. HOWEVER, I totally agree that Dell should offer XP on everything. Lots of IT people I talk to don't want a heterogeneous network with odd flavor combinations of Windows variants. Most say that when they do switch, everybody will be switched all at once.
ajmukon Feb 11	read: http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=57901&highlight=VISTA+game< has something called DX10.... that is why people do not like it....
zanlok Feb 14	what gives? now I'm getting lessons from another kid. great. Microsoft is just scamming you, man. DX10 can work fine on XP. it is am artificially imposed limitation. if you're too blind to see it, then you deserve to keep having money extracted from you and deposited in Microsoft's accounts.
zanlok Feb 14	there isn't even ONE piece of software out yet - much less any GAMES - that fully leverages the actual capabilities of DX10. Crysis is better, sure. CoD4 is better, soo. We're going to be waiting a few more months for the real goods, though. So don't try to tell me I really need Vista. Especially when my game performance is totally inferior using Vista. puh-lease.. with the wannabe explanations, already.
aikiwolfie Feb 14	The real crime is that there isn't a single piece of software available from either the past of present that leverages the full capabilities of DirectX 9c never mind DirectX 10.
zanlok Feb 14	that wouldn't surprise me, but really? seems like HL2 did a decent job.. especially once the HDR features got in there.. but I could be missing some of the features the game could offer.. more particles and stuff?
ajmukon Feb 14	DX 10 is very different, along with VISTA. VISTA utilizes RAM more effectively than XP. lets take two Identical computers, both have intel QUAD CORE Q9950, X38 motherboards, an 8800 ultra. there are only two differences: the VISTA PC has 8 GB and the XP is MAXED out at 4GB. these 2 computers run Crysis. the VISTA one will have CONSISTENTLY BETTER graphics AND SPEED than the XP. this is because of the RAM: VISTA PUTS EVERYTHING INTO THE RAM, putiing all "non-essential information" to the pagefile. XP loads the RAM as needed (and then uses the Pagefile) . VISTA runs on top of DX10. In VISTA, this "non-essential" information is the stuff that IS NOT needed for running the GAME AS for DX10 not being able to be on XP, see this: http://www.pcguide.com/vb/search.php?searchid=1401765< explains it better than I ever could
okroger104 Feb 14	ajmukon, you got a bad link.
ajmukon Feb 14	Thank you: http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=58955&highlight=VISTA+DX10
okroger104 Feb 15	No, thank you for fixing it. Good read especially the white paper.
jdelidc Feb 15	in theory that works beautiful. the problem is that in real life, which is all that actually matters, it's horrendously slower besides that, it was rigged. 4g ram xp vs 8g vista. the test needs to be 4g vista vs 4g xp otherwise you'll always get biased results
aikiwolfie Feb 15	Perhaps the extra 4GB for Vista is to compensate for it's much bigger foot print?
ajmukon Feb 15	that was to demonstrate that VISTA 64-bit can handle up to 128 GB of RAM. XP MAXES OUT at 4GB (actually lower ~3.4GB)- unless you got the unstable XP PRO 64-bit...... VISTA is more stable in 64Bit operating mode. I agree that 32BIT editions are horrible. Its the 64BIT editions that are much more effective... Personally, my next computer is going to be Vista 64Bit Home Premium, 4GB RAM (2x 2024MB).... and whatever i have the money for at the moment... Windows 7 is going to be more of a "resource hog" than VISTA is....
jmxz Feb 15	@ajmukon: "XP MAXES OUT at 4GB (actually lower ~3.4GB) unless you got the unstable XP PRO 64-bit" Yet amusingly 32-bit Windows 2000 supports 32GB of physical ram. http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx "Windows 2000 Datacenter Server supports 32 GB of physical RAM using the PAE feature of the IA-32 processor family" I bet Microsoft "broke" this for Vista just so people upgrade from OEM-32-bit to expensive-upgrade.
aikiwolfie Feb 15	Stupid things like that are exactly why people get annoyed at Microsoft.
jmxz Feb 15	@aikiwolfie: ...annoyed at Microsoft. It's even more amusing (or sad, if you're a Vista victim) that Microsoft used Windows NT's ability to access the full 4GB of RAM as an alleged benefit of NT 4.0 over Linux in their 1999 FUD campaign: "Linux only supports 2 gigabytes (GB) of RAM on the x86 architecture, compared to 4 GB for Windows NT 4.0." (of course that wasn't true about Linux even then, though - just some distros were compiled with such limitations)
jdelidc Feb 15	"Windows 7 is going to be more of a "resource hog" than VISTA is...." scary, ain't it? allthough i heard somewhere (i think wikipedia but i'm not sure) that they redid the kernel and killed some stuff they don't use to try to get it to run faster. funny part is that fedora did the same thing a week or 2 after i read that. kernel went from 45mb to 16mb.
aikiwolfie Feb 16	The stupid thing about trying to run a FUD campaign against Linux is which distribution to choose? Not all Linux distros are equal. They all have their quirks and specific needs and intended uses. "Linux" is almost a generic term these days. I prefer to refer to different distributions by name. Like Ubuntu or Red Hat Enterprise Linux or openSUSE.
jmxz Feb 16	@aikiwolfie: "The stupid thing about trying to run a FUD campaign against Linux is which distribution to choose?" Yet that's what makes it so fun for Microsoft. "Windows has better x86 driver support than [the playstation 3] Linux" "Windows runs faster than [low power embedded ARM chip] Linux" "Windows requires less hardware than [the Blue Gene supercomputer] Linux" "Windows has a nicer GUI than [Cisco's embedded no-GUI] Linux" Otherwise they'd have a pretty tough time finding any facts for their "get the facts" campaigns.
winoffice Feb 16	@jericho: "I have 2Gb or fam and the only time it slows down is when I use a program (NOT vista) that has huge resources" I agree with you. Even though I have only 1 GB of memory on my Vista PC, Vista runs pretty fast. Occasionally my Vista PC does run slower than usual, but I have detected that Vista is not the cause - it is a third party wireless card driver which probably was made for XP.
aikiwolfie Feb 16	I was under the impression XP drivers don't work in Vista on account of Vista being so different from XP. If that is the case then the driver must have been rewritten for Vista. Either way aren't Microsoft supposed to have validated all of the hardware drivers for Vista? Don't all hardware drivers need to be digitally signed and approved by Microsoft?
jdelidc Feb 16	nope. it will warn you if it ain't, but it don't have to be signed
aikiwolfie Feb 17	So what's the point of having them signed then? As a security feature it's redundant if it's not enforced.
jmxz Feb 17	@aikiwolfie: Some systems have different security requirements than others. Seems debian (and by extension, probably ubuntu) has similar, no? WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated! libglib-perl libgtk2-perl Install these packages without verification [y/N]?
aikiwolfie Feb 17	I generally only install stuff from the official repositories. But I'll take your word for it. If it's there it's there. Although it still seems to be a redundant feature be it Linux or Windows.
jmxz Feb 17	@aikiwolfie: It's useful when making your own .deb's so you don't have to bother signing them. I agree it's inappropriate for any production system.
pattyboy Mar 11	I'm not a big microsoft fan, but the Vista on my tablet PC(Gateway) runs pretty well, albeit on 4gb of ram installed. My only real issue is the overblown security, and the really slow recovery from hibernation/sleep. I guess, I'd have to say, it still doesn't seem like an upgrade of any kind. with a free antivirus program, I haven't had a virus in years with XP, so the increased security seems pretty useless to me, and another way to slow down productivity. I guess it shows, as I work for a company that has 140,000 employees, and, at least in my area, we haven't upgraded to vista.
winoffice Mar 11	@aikiwolfie: "I was under the impression XP drivers don't work in Vista on account of Vista being so different from XP. If that is the case then the driver must have been rewritten for Vista." Actually most of my existing XP drivers do work with Vista. It is exactly the wireless card (Intel Pro 2915 wireless card, which can support 802.11a/b/g wireless cards) and Bluetooth XP drivers that cause the problem - my sound and audio drivers work just fine. I think that the solution is just to replace the XP drivers with Vista drivers, although I have not tried that yet.

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