
Ten years of Windows XP: how longevity became a curse - shawndumas
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/10/ten-years-of-windows-xp-how-longevity-became-a-curse.ars
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ck2
I'm a happy XP user. XP fits into 1GB and is very very fast.

Windows7 takes 10GB and grows exponentially as it keeps two copies of almost
every system file that cannot be deleted.

~~~
recoiledsnake
How much does 10GB of HDD space cost these days? I would rather have the OS be
able to recover from corruption or deletions than save 5 bucks or something.

~~~
qjz
Space on a hard drive is finite, no matter how much it costs, and the size
requirement makes it particularly unattractive for running in a VM, compared
to a leaner OS.

~~~
zedpm
I run only SSD in my desktop and I was running out of space for VMs. I decided
to move a VM to my NAS and I discovered, happily, that it runs great on the
NAS, connected over Gig-E. I moved the rest of my VMs over there and I really
don't notice a difference in performance.

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pavel_lishin
That was a lot of paragraphs to say, "Despite being pretty great for its time,
Windows XP is pretty outdated, and somewhat annoying to deal with."

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dmfdmf
> Windows XP needs to be not only the first ten-year operating system; it also
> needs to be the last.

I disagree with this.

I agree ten years is a long life for an OS now but sometime in the future that
won't be true. The point is that the OS is a platform that should be stable
and supported for years, if not decades. At some point the underlying
technology and operation principles of an OS will plateau or reach diminished
returns and a new OS will not be needed or just not worth the trouble.

Fast tracking OS releases today is really bad for all (except MS which is why
they do it). Vista came out 5 years after XP but it was not ready for prime
time. Win7 came out 3 years after Vista and Win8 is slated for 3 years after
the release of Win7. This 3 year OS cycle is insanity. One reason no one
wanted to give up XP was because it worked, it was reasonably stable and no
one wanted the pain and cost of moving to a new OS with all the inevitable
driver and app problems. I'd bet that most of the new "features" of Win8 are
really improved apps that would work fine on Win7 or completely unnecessary.
Sell new features in the old OS but make them standard in the new OS and
release the new OS on approximately 5 year (and eventually longer) cycles when
the fundamental functions of the OS _need_ to change to improve security,
efficiency or operation, not because MS needs revenue.

Win7 is a good OS, a worthy successor to XP, but we aren't even out of the
Win7 adoption period (by users, hardware manufactures and ISV's) and we are
suppose accept Win8 and stir the whole pot again? I suspect that Win8 is going
to have the same marketing problem that (in part) submarined Vista. People
don't care about Operating Systems, they run them to run Applications.

~~~
rkudeshi
I think OS X does this right.

Every Windows upgrade feels like a brand new operating system. In contrast,
every new OS X release feels more like an iterative update.

In a sense, OS X has been your ten year operating system, just with rolling
updates.

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Alpocan
I'm still on XP because there is no clear choice for an upgrade path. I have a
pile of business, programming, and electrical engineering applications that
work well on XP and maybe fine on Windows 7. I don't like the bloat,
interface, and locked-down nature of Win7. But do I wait for Win8? Or maybe
try some Linux flavour and run XP/7/8 in a VM? It's really not an easy choice.
Larger enterprises must hate this.

~~~
wvenable
Have you actually seriously tried Windows 7? I couldn't stand Vista, but Win7
is a worthy successor to XP. It's faster, more memory efficient, and more
stable. I've done my fair share of tweaking to make it more XP-like but many
of changes are improvements.

Most businesses I work with are now moving to Windows 7 after skipping Vista
entirely.

~~~
dmpk2k
Faster and more efficient than what? They've been saying this every single
release since at least as far back as Windows 95.

Strangely enough, Windows 3.1 sure seems a lot smaller and snappier than
Windows 7...

~~~
TruthElixirX
Seven is faster and more efficient than Vista. I have it running (with Aero
off) on a 6 year old Thinkpad. It workss great, just as well as XP.

I also used Vista for 3 years, and recently moved to 7. It boots much quicker
and uses less resources on a consistent basis.

Of course I realize that the plural of anecdote is not data but I haven't
heard anyone contradict what I said.

~~~
megablast
Faster than Vista? High praise indeed.

Vista is what drove me to Mac OS, Windows 7 does not seem like much of an
improvement in my limited testing. I hated the fact that Microsoft would just
move everything around for no good reason, so I had to relearn to do
everything I could do in XP. I managed with Dos v3.3 -> XP.

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m0nastic
We still standardize on XP on the corporate images at my work (where we have
more employees than many cities have residents), and are just now starting to
even consider running a trial build of Windows 7.

We had to skip over Vista completely, as a year after it was released there
were still loads of applications that didn't work on it (including our VPN
software, which boggles the mind as it's not exactly like Vista was a
surprise).

We had a few security applications we use day-to-day that prevented us from
even installing XP Service Pack 2, as the changes to the raw socket support
broke them.

Were it not for Microsoft preventing newer versions of IE from being
installed, I think we'd probably stay on XP forever.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
What software specifically stopped working (and are you aware of why)?

Have you researched alternatives?

~~~
m0nastic
If you're referring to our VPN software, the version distributed by the vendor
would crash upon initialization every time for a good year after Vista was
released. I presume they eventually released a version that was stable, but my
company had already decided to skip Vista by that point.

As to the applications which wouldn't work with XP SP2, WebInspect was a
specific one (they eventually fixed it), but I recall there were a few others
(basically any scanner that used raw sockets).

As to researching alternatives, I don't work in IT at my company, but if
you're testing out a new version of the operating system that you deploy to
all of your employees, and the VPN client doesn't work, you don't research
alternative VPN solutions. You just decide to hold off on upgrading several
hundred thousand systems until everything works.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
I'm afraid I don't understand; why don't you research alternatives? Is it a
training thing?

~~~
m0nastic
I don't think training has anything to do with it.

Rule number 1 for corporate IT: Keep operations going (i.e.: make sure
everything works).

At some point you see that Microsoft is releasing a new version of their
operating system:

    
    
      1.) You build some test images to see what the upgrade process would be like
      2.) You discover that your VPN client doesn't work with the new version, so you see if the vendor has an updated version that works.
      3.) It turns out that they don't, so you hold off with the upgrade until such time as they do.
      4.) Enough time goes by where to where you decide that it doesn't make sense at this point to bother with this version of the operating system, so you decide to just skip it (and when you ask around, it turns out a really large amount of other enterprises are doing the same thing).
    

The idea of replacing your existing (working) VPN solution enterprise-wide
just to enable you to use a newer version of the operating system isn't
something you seriously consider (as it goes against IT rule number 1).

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Again, just asking, why wouldn't you do a limited deployment to your QA group
to make sure everything works, and then do the company-wide deployment over a
weekend after you know everything works.

I've worked at a programmer at companies where you weren't allowed to touch
Widget X because it works, so I understand the mindset, but more often than
not in programming departments the focus is on shipping so nothing is off the
table completely. I guess I just don't understand why IT has a different
mindset.

~~~
m0nastic
That's the point, they did a "limited deployment" and discovered that
everything didn't work. Specifically, the VPN didn't work.

Making the VPN work would require spending millions of dollars in hardware, as
well as the deployment of said new hardware in thousands of offices across the
globe.

That's one option...The other option is to not upgrade to Windows Vista.

I don't understand what you mean by "mindset". The "mindset" of IT is to
provide operational support. That means that they don't decide to upend the
network infrastructure of the company willy-nilly for no discernible positive
benefit.

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redthrowaway
One minor note:

" Direct3D 10, for example, only supports Windows Vista and Windows 7; it's
not available on Windows XP. The continued widespread usage of the old
operating system makes it much harder for developers to depend on these new
features: every time they do, they rule out the ability to sell to half of all
current Windows users, and that's a bitter pill to swallow."

How many devs who would like to use the features offered in D3D 10 but not 9
are realistically going to be selling to people running XP? An outdated OS
with outdated hardware and users who are behind the curve on upgrades does not
seem to be a market that people implementing rich graphical features would be
targeting.

~~~
coffeeaddicted
I guess the best available survey for hardware used by gamers is from steam
(<http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=pc>). Around 20% are using
XP there - still a hard decision if you want to ignore a fifth of your
potential customers.

~~~
redthrowaway
Steam's a bit weird, as it has a lot of games that run on lower-spec systems.
Your point's a valid one, but I think Steam might be a bit of an oddity.

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Androsynth
Win7 feels like aliens came down to Earth and decided to rebuild their own
version of OS X. They know nothing about human user interfaces and they are
just kinda putting all the pieces together. In the end, all the pieces are
there, and if you look at it superficially it looks good, but once you really
get into it, it feels like bizarro usability.

Just to give you an example of some things that make no sense: -shaking
windows minimizes everything -moving the window to the top of the screen
maximizes it (its easier for me to just click the box in the corner, and now I
can't place windows across the top edge) -window explorer went from a couple
large buttons to a ton of small buttons -the clickable area of a directory in
windows explorer in list view is about half the size, making it very difficult
to right click a directory unless its already selected (something done a lot
with tortoise svn) -control settings has become so complex its almost unusable

I won't go on, I know from experience that you either vehemently agree or
vehemently disagree.

edit: I should add: I used XP for 10 years then switched over to win7 last
year. I am not a mac or linux fanboy. I recently switch to osx full time at
home, and use XP to play games. I could not be happier with that setup.

------
yuhong
XP is still common enough that I wonder how many enterprises will opt for
custom support in 2014 (costs $200,000 for first year, more every year after).

~~~
pavel_lishin
Depends on how much upgrading would cost, right? Enterprise-wide licenses,
plus the cost of upgrading (downtime, overtime for IT staff, training for
users, etc.)

It might make sense to shell out $200k/year for a few years, while gradually
rolling out upgrades to more recent versions.

~~~
yuhong
Note that $200k/year is for the _first_ year. The price of Custom Support
generally increases every year, with the pricing generally disclosed 3 years
in advance.

------
testz3453
I will use Windows XP for another 5 years - until new software and hardware
will stop working on XP.

Windows 7 GUI is 5 times slower than XP and has bugs:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay-gqx18UTM> (Windows 7 GUI slowness)
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToFgYylqP_U> (Windows 7 GUI slowness: file
explorer)

Windows 7 uses 5 times as much resources: XP: 233MHz, 64MB RAM, 1.5 GB. 7:
1GHz, 1GB RAM, 16 GB.

~~~
redthrowaway
1 GHz, 1 GB RAM, and 16 GB HD are micenuts. You couldn't buy less than that if
you tried. Hell, you could run it on a phone.

Windows 7 is faster and much, much nicer on any computer made in the last 2-3
years. I'm not a Windows fan by any means, but choosing to run XP over 7 in
2011 is incomprehensible.

~~~
noarchy
Today's high end smartphones are more powerful than the last machine on which
I ran XP. Vista ran like a bloated pig, but Win 7 seems to be the sweet spot,
much like XP was in its time.

~~~
eropple
Vista wasn't bad after SP1 or so.

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hvs
Fun note, OS/2 Warp 4 support was discontinued on December 31st, 2006; ten
years after its release.

~~~
yuhong
Another fun note: MS rounds the end of support date to the nearest quarter. I
still remember when extended support for XP was to end at the end of year
2008.

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markkat
I was using XP until my Lenovo died this weekend. I pulled Vista off of it
pretty quick. I suppose I'll be moving on to 7 now. :)

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nobody3141
So 10years of R+D from the foremost manufacturer of PC operating systems has
produced ......

Hardware accelerated transparency effects on the desktop (if you're lucky and
not on an Intel chipset)

Just think what the next 10years might bring - multicolored keyboard CAPSLOCK
lights?

~~~
to3m
I suspect a lot of the R&D goes into making sure that people can make this
sort of "is that all" type comment without looking ridiculous :)

Perhaps if Windows 8 were to break all your old apps, and look utterly
radically different, then people might find it easier to believe that it was
genuinely something new? Maybe that could work.

~~~
nobody3141
Hey the new 2012 Oldsmobiles are in! And not only are they new and improved in
ways you can't actually detect - but they are guaranteed compatible with your
current gas.

~~~
brisance
Tell that to the iPhone 5 prognosticators.

