Microsoft has been making regular (as in, once a month), free updates to a product that is, as of a couple weeks ago, twelve years old. I’d argue that’s quite remarkable.
I mean, seriously, what do people expect Microsoft to do? Just keep providing security patches indefinitely? Should they still be issuing security patches and providing support for Windows 3.1 or NT 4? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve all kinds of gripes with Microsoft and how they do business, but dropping free updates for a product that will be, at the time, twelve and a half years old is not one of them.
I actually think that twelve years is plenty long enough to support an operating system, but those updates are not free; you pay for them with the money you pay for the operating system.
Twelve and a half years? Wow, sounds like a lot. Let me see what happens when I google…
“Microsoft (MSFT) throws the struggling PC industry a bone: The software company has worked out a deal with PC makers allowing them to sell new computers with Windows XP through at least the end of May 2009.”
“Microsoft has one again agreed to extend the option of selling Windows XP for use on new PCs for another year, through April 30, 2010.”
Microsoft was allowing the sale of XP on brand new computers through 2010. I think that is a lot more relevant than twelve and a half years. It was Microsoft’s own mistakes (Vista) that caused XP to keep being sold with their blessing.
That’s why so many people use XP, and why they should keep supporting it.
And, honestly, for all the people saying there are tons of businesses running XP on their desktops… those same companies have server farms where they consider a five-year-old server to be hopelessly outdated and end-of-life. They’re perfectly well aware that XP is coming to an end, and they’re going to upgrade to 7 before the deadline.
I’m not sure what you mean by this, but if you are saying that it will problematic to have a huge number of unprotected XP computers serving as a massive arsenal for hackers to attack everybody, and that it is Microsoft’s fault for messing up with Vista and then selling XP through 2010 so that tons of people still use it, then I agree.
I’d stick with XP even after Microsoft stops supporting it. There’s no point in “upgrading” to a failure like Windows 8 and getting yourself trapped on that sinking ship. Wait until Microsoft rolls out Windows Blue and hope that it works better.
Just make an image of your machine. If you have to, for whatever reason, reinstall the image. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. If that’s too much trouble, then upgrade to a newer version.
Android, Apple don’t support operating systems for nearly as long. XP launched in Aug 2001, so it’s been supported for 12+ years. Quityerbitchin’
The company I work for has several thousand employees and still uses XP. It’s not just a mater of installing a new OS, we have something like a hundred different programs, and a third of them, many custom written and costing millions of dollars, do not work with newer versions of windows, including the main one customer service uses. It’s not like we haven’t had time to prepare, but the sheer expense and magnitude kept it from being started until the last possible minute.
My computer was a gift 11 years ago with WinXP already installed.
It does not support Vista, never mind Win7 or Win8.
I have no money to buy a new/used computer with, none at all.
Disability sucks.
Your lack of sympathy and understanding of people in different and difficult situations is duly noted.
That’s good because on Apr 8, 2014, I plan to douse myself with gasoline and set myself on fire to protest.
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Or maybe I’ll douse and set on fire the guy and the store who sold me the computer. I need to think about this a bit more.
Both Vista and Windows 8 have horrible reputations (if anything 8 seems to be even less popular than Vista), and I doubt they deserve to be included under the term “upgrade”. As for 7, I went from XP straight to 7 and if anything 7 was a bit inferior in its functionality.
Uh, about 6 months ago I tried to activate a Windows XP machine at the office (for testing). The Internet-based activation didn’t respond and the supplied phone number didn’t work. I concluded at that point that they had turned off everything and we’d have to install cracked versions from then on, or reinstall/reimage every time the activation delay expired.
Okay, I got the codeword wrong. I looked to see what name Microsoft was using for the next generation of Windows it was developing and I found references of Blue being their next product. Looking further after your informative post, I find that Blue was just the in-house name for Windows 8.1.
So I’m not going to bother looking up the actual name for whatever Windows’ next generation is currently being called. Let’s just call it Windows 9. Whatever its name is, it’ll be the product that replaces Windows 8 and while it’s currently just a gleam in Steve Ballmer’s eye, I can confidently make two predictions about it right now:
It’ll work better than Windows 8. I mean, it would pretty much have to. Plus it appears that Microsoft is continuing its tradition of releasing a bad operating system and then fixing the obvious problems with it and releasing a good operating system to replace it.
Whatever it is, Microsoft fanboys will love it. The same people who are now declaring Windows 8 is the best thing ever will tell you Windows 9 is the best thing ever the moment Microsoft tells that them that’s the new reality.
So here’s the takeaway for the average user: Some Microsoft products are good and some are bad. Windows XP was a pretty good system and Windows 8 is a pretty bad system. You should watch out for some people’s opinions because there are users who are incapable of rationally judging Microsoft; they will sing the praises of the bad products with the same fervor as they used for the good products.
Not so. There was a recent thread about this. You can still install, register and update Win XP. There are some problems due to having to upgrade some programs but for now it is still working.
