Should Windows XP still be supported by most hardware and software manufacturers

[nemesismk2]

I am not a gamer so once I am done with Windows XP I will be upgrading to Linux with Ubuntu 🙂

 

[Linflas]

Yes, but you've had at least a decade to prepare for the transition so IMO there is no excuse for still being on XP at this point.

lol in March 2002 this district was still running Windows 98 and XP was an exotic OS not at all understood by the Novell people running the show. There is no way in 2002 that they were planning a roll out for an OS 3 iterations later than what was currently deployed. And in case you want to dismiss this as some kind of aberration unique to public education I will tell you that in 2002 I was working on a contract with a large DoJ entity that was still based entirely on Windows 95. They were not even connected to the internet in 2002 and they had one workstation attached to a modem for the users we dealt with to use dial up to get to Hotmail or AOL to email us or read our emails to them. That is the real world businesses and government agencies exist in, one limited by cash, vision, and conflicting interests of a lot of stakeholders whenever a major IT upgrade or migration is planned.

 

[Nothinman]

lol in March 2002 this district was still running Windows 98 and XP was an exotic OS not at all understood by the Novell people running the show. There is no way in 2002 that they were planning a roll out for an OS 3 iterations later than what was currently deployed. And in case you want to dismiss this as some kind of aberration unique to public education I will tell you that in 2002 I was working on a contract with a large DoJ entity that was still based entirely on Windows 95. They were not even connected to the internet in 2002 and they had one workstation attached to a modem for the users we dealt with to use dial up to get to Hotmail or AOL to email us or read our emails to them. That is the real world businesses and government agencies exist in, one limited by cash, vision, and conflicting interests of a lot of stakeholders whenever a major IT upgrade or migration is planned.

I'm not saying it's uncommon and obviously a decade is an exaggeration since Vista and Win7 weren't out at the same time as XP. However, Vista's been out since '06 and Win7 since '09 so there has been at least 5 real years that people should've been planning their refresh.

 

[ViRGE]

Which is fine until they expect someone to support them.

It's worse than that, IMHO. 2014 is going to roll around and we're going to have tons of dusty, decrepit, unpatched systems connected to the internet. The first remote code execution vulnerability will be the last.

Anyhow, XP certainly had its day, and if customers still want to use it offline that's fine. But asking software and hardware developers to support XP with new products is just being daft.

 

[Anteaus]

I can understand the resistance, but only from a financial point of view. If someone is using software A on XP and it will cost 15K to get a newer version to run on Windows 7, I can completely understand the desire to delay as long as possible.

I agree with Nothinman though. It isn't like the transition wasn't inevitable. They had years to organize a proper upgrade path as well as put money together. In fact, due to the reduced adoption rate of Vista and extended XP support, people basically got a honeymoon period to keep using their XP software until Windows 7 was released and became established. Now people are talking about how they suddenly have to spend all this money they didn't bother to plan for. Bad systems management.

 

[notposting]

Look at it from the perspective of a hardware or software writers perspective instead. If I was in that business now, I wouldn't be bothering. Vista/7/8 are all fairly similar under the hood, some tweaks maybe here and there for certain drivers, but otherwise why pay someone to write for a declining market? Heck I would have support for Linux (and again, maybe the previous major kernel release, current, and soon to be released versions) before XP at this point.

 

[JackMDS]

Lucy for us many people know when to let go. :thumbsup:

Otherwise we will still be Gatherers running all day looking for basic food. 😱

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer



😎

 

[Oyeve]

I manage over 100 PC's all on XP. I recently replaced 30 with new PC's that came with windows 7. I live windows 7 but the 2 main databases that the company uses don't work under win7,yet. I blew awaythe drives and put XP on them. I retained the win7 licenses for future updates which will be inevitable in two years. Man. I hate SQL databases from the 80s.

 

[Lemon law]

Our famdamily has 4 computers. The main two desktops still run XP, I have one vista laptop, and my wife has a win7 laptop. Yes I know, XP computer security and memory handling is rather poorly designed, but I am used to XP as an OS, I can't stand vista, and I am still fighting may aspects of windows 7. And from what I hear, windows 8 will be so badly waked up to make it unusable.

I would much prefer to see Microsoft fix windows XP rather that bring out new screwed up OS's. But Microsoft won't do that, they would never get by charging hundreds of dollars for a new OS every time Microsoft get a upgrade brainfart.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

Our famdamily has 4 computers. The main two desktops still run XP, I have one vista laptop, and my wife has a win7 laptop. Yes I know, XP computer security and memory handling is rather poorly designed, but I am used to XP as an OS, I can't stand vista, and I am still fighting may aspects of windows 7. And from what I hear, windows 8 will be so badly waked up to make it unusable.

I would much prefer to see Microsoft fix windows XP rather that bring out new screwed up OS's. But Microsoft won't do that, they would never get by charging hundreds of dollars for a new OS every time Microsoft get a upgrade brainfart.

They did fix Windows XP, the resulting product was called Windows Vista.

 

[Linflas]

They did fix Windows XP, the resulting product was called Windows Vista.

Not really, Vista was an evolutionary follow on to XP that MS really released too soon. Windows 7 is what Vista should have been.

 

[Nothinman]

I manage over 100 PC's all on XP. I recently replaced 30 with new PC's that came with windows 7. I live windows 7 but the 2 main databases that the company uses don't work under win7,yet. I blew awaythe drives and put XP on them. I retained the win7 licenses for future updates which will be inevitable in two years. Man. I hate SQL databases from the 80s.

Did you try them under XP Mode?

 

[imagoon]

I can understand the resistance, but only from a financial point of view. If someone is using software A on XP and it will cost 15K to get a newer version to run on Windows 7, I can completely understand the desire to delay as long as possible.

I agree with Nothinman though. It isn't like the transition wasn't inevitable. They had years to organize a proper upgrade path as well as put money together. In fact, due to the reduced adoption rate of Vista and extended XP support, people basically got a honeymoon period to keep using their XP software until Windows 7 was released and became established. Now people are talking about how they suddenly have to spend all this money they didn't bother to plan for. Bad systems management.

It will be more costly as you get closer. Mostly less time to do the work so either more costs for people and testing "around the clock", or the dev will know that the company is "desperate" and charge more + just general inflation + demand going up etc.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I see no reason for hardware mfgs not to continue supporting XP. There will still be a lot of XP PCs out in the field for the next few years.

Heck, many devices (Wireless NICs, mostly) still support Win98se.

 

[Anteaus]

I see no reason for hardware mfgs not to continue supporting XP. There will still be a lot of XP PCs out in the field for the next few years.

Driver architecture is very different. XP doesn't support some new technologies that are critical with newer hardware. Also,there is a delay between the time software development is initiated and when it is delivered. Nothing happens in realtime unless we are talking about bugs and upkeep. I agree that there will be alot of XP machines in the field, but you get to a point where it's just not worth the investment.

Do you think they should still be shipping movies on VHS just because many people still have working VCRs?

 

[Nothinman]

I see no reason for hardware mfgs not to continue supporting XP. There will still be a lot of XP PCs out in the field for the next few years.

Heck, many devices (Wireless NICs, mostly) still support Win98se.

Depends on what the device is really.

For NICs I doubt there's much difference between drivers for most of the releases of NT. I know new features have come into play, but I don't think it would be that hard to hit the lowest common denominator and have drivers that work from XP (or earlier) and up to Win7 and probably Win8.

For driver models that have had major overhauls such as sound and video, it could mean having to develop, test and maintain 2 or more completely separate drivers which would be a good reason to skip XP support.

 

[lamedude]

Depending on who you ask XP has 26-42% marketshare. Not selling to a quarter of your customer base doesn't sound like good business to me. Steam has XP down to 16%. Looks like Steam puts old DX9 GPUs that most XP rigs probably have under other which is at 25% so if a game isn't playable on those I see no reason to support XP.
Looks like XP can use the same WDF drivers that Vista uses so that shouldn't be a big issue except for videocards (doubt NV/AMD want to write XPDM drivers anymore).

 

[Anteaus]

Market share is important but you have to be careful how you read it. 25% today will probably mean 15-20% 6 months from now. If you consider an arbitrary development time of one year, that means that by the time you RTM you've lost a substantial percentage of potential buyers, and the while Windows 7 market share is increasing dramatically. The day MS stopped selling XP, XP started dying.

As for drivers, while they both use WDF, XP allows low level driver access where Vista/Win7 only allow high level. This is why there were huge driver issues when Vista was released. In fact, driver issues are one of the big reasons for Vista's slow adoption rate. Everyone was quickly frustrated by the poor drivers that were provided by hardware developers. GPU and SPU drivers had to be rewritten. GPU developers responded relatively quickly and performance continuely improved but I don't even want to talk about Creative and that stupid OpenAL workaround.

 

[yinan]

I manage over 100 PC's all on XP. I recently replaced 30 with new PC's that came with windows 7. I live windows 7 but the 2 main databases that the company uses don't work under win7,yet. I blew awaythe drives and put XP on them. I retained the win7 licenses for future updates which will be inevitable in two years. Man. I hate SQL databases from the 80s.

This is a perfect situation for virtualizing that particular application, so it can run on 7, but think it is running on XP.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

It depends on who the hardware and software makers target their products at. Look at the number of institutions still using DOS based software and manufacturers using production equipment that use proprietary machine language.

 

[ViRGE]

It depends on who the hardware and software makers target their products at. Look at the number of institutions still using DOS based software and manufacturers using production equipment that use proprietary machine language.

Agreed. Even though XP has as much market share as it has, how many users are using it for limited tasks, with the intention of just running the system until it dies? You can't sell products to people who don't buy stuff.

 

[Mark R]

This is a perfect situation for virtualizing that particular application, so it can run on 7, but think it is running on XP.

This is only an option if your app vendor will support virtualisation.

My hospital recently upgraded their digital x-ray workstations. However, the software vendor has them locked into their licence until 2014 (licence prohibits even beginning discussions with a replacement vendor until after the contract ends). The new hardware was xeon quad cores with 8GB ram and dual 2gb Quadros. However, the vendor of the software would only support XP32 SP1 - no other OS or SP, and no virtualisation. Result was that the HDs all had to be reformatted and XP 32 SP1 installed. Undurprisingly, they're pretty flaky having to use an unpatched OS, and outdated drivers - not to mention the hardware is being wasted.

Having learned our lessons from this problem. We're already negotiating with a new vendor (albeit as part of a large regional group of hospitals, who have decided to go for a bulk buy in order to get a discount - and also hopefully have a reliable method of transferring files from one to another). The proposed delivery date is mid 2013, and the tender explicitally states that the software must be fully supported on W8 (and the most recent currently SP) for the duration of the contract, as well as having the option to run it virtualised should there be unanticipated compatibility problems.

 

[JackMDS]

@Mark R

This is very good example to a problem that is considered a computer problem but has very little to do with computers per-se.

Many contract like this are is signed in business. The issue usually stem from Excutives that know very little about waht they deal with, or because there is ""special relations"" between the parties.

I doubt that someone will sign a contract like this when it comes to Medication (i.e., forbid the use new live saving medication when it comes out) but it ok to do so with other technology.
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On the other hand, my plumber runs a Plumbing managing business program that was designed in DOSv6 10 years ago and later made running in a WinXP DOS box.

Personalty he uses a laptop with Win 7. His claim is simple, the program does what I need for my business and there is No reason to spend money for "fashion" reasons.


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