Speaking of the things They do to Us (and the frustration almost makes me understand the silly emotions that drive the 1% versus 99% dichotomy), I am one of those stubborn clingers to the past who wants to keep my Windows XP — a perfectly good OS that serves my needs. Anyway, simply because I had a recent motherboard problem and started looking into newer boards and CPUs, I started having fits of paranoia about the future of xp. It looks bleak indeed:
Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP on April 8, 2014. Security patches and hotfixes will no longer be available, leaving the OS open to vulnerabilities. Already, Microsoft has moved to a limited Windows XP support plan that provides security fixes for all users but only issues non-security updates to companies with a support contract. Microsoft also opted not to support Windows XP with its latest Web browser, Internet Explorer 9.
They’re already forcing businesses to upgrade, and it seems a little economic duress works wonders:
But for Microsoft, enterprise customers are the real challenge, and the company’s anti-XP blog post is aimed squarely at IT professionals. Citing a Gartner report, Microsoft warns that half of companies that don’t start upgrading by early 2012 won’t complete the process before support ends, and will therefore incur increased costs. The company links to a return on investment calculator that supposedly shows how much money can be saved by upgrading to Windows 7.
Both consumers and enterprise users, however, may be tempted to wait for Windows 8. Microsoft hasn’t announced a release date for its next operating system, but ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley has reported that Microsoft is trying to push Windows 8 out the door by April 2012.
As an angry old crank, I say screw 7 and the hell with 8! (As to what happened to four, five and six, who knows? Might there be a little numberphobia there?)
I’m not alone in my 7phobia Already a lot of people hate Windows 7 and want XP back.
I’ve been using Windows7 for almost 2 years now and almost everything about it in terms of user interface is appallingly bad. The file hierarchy is nearly useless; it’s like trying to decode a plate of spaghetti. XP’s file hierarchy was logical and consistent. In W7 you have to rely on memorization rather than logic or predictability to know where to find something. The way files and programs are displayed is much more clumsy (example: Control Panel items are now alphabetically oriented left to right and then down to the next row instead of XP’s series of columns, which was so much more readable. The Start Panel is utterly disorienting.)
Many tasks now take more clicks instead of fewer. The options for customizing, when available, are buried in irrational locations. But often the customization that is required isn’t available at all – even though there are an almost infinite number of useless customizations.
W7 has NOT made moving around in Windows easier, just the opposite. It has a whole lot of useless and distracting flash without substance. It reminds me of new cars that have every conceivable piece of useless flash but are only meant to be driven by helpless people – don’t even think about opening the hood.
It is clear to me that whoever designed W7 had a deviant mind combined with a severe case of dyslexia.
Microsoft: Give up on this bad bad interface and make the far superior XP interface your default going forward.
Unfortunately, going “forward” has come to mean dumbing everything down and promoting moronic schlock. The new Microsoft Word appears to be catering to illiterates and third graders, and I don’t like such trends. All I want is to be left alone to enjoy that to which I have become accustomed. I don’t like being nudged into compliance with ultimatums. This feels like having someone come along and tell me I really should buy one of those newer style modern cars I hate (the ones that look like they were designed by and for video gamers), oh and by the way, your car will no longer be allowed on the road after 2014. So get on board with change!
This might be time to seriously consider dumping the Windows paradigm entirely. I have long dabbled with Linux, and when a serious virus hit my laptop over public wifi, I decided to never use Windows in public again. My laptop dual boots, and whenever I am out and about it’s always Ubuntu. Perhaps I should consider taking the plunge in private and just switch. Fortunately, this is still the United States, and They can’t yet stop Us.
There’s more than one way to change.
MORE: Oh, did I mention the high cost of change? Take me as an example. My house has four older Dell computers (usually two or three running at the same time), plus there’s my laptop. All run xp. With xp set to die, you might think that I would “only” have to pay over $1000 to “upgrade,” right? It’s nowhere near as easy as that. It requires new, clean installations and even when you use the programs to save your programs, the whole thing is a major pain in the ass:
…what’s involved with a clean install, you ask? It means you erase every last program and file on your hard disk during the “upgrade.” Ow.
You can save some of it. Microsoft’s Windows Easy Transfer , which comes in Windows 7, will let you save your files and your settings. Of course, some of those settings may not work anymore with Windows 7, but that’s a relatively minor pain.
The major headache is that you can’t transfer your old programs and device drivers from XP to Windows 7. So, do you know where your install disk is for Quicken 2008? How about Office 2003? Or, for that matter, do you really want to download iTunes and Firefox, plus a half-dozen must-have Firefox extensions, all over again? Well, you’d better know what you have on your current XP system, and you’d better be ready to reinstall them all and reset them to just the way you like them, because that’s exactly what you’re going to need to do.
For an individual, that’s annoying. It took me two or three hours, but I’m always installing and updating operating systems. Microsoft estimates that heavy users , people with 125GB of data and 40 applications, would need between 2 hours and 40 minutes and 5 hours and 43 minutes to upgrade their systems. A super user could take close to 20 hours But, wait, those Microsoft numbers are for Vista to Windows 7! XP to Windows 7 can only take much longer. At best, I suspect we’re looking at it taking a full day for heavy users to make the migration. Now, imagine multiplying that by a business’s dozens to tens of thousands of PCs. That’s not just a headache; it’s the kind of major suffering that companies try to avoid whenever humanly possible.
As to the cost, the numbers he cites for businesses are shocking. This is not something any sane person would look forward to. And if you go to Dell’s website (which I did) they say that the older computers are not xp compatible. Which means what? They’ll be junk in the near future? Why is that? Because xp won’t work and the Windows 7 drivers won’t be there for the older Dell computers, dummy. Neat trick!
You’d almost think the computer industry was involved in what appears to be a conspiracy to murder a perfectly good operating system.
Welcome to the future. All your computers are belong to us! We kill them!
Comments
15 responses to “Change should be a choice”
What will it take to drum sense into Microsoft? How about organizing a boycott for starters.
Like you I have XP on more than one computer. But the business computer is the main problem. My business records going back 10 years are in a program that will not work on Windows 7. And the upgrade of that program is not only expensive, it is written in a different language! So trying to extract all my files and convert them so they will work on the new, updated, “better” program is impossible. I’ve tried.
I bought a new Dell with 7. But it also has 64 bit vs. 32 bit. Right there is a block for most of my programs. One which I love, and have used for years is Adobe Illustrator. It will not work with 7. I haven’t upgraded it in several years, since the version I have is more than adequate for my typesetting needs. So now I must buy the new, “better” Illustrator. Except it is now part of a package that includes Photoshop and Acrobat. So I must buy Creative Suite 6 at only $2,599.00 to get Illustrator?
My solution may be to dump anything remotely related to Windows and go to Apple. Screw Microsoft.
“This might be time to seriously consider dumping the Windows paradigm entirely. I have long dabbled with Linux, and when a serious virus hit my laptop over public wifi, I decided to never use Windows in public again. My laptop dual boots, and whenever I am out and about it’s always Ubuntu.”
Are you happy with Linux? Any how-to website recommendations for a Linux dummy like me?
I was going to suggest one of the solid older Ubuntu versions, because they are less cluttered, and user friendly. Then I found this article, which explains in more detail how you might get started:
http://www.itworld.com/operating-systems/138168/ubuntu-linux-beginners-tips-and-tricks-getting-started
There is also Puppy Linux. Very fun, minimal OS which is perfect for older computers. You could make an old Pentium clunker run like a race car with it.
http://www.puppylinux.com/
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=puppy
If you really want to poke around in detail familiarizing yourself with the innumerable distributions, distrowatch.com is a great site.
I would simply download the iso of Ubuntu version 10 or so, burn it on a CD, and try it out without installing it. Then if and when you’re ready, it will step you through and you can easily set up a double boot machine so you still have Windows. The neat thing about the CD is that you can boot any computer anywhere and run off the CD to get online. (You can also install it to a thumb drive and take it anywhere, but you will read about that as you familiarize yourself with Linux.)
I also am content with XP, and do not want to change.
I use MS Access in my work- MS Office Pro 2003 version. I find the MS Office Pro 2007 version of MS Access much more difficult to use, so I don’t use it for my work. An IT guy I work with, who knows much more about databases than I do, says the same thing about Access 2003 compared to more recent “improved” versions.
When the time comes that I will have to use Windows 7+, I suspect that I will install an XP partition so that I can keep using the 2003 version of Access.
Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP on April 8, 2014
XP was released to retail channels in October of 2001.
Microsoft is supporting it for nearly 13 years – that’s more than enough.
(Gringo: Windows 7 comes with support for an XP-based virtual machine built in, for free, called “XP Mode” – and if it’s not in Windows 8, you can still use a free third-party virtualization tool and install that way.
You don’t need a separate partition or rebooting these days, thanks to CPU-level virtualization in pretty much every CPU you can get.
Then again, I’m baffled by an “IT guy” who “knows databases” willingly using Access, let alone a 9 year old version.
SQL Server Express is free, as is the Management Studio for it.)
As I said in my parenthetical above, you can keep running XP more or less until the end of time, if you run it in a virtual machine, to keep your horrible legacy data from software providers who hate you* running.
(* Adobe, like HK, is best described as hating its users, I think.
And whoever made the business tool Frank has that can’t export data sensibly, or migrate from an old version to the current one – and “new language” is no excuse on their part! – plainly also has no customer service mission.
The fault here is not Microsoft’s, but Adobe and other-provider’s. Of course, Adobe knows their main market is design professionals, who view a few grand every few years for a new version of CS as mere amortization…)
I still run one machine on 98, and it never crashes. Seems 3.1 plus GUII works pretty well.
Number One Son will have to help me when the End Days appear. He’s running Linux and seems quite pleased.
Fingers crossed. Microsoft will end up pushing a certain class of users from their market.
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I bought a new computer with Windows 7. It’s not much different from XP, and there is very little about XP that I miss. Some things are much better. Be not afraid.
http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/gallery.html
The structural improvements of Win7 reskinned to look and act just like XP.
Nice to hear about the workaround.
BTW, I am not arguing that Microsoft can’t do whatever it wants, only that they shouldn’t assume everyone will go along with it. As to the amount of time xp has been around, I think that’s more a testament to its success than an argument in favor of retiring it. Reformulating a product that works is a risky business — especially if the manufacturer doesn’t come up with a clearly better alternative.
I’ve also been looking seriously at Ubuntu (for much the same reasons). Plus which I WORK with/on UNIX-based systems at work. Only problem is the windows-based programs I like using. And Wine, even after all these years, doesn’t quite do it.
I use XP only to get Cygwin, which is a linux lookalike.
If worse comes to worst, I’ll just get a real linux, I guess.
The problem as of 2005 when all this started (upgrade from win95) was no drivers. I assume they’re there now.
I also use and recommend Cygwin, with Windows 7. Works great.
The only operating systems I can think of that have had longer support periods than XP are mainframe and minicomputer ones.
I’ve got an 8 year old Athlon XP machine I built that runs Win7 fine. My new laptop runs several VMs with VMWare Player simultaneously and they don’t even know that they aren’t the only thing running.
And for older hardware you can’t really beat Linux. I’m partial to Fedora myself, but you can put together a completely open-source stack with Fedora, OpenOffice, VirtualBox, etc. to rival any Windows 7 PC you can think of.
Or you could just run Windows XP with some third-party security software to keep the bad shit out and stop whining about MS killing it off.
Sigivald
Then again, I’m baffled by an “IT guy” who “knows databases” willingly using Access, let alone a 9 year old version.SQL Server Express is free, as is the Management Studio for it.)
He uses SQL Server. I use Access and deliver the DB to him. He was commenting on Access 2003 compared to Access 2007 or Access 2010.
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