We either work for the same company or this a fairly widespread problem. We are just getting started on Windows 7 rollouts and the overall project has already been postponed. It is probably going to take another two years to complete. Microsoft is probably going to provide support for us after the official support window closes and it is going to be very expensive. The reason it is taking so long is that literally thousands of apps have to be ported or upgraded to support the move and the total cost is probably going to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars range at least. It doesn’t get any cheaper by delaying (just the opposite) but it is hard for IT to get that amount of money for only marginal business benefits if there isn’t a true emergency.
XP is not dead by a stretch in the corporate space.
I work for one of the largest companies in the US. Everyone here would definitely recognize the name (no, it isn’t Walmart). We have huge technology and data groups.
We have a laptop refresh policy where we get new ones every three years. I got one about 18 months ago, and it still had XP on it. I had thought that we had switched over to Win7, but three people on my team got new ones last week, and all of them have XP (even with a SSD).
We are planning on transitioning by April of next year.
My employer (a nationwide insurance company) not only still runs XP, but we can’t upgrade past IE6 because our ancient claim software is browser-based. It’s farking terrible. The IT department keeps pushing to upgrade us to IE8, though. It’d be nice, maybe by the end of the year? But I’m not holding my breath. It was a fun couple weeks when they pushed through the IE8-compatible version of Java to everyone. We had to take *paper *claims because they broke everything.
I take issue with this. It works in that “it works” in the most basic sense. But it’ll vastly lower the lifetime of your SSD, because XP doesn’t recognize that class of disk and treats it as a normal HD.
Vista and up and many optimizations to maximize the life of SSDs that XP doesn’t have. That all said, even under XP your SSD is likely to last as long or longer than a spinning HD, but it’s still not a very good idea.
Another issue is your computer’s BIOS-- if you buy a computer designed for Windows 8, it’s possible it only boots to UEFI, which would make it impossible to even install (much less use) Vista. (That said, most computers that ship with Windows 8 have a way of disabling UEFI and going back to traditional BIOS.)
You can use xp64, the alleged poor driver support problems are a myth in my experience. If you have an SSD you can install the vendor’s program to maintain the disk and issue TRIM etc. Lack of boot drivers is no problem if you integrate F6 drivers with nLite or similar then you don’t need a floppy.
The main problem will be drivers for new hardware, I recently had to put XP on a Sony laptop and had trouble with the on-board sound device. In a lot of cases you can go to the chip maker for the driver rather than the vendor of the item - although identifying it can be troublesome.
the problem is IE8 still sucks. Internet Explorer stopped being shit at version 9.
it’s not a myth; in some cases if you’re lucky a 64-bit driver for Vista/7 might work depending on the specific peripheral, but many driver installers detect XP 64 as Server 2003 (which is basically what it is) and refuse to install. and there’s things like sound drivers which are NOT compatible between XP and Vista/7, so if the audio device manufacturer didn’t bother to write a 64-bit driver for XP you’re basically screwed.
It’s based on Server 2003 x64 version. IME the drivers work the other way -> XP drivers can be made to work on Vista/7/8 but not the reverse. OK, it was a small market share OS in the beginning so support was limited, but that was in 2005. Now you really shouldn’t have a problem if you choose to use it.