To what extent will Windows XP work on New PCs? For example issues with drivers and SSD drives? Or is there still a substantial market for new computers with XP from corporate and government users who don’t want to retrain their staffs on Windows 7/8? What brands come to mind? What is the situation with custom PCs?
Thanks.
Most corporate and government users have moved to Windows 7. There isn’t a demand for XP at this point.
XP is limited to 4 GB of addressing space. If you have more RAM and memory devices (video cards, etc) than this then XP won’t be able to access all of it.
Additionally, some drivers and chipsets won’t work with XP. This is kinda hit and miss and I don’t have a percentage for you. Some manufacturers will take the extra time to develop an XP compatible driver so that they can sell their parts/devices to folks with older computers. Others don’t bother.
XP works fine with SSDs though it isn’t particularly optimized for it. Windows 7 and 8 are much better at minimizing writes to the drive which will make them last a lot longer. There are third party tools and some tweaks in XP itself that you can use to make XP a bit more SSD friendly.
There was a 64bit version of XP: Windows XP Professional x64 Edition - Wikipedia
Rather notorious for poor driver support, as I recall.
I don’t see it available on NewEgg, nor more local (Australian) sites. I doubt there’s a large market; both Windows & and 8 are superior in just about every way, and there’s very few programs that they can’t run that XP can. And frankly, if I were using proprietary software that could only run on XP, I’d be rather miserable about it.
The last bit of support for XP ends next year, I believe.
XP is 12 years old. it’s dead. leave it behind.
FWIW, the company I work for now (and my previous employer) are pretty much fully moved to Windows 7, and for those one or two legacy things they have a configured virtual XP machine as part of the standard install.
Same here, although oddly enough in my agency IT is the last group to make the switch (probably to maintain support for the remaining XP workstations).
Don’t know how widespread the practice is, but both here and with my previous (private sector) employer the practice was/is to buy the PC with no operating system and load it with a standard image including the OS and basic applications. There are a half dozen or so images tailored to the user’s role, and since very few users have admin rights they’re pretty much stuck with what they’re issued — the upside being that compatibility and support issues are much reduced.
What chipsets are these? There really aren’t that many chipset manufacturers, and the ones I know of are still releasing XP drivers, which makes sense, seeing as they also still have to support 32-bit versions of Windows Vista, 7, and 8. Heck, I’ve yet to run into an Intel chip that can’t run Windows 98, for goodness sake.
Even display drivers, which have changed dramatically even in the 32-bit versions, are still produced for every model I can find. They won’t be nearly as good as the Windows 7/8 drivers, but they’ll at least work. I mean, it’s just three manufacturers there, and the worst, Intel, definitely still has XP drivers.
I’d think a bigger problem would be peripherals, since there are many different manufacturers of those. That’s where I’d expect a lack of Windows XP compatibility.
The only exception would be laptops, but, even then, you can likely still run the OS. It just isn’t optimal.
you haven’t used any recent Intel CPUs, then? I remember running into this issue when I had a Northwood P4, which is when I bit the bullet and shelled out for Win2k.
I think you’ll have a hard time finding XP drivers for notebooks with hybrid/switchable graphics. You’ll probably be able to install the driver for the integrated GPU, but the discrete one will sit there uselessly burning power.
The corporate market for new XP systems is pretty much dead - Microsoft ends routine support of XP in less than a year. You can still pay for a corporate support contract, but I’m told these generally run into 6 figures. And just because some company pays Microsoft for a security fix doesn’t mean they’ll make it available to others for free.
Next, XP doesn’t support TRIM, which is how operating systems tell SSDs that space isn’t in use any more (without it, a delete is just another write operation from the drive’s point of view). Without TRIM or manual workarounds, your SSD will become slower over time.
Consumer XP doesn’t take advantage of many features of modern hardware (in particular, large memory / 64-bit support). As others have pointed out, while drivers are usually available, they may not perform as well as the ones for newer Windows versions which get a lot more use. I was quite surprised to see the magnitude of the performance improvements when I switched from XP to 7 (64-bit) on identical hardware.
Anecdote: One of the good things that the generally-reviled (with good reason) Windows Vista did was require both 32- and 64-bit drivers in order for a hardware manufacturer to get Windows certification for the hardware, thus solving the issue that plagued 64-bit XP - no drivers.
It remains to be seen what happens with Windows 8 - there’s a lot of backpressure from consumers, retailers, and system manufacturers. Unless Microsoft backpedals on some of the more controversial changes, I can see Windows 7 having a similar lifespan to XP.
Make sure your new PC includes a floppy disk drive: I had gone to Linux by then so never installed nor used XP except on a virtual machine; but I can recall the sheer wonder at finding Linux didn’t need separate SATA drivers on a floppy ( which drive I didn’t have, nor would have bought merely to install SATA ) — finding out it included it’s own chipset drivers was sheer gravy.
I got around it with other Windows OSs by looking up slipstreaming, but it’s an awful fag just to install something that should install itself simply.
My employer still deploys Windows XP to new desktop systems. They’re planning the move to Windows 7, driven by the end of support for XP. But we have hundreds of applications that need to be checked for compatibility with Windows 7.
bunch of stuff that isn’t any of my business, but I have to wonder why they waited until now. Windows 7 has been out for three years, and the EOL for XP has been known for quite some time. it’s not like this should be taking anyone by surprise; that’s Apple’s M.O.
I can’t speak for Dewey, but in my situation, it’s because my employer is the state government, with their labyrinthine policies and procedures, their tight budget strings, their undermanned IT departments, and the sheer bureaucratic inertia that keeps me running XP at work, with a plan to upgrade to 7 “hopefully before the year is out”.
Our federal agency still uses Windows XP. We do not anticipate a full upgrade to Windows 7 agency-wide until sometime in late 2014.
Yes, our CIO is incompetent.
We made the switch from XP to Win7 at our workplace a couple years ago. Two of our machines have the XP compatibility mode on them for the couple of programs we still needed to run that wouldn’t work with Win7, and one of our machines still runs - get this - Windows 98. shudder That one is stuck in the past because it runs our old plotter and the boss refuses to upgrade a plotter that’s working just fine.
At home I run Win7 on my laptop but haven’t yet bothered to upgrade the desktop simply because I’m debating going straight to Win8 with it and haven’t made up my mind.
Me too - we’re a little further on - maybe two thirds of the way through the Windows 7 rollout - and it’s the hundreds of applications and systems that makes it difficult.
For example, we’ve got a system used by departments A and B - it has a common back end that will need upgrading in step with the client upgrade for compatibility with Windows 7, so Departments A and B need to go to Win7 together - except that department B also shares a different system with department C - and one of the other applications department A uses is actually at end-of-life, and a new solution must be procured before Win7 can be implemented.
We’ve got about 600 applications and systems in use across our estate of some 4,000 desktops - organising an OS change is a bloody nightmare.
My organization is a little larger; about 40,000 or 50,000 workstations across forty large and dozens of smaller sites, but we also have hundreds of applications that need to be replaced, or ported or whatever, before we can go to Windows 7. And this is in the middle of several other large IT projects, all which are competing for resources and money.
Same here. About 4,500 workstations (I’m guessing, but I’m probably not far off), and all were upgraded to Windows 7 about two years ago.
We keep a couple of XP boxes here in my department for testing stuff, but that’s all. They’re not in regular use.
The only thing I have to say that’s relevant to the OP is that the PCs running XP are identical to the PCs running Windows 7. They’re all not more than 18 months old, I’m pretty sure.
Blimey. I can’t imagine what that must be like - except the competing resources bit, which is the same everywhere, I guess - the reason we’re not already on top of Windows 7 is that we were busy doing other stuff - stuff which is now being postponed and will in turn be overdue when we get to it.
I actually used Windows XP X64 for a while on my home machine, because I wanted to take advantage of my 64 bit processor. I didn’t experience the same issues that other people had, apart from the big leap for both editions breaking compatibility with DOS games (I finally got Doom and 7th Guest working again after all these years, good times but still waiting for Epic Pinball to come out with a Windows compatible version).
As has been mentioned, installing a new version of Windows, or Office, or even Internet Explorer in a huge corporate environment isn’t as simple as just burning a new image on every computer. Huge companies have all kinds of programs custom written for them that run on a specific version, and these all have to be tested and usually updated every time there is a big switch. In my office the main claims processing system is Cobol mainframe, but there’s a number of HTML based auxiliary applications for documentation, reporting, time tracking, etc.